I grabbed this from a random page from the school district’s report, omitting names to protect the guilty.
It shows base salaries for mostly teachers. No extra curricular pay included. This is a 1 page sample from many pages.
It’s from the 2019-2020 school year. The 2 lowest numbers are listed as part time teachers.
It’s a lot of numbers that begin with a 1. It’s real dollars, not scaled in any funky way.
You must live in one of those liberal states… you commie.
I’m going to guess that you aren’t dealing with a teacher shortage either.
Ok, sounds legit then. That is pretty uncommon around the country.
This is the 2019-2020 salary schedule for the district where I did my student teaching. As you can see, it’s not even possible to make $90,000 let alone $100,000 for a base salary.
How do these salaries compare to the cost of living in the area?
I’m pretty sure that most teachers (in public high schools) in IA aren’t making that sort of money, but I believe that they do “all right” given their cost of living.
I mean, I doubt that they’re all looking to buy a Tesla on their salary, but they’re also not generally worrying about making ends meet (with a dual income family).
Umm, if you don’t mind sharing, what school district? Asking for a spouse.
But seriously, what are your district’s other benefits like? For my spouse, their base salary isn’t all that great, lower than what twig posted by about 20% (but I imagine we live in a much lower COL area). But they have really good health and dental insurance and a solid pension. So in total, with the benefits their benefit might be similar to what your district is paying out (area adjusted). If your district has crap benefits, they might make up for it in salary.
From my town:
Highest salary at My town’s Public Schools in year 2021 was $104,720. Number of employees at My town’s Public Schools in year 2021 was 1,201. Average annual salary was $76,050 and median salary was $75,869. My town’s Public Schools average salary is 62 percent higher than USA average and median salary is 74 percent higher than USA median.
Are those averages for teachers or just income in general?
i understand your logic. It does not apply here. Their benefits are good, not crap.
My observations is that adding additional “hours” and “masters” to slide over columns on these scales are WAY WAY WAY easier than actuarial exams.
It’s suburban Chicago. You can look that COL up. I don’t know what you would recommend/prefer as a regional cost comparison tool.
I think there’s some squishyness around your numbers.
I think teachers are working about 185 days. The students attend 180 school days. There are roughly 5 teacher only days on top.
Furthermore, regular full time employment seems to be about 230 days per year, not 225. (Assumption is 365 days, 104 weekend days, 11 holidays, 20 vacation days)
So the ratio you calculate I think should be low 80’s not mid 80’s.
Also, I frequently hear the argument that their 6 hour work days are really full time, because they need to put more time in than the teaching time so it is really a 40 hour per week job and therefore the same as full time. I find that dubious for the comparison of the work life of teachers that I know because:
teachers prep time is highly related to the number of different classes taught. For example, it is easier to prep 1 algebra class that you teach 6 times to different classrooms of students in a day than to prep 6 different math classes (algebra, geometry, trig, basic math, calc, and algebra II)
the more years of teaching experience, the less prep time needed. If you prep teaching plans for a class, you can re-use those plans for many following school years.
Not every teacher and/class has significant “out of school day” prep time.
Even if a teacher DOES work a 40 hour work week, then I will contend that my 9 to 5 job is really an 8 to 6 or 7 job, so my 40 hour workweek is really 50 or 55 hours a week, so teaching is STILL a shorter day.
Virtually NO business travel.
Yeah, so you can top out at $88,000 after 25 years? And coach a couple of varsity sports to add another MAYBE $10,000 a year while working 50-60 hours a week during the year plus maybe 2 weeks over the summer and 10 hours a week the rest of the summer…
Sure it’s easier to meet the educational requirements, but it pays way less than even ASA pay, which is the lowest of the big 4 US credentials.
I looked up the coaching pay and I’m posting a few samples:
Varsity Boys Soccer: $3,509
JV Girls Tennis: $2,169
Varsity Wrestling: $6,061
Junior High Cross Country: $2,233
Varsity Baseball: $3,828
And of course the big one is varsity football at $6,870.
These are annual amounts.
Art club is $798
Drama club: $2,233 for the head and $1,675 for the assistant.
Junior High Honor Society: $1,436
For the amount of hours they put in, that’s pretty low pay.
You could make a case for teachers being overpaid or underpaid.
Overpaid: they don’t work the entire year. Unions are too strong. Killer benefits (at least here in NJ).
Underpaid: Depending on the teacher, often there is work to be done outside the classroom. Lesson planning, grading papers/homework, responding to parent inquiries/complaints (it a helluva lot easier to hold of a teacher these days via email than it was when I was in school (who was even president then?)). Plus, they are responsible for probably the most precious asset you have in this word: your child.
That said, the gym teacher (ahem, physical education and student health instructor) at one of the grammar schools (ahem, elementary school) in my town makes $104,000 with now nearly 30 years experience. He has little if any out of classroom planning and I doubt he has any homework to grade, let alone term papers or even book reports.
I’d say he’s ‘overpaid’.
He also is an assistant football coach at the HS, so he gets a couple grand on top of that. My guess is he does more work at that ‘job’ than he does teaching.
You are pretty ignorant about what a teaching job all entails. It is significantly more than just being student facing for six hours a day. With all of the different requirements, tracking, curriculum, and assessments that teachers are required to complete, even a teacher that only comes in and is student facing will be putting in a non-trivial number of hours every year to be certified and compliant with the DOI. Based on the number of hours that my spouse puts in just at home, it is probably 100 hours a year. On top of that, a teacher is going to need to be taking educational classes in order to continue to hold their license, typically 3 to 6 credits worth per year. Generally speaking that has to be accredited classes not some BS professional seminar they watched online. They pay for that out of pocket because they don’t get reimbursed by the district. And all of this doesn’t include time spent grading homework, tests, and papers or contacting parents, counselors, and other administrative staff. Did I mention the staff meetings, curriculum meetings, active shooter training, and other miscellaneous non-sense they have to do? So yeah, even a bad gym teacher is probably putting in 40 hours per week on average at least.
Now:
Less preps does mean less work. In some cases. The base lesson plans will remain the same but the specifics and timings will be different. Each class learns at a different rate and the teacher will need to modify some lesson plans to either stall or catch up some classes. And for Science teachers prep is really important because they need to set up labs with equipment, specimens, etc. For actuaries I can make the same argument that filing rates in six states is less work than filing six different products. Should we pay the actuary filing in six states less?
Yep, jobs get easier with experience. I work a lot less hours now than when I started my career. I don’t work overtime any more because it sucks, I don’t like it, and I don’t need to in order to complete my workload. Maybe we should pay more experienced workers less because they work faster?
Most do. Teachers are constantly changing their classes because they got new books or there is a new curriculum or they are teaching a new class or found new materials or have a different class dynamic or whatever. If they don’t they’re probably bad teachers. Q: So why don’t we fire them? A: Because there isn’t anybody else to take their job because the pay is low and the community shits on them whenever possible (see quoted post).
They do. My spouse is at school from 7AM to at least 3PM. They have a twenty minute lunch break where several weeks out of the year they have to monitor the lunch room. Oh, and bus duty. In addition, you are always on when you are in the community because you will see parents and students everywhere. If you go out, you can expect to hear, “I saw you at blank & blanks drinking a beer!”
I’ve had business travel twice in my career. It sucks and I took a position where I don’t have to travel intentionally. Lots of roles don’t involve travel, especially today. Doesn’t mean that they should be paid less.
Every teacher contract I have ever seen (and I’ve been employed by 4 districts in 2 states and applied to bunches more) was 190 days. I’ve never heard of a 185 day contract but I’ll stop short of saying it doesn’t exist.
In my experience the extra 10 days are 4 in-service days (1 at the end of each quarter), 2 staff development days, 2-3 days before school starts, 1-2 days after school gets out in addition to the in-service day.
That concept is called a “prep”. I’d teach 5-6 classes, but no more than 3 preps normally unless you’re teaching something fairly obscure. Like if you’re the high school’s only Japanese teacher then you might have 4 preps: (Japanese I, II, III, and IV). The bigger the school the less likely it is that you’ll have more than 3 preps as it’s acknowledged that more preps = more work.
One glorious year I long-term subbed and to make it easy on me they gave me only two preps (4 sections of one, 1 section of another). But when the regular teacher came back she essentially made it 3 preps by splitting up the the big prep so they had tests / quizzes on different days. That seemed silly to me… yes it’s more work on quiz day to grade 4 classes worth of quizzes on one day, but you gotta grade them anyway, so why not pile it up on one day? Anyway, her choice. So she kind of landed with 2.5 preps. But 3 is typical.
The longer you teach the less work goes into each prep, sure, but it’s still work.
My first year as a regular teacher I was “part time”, 60% with 3 classes and 2 preps and I was probably working 60 hours a week because I had nothing to go on. For the long-term sub job they gave me last year’s lesson plans, tests, quizzes, etc. I was full time and probably worked 45-50 hours a week… more during winter when students missed school due to illness because they’d come in for extra help before/after school or during my planning period if that happened to correspond to their free period.
Any time they change up the textbook that’s always extra work.
And there’s always lots of paperwork and curriculum night, parent-teacher conferences, staff meetings, department meetings, committee meetings, and SO MUCH MORE.
IEP kids require copious amounts of paperwork, so the more kids you have on IEPs, the more work there is. And IEPs are more common every year.
Yeah, when I was substitute teaching I enviously eyed the PE teacher’s lesson plan book.
When I was student teaching I would write in tiny print in my lesson plan book with examples to work out in front of the class, homework assignments, and more. I could barely cram it into the allotted space.
The PE teacher’s lesson plan book had the word “Volleyball” written in Monday’s block, and then an arrow going through Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday’s block. She obviously spent WAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYY less time on her lesson plans than I did teaching math. No, it’s not fair that PE and Math teachers make the same. One is way more work and the market for the two is very different too.
