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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Teaching was a cushy job a decade ago.  Now with so many jobs that can be done from home, there are so many more options.

I find this refreshing.  In the past, many teachers chose the profession because of the hours and summers off.  Now that covid has come and gone, teachers who have gotten a taste of WFH will seek out other careers.  The hope is that those who actually decide on this profession do so because of the joy of teaching, not because of summers off or other conveniences.[/quote]

Frankly, we've spent the last decade or two completely devaluing the worth of teachers.  School systems have added a host of horrible stupid bureaucracy including mandatory training, mandatory meetings, endless streams of documentation of what they are doing that must be provided for district administration, school administration. parents, students.  There have been so many guidelines on what is taught and how it is taught that the overhead for their job is adding many hours per week to what they are required to do outside of class time.  And throughout this, school systems have decreased compensation.  Teachers salaries are not even matching inflation and COLA and they are paid horribly relative to their general level of education.  In addition, schools have cut budgets for supplies, classroom resources, and even basics like tissues, hand sanitizer, soap and paper towels.  Teachers have had to buy those and supplies like markers, pencils, paper, etc out of pocket to support their classrooms.  I know dozens of teachers in multiple school districts (I am not a teacher, I just know many) and I don't know a single one that hasn't had to provide supplies and basics out of pocket to support their students.

At this point, almost all school districts have had rounds of early retirement, abrupt unplanned retirement and teachers leaving the profession.  They are understaffed and have more openings than they can find qualified teachers to fill.  Hopefully this will make school districts understand that they need to start reprioritizing and maybe start paying teachers what they are worth to fill positions.[/quote]

I agree with much of what you said, with the exception of teacher pay.  Looking at what teachers get paid, rather than what we might feel they deserve based on the demands of the job, teachers get paid fairly well compared to other professionals.  A [url=https://www.epi.org/publication/teacher-pay-gap-2018/]2017 study[/url] found a 11% compensation gap, but are several major caveats to that.  First, it didn't make any adjustments to reflect the value of having summers off. Obviously there is value there.  Some teachers pick up jobs over the summer, others stay home to care for kids, and thus avoid child care costs.  Second, they didn't attempt to restrict the comparison to other public sector jobs.  They were compared to others others, which mostly included private sector workers.  Public sector professionals simply get paid less than their private sector counterparts.  We could argue about what the amount, but there's clearly value to the job security provided by a public sector job, particularly one with dedicated union.  And third, the study really didn't try to identify "comparable" professions.  Teachers were compared against other workers based primarily on educational level and experience.  This will skew the results. Comparable professions to teachers would be closer to things like professionals working in the social sciences, as opposed to someone working in medicine or engineering.  Similarly, a Masters of Education isn't really comparable to an M.S. in a STEM-related field, or a professional degree in medicine or law.

I don't say this necessarily to argue that teachers shouldn't get paid more.  But I think it is false to claim that teachers are paid "horribly."

I do, however, think teacher pay should reflect the difficultly of recruiting competent teachers in a given area. STEM and SpEd teachers are much harder to recruit than elementary school teachers- it is ridiculous that they're on the same pay scales.  It's ultimately the unions holding that back, though.[/quote]

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