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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]23 year old who just graduated with a BS in Math and Secondary Ed (student taught, obtained a teacher's license.). Working at a Catholic high school in the DMV. $55,000 per year.  [/quote]

We need good teachers. How can this low salary encourage young people to seek out career in education?[/quote]

It doesn’t.

I was a career changer who got a graduated degree in education. It was a terrible investment, and I was upset with myself for not doing more research about salaries. I took a $10k salary cut when I went from a non-teaching admin job at a private school to a teaching job at a private school down the road. It’s not like the admin position paid a lot either. After years of paltry salaries, costly health insurance, and sad retirement savings, I went back to the business world. There’s a reason why so many private school teachers are white women who come from wealthy families and are married to high earning men.

A lot of people don’t understand the economics of private school operations. Any school costs a lot to run. DCPS has an average operating cost of $24k/student/year. This excludes central office admin costs—marketing, PR, HR, technology, insurances. Public schools often rely on donations for classroom materials—everything from new science tools, to photocopier paper, to tissues—whereas your private school provides these things as well as a classroom supplies budget of between $200 and $1000 per teacher per year. Your private school has a greater teacher-student ratio, so faculty expense is higher. The large, attractive campuses with great sports facilities are expensive to maintain too, especially as electricity costs skyrocket. Field trips, particularly overnights are bonkers expensive, especially when an outside tour operator or facilitator is engaged. Yet, in the privates where I have worked, I was expected to have at least two field trips per year. Costs of employee benefits have been crushing privates for all of the 21st century. Unlike publics, which use state pension schemes where a sizable portion of staff never vest, privates have to administer 403(b)s. Health insurance costs are also very high for these small risk pools (fewer than 100 employees, skews older). Curriculum, whether books or tech-based, is also very, very expensive. A lot of educational software subscriptions are $10k/year or more for between 300 and 400 licenses. Schools will have multiple subscriptions for the whole school and a few that are specific to a grade level or department. And that’s before you factor in the hardware—a $1k Thinkpad or MacBook for every student and teacher and smartboards in classrooms. (There are some bulk purchasing discounts, however.) In short, the attractive campuses, variety of courses, and smaller classes that sell families on private schools carry a lot of associated costs.[/quote]

And yet these elite private schools are so competitive and the student body is so insanely rich.  All the time the school show how they promote some DEI and inclusiveness on paper. Why can’t they start with paying the teachers more?

It feels wrong. [/quote]

Thank you for this. Very insightful. [/quote]

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