Heard on Rush Limbuagh this morning, and found the article:
Public School Teachers Are Highest Paid State Workers; Pay Doubles the Average in Private Industry
CNSNews.com ^ | December 14, 2011 | Terence P. Jeffrey
Posted on Thu Dec 15 2011 06:38:51 GMT-0800 (Pacific Standard Time) by Zakeet
Full Headline: Dept. of Labor: Public School Teachers Are Highest Paid State Workers; Compensation Doubles the Average in Private Industry
Public school teachers receive greater average hourly compensation in wages and benefits than any other group of state and local government workers and receive more than twice as much in average hourly wages and benefits as workers in private industry, according to a new report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Public primary, secondary and special education teachers are paid an average of $56.59 per hour in combined wages and benefits, BLS said in the report released last week.
That is slightly more than twice the $28.24 in average hourly wages and benefits paid to workers in private industry.
In fact, according the BLS, the $28.24 in average hourly wages and benefits that private-industry workers now earn in the United States is less than the overall national average for hourly wages and benefits of $30.11.
That is because the overall national average compensation is dragged upwards from the private-industry average by the much higher wages and benefits paid to state and local government workers—who take in an average of $40.76 per hour, according to BLS.
The BLS report only calculated and published the average hourly wages and benefits for workers in nonfarm private industry and state and local governments. It did not include federal government workers.
Tacoma News Tribune a list of teachers and salaries: Some of them don't make much at all, under $20k others do as well as new computer science graduates at over 60,000
FIRST NAME
POSITION
SCHOOL NAME
TOTAL PAY
AIDE
LEWIS & CLARK ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
$13,798
DEBRA
AIDE
MCCLURE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
$16,992
DAVID
ELEMENTARY TEACHER
ROCK CREEK ELEMENTARY
$59,950
DIANA
$55,487
COURTNEY
AIDE
INGLEMOOR HS
$20,187
KATHRINE
TECHNICAL
$51,646
EILEEN
ELEMENTARY TEACHER
MELVIN G SYRE ELEMENTARY
$69,025
STEVEN
PROFESSIONAL
$72,173
DEBRA
ROCK CREEK ELEMENTARY
$23,722
MARIANNE
AIDE
$20,069
ARDETH
AIDE
QUINCY HIGH TECH HIGH
$13,516
LYNN
ELEMENTARY TEACHER
PICNIC POINT ELEMENTARY
$74,277
MICHELLE
AIDE
TOTEM FALLS
$22,858
JONI
AIDE
LEWIS & CLARK ELEMENTARY
SCHOOL
$16,869
DEEANE
AIDE
ORTING PRIMARY SCHOOL
$17,663
DEBBIE
AIDE
LEWIS AND CLARK ELEMENTARY SCH
$2,618
SHERYL
SERVICE WORKER
MARYSVILLE MIDDLE SCHOOL
$8,674
DARREL
CRAFTS/TRADES
$54,226
MOIRA
SECONDARY TEACHER
TUMWATER MIDDLE SCHOOL
$24,632
ERIC
SERVICE WORKER
HANFORD HIGH SCHOOL
$33,134
MARK
SECONDARY TEACHER
WILSON
$51,609
SARA
SERVICE WORKER
$32,053
JOCILYN
AIDE
TENINO HIGH SCHOOL
$14,432
ANNALISA
OTHER TEACHER
GARFIELD HIGH SCHOOL
$60,802
MELISSA
SECONDARY TEACHER
MERCER ISLAND HIGH SCHOOL
$50,053
RUTH
OCCUPATIONAL THERAPIST
$32,111
EVANNE
ELEMENTARY TEACHER
LAKE TAPPS ELEMENTARY
$63,123
JON
OTHER TEACHER
KENTWOOD HIGH SCHOOL
$62,916
LORELLE
ELEMENTARY TEACHER
WHITSTRAN ELEMENTARY
$21,443
PATSY
SERVICE WORKER
MORGAN MIDDLE SCHOOL
$35,783
DONNA
ELEMENTARY TEACHER
SUNNYLAND ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
$75,223
RAMONA
LOWELL ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
$33,746
From the conservative Washington Policy Center:
Seattle School District officials are negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement with the city’s teachers’ union, the Seattle Education Association. The talks will take several months, and will determine costs for taxpayers and the quality of instruction for Seattle students for up to five years
School district salaries and benefits
- Teachers in Seattle receive an average of $70,850 in total salary (base pay and other pay), plus average insurance benefits of $9,855. These figures apply to a ten-month work year.
- Teachers in Seattle public schools can earn up to $88,463 in total base and other pay for a ten-month work year, or $98,318 including benefits.
- Seattle Schools employ 371 people as “educational staff associates,” who receive an average of $76,339 for a ten-month year, or $86,194 including benefits.
- Seattle Schools employs 193 non-teachers, mostly senior administrators, who each receive more than $100,000 in total pay.
The school year – State law entitles public school students to 180 days of instruction. Due to a waiver, Seattle students receive 177 days of instruction.
Paid time off and leave – The ten-month work year includes nine paid holidays, and a total of four paid weeks off. In addition Seattle teachers receive ten days of paid sick leave, two days of personal leave and days for professional development. Teachers in Seattle public schools use an average of 16 leave days per school year, or about 9% of the school year, not counting holidays and vacations.
Teacher assignments – Principals have some control over hiring, but seniority often overrules the decisions of principals. Teachers with full contracts must be given priority over younger teachers with provisional contracts. Some teachers have “super-seniority” transfer rights.
Teacher evaluations – The collective bargaining agreement defines the criteria used when evaluating teachers. Assessing teachers based on improved student learning is not permitted.
Layoffs – A layoff must be made based on seniority, with younger teachers being let go first. The collective bargaining agreement expressly bars officials from using teacher performance evaluations in making lay-off decisions: “The performance ratings (evaluation) of employees shall not be a factor in determining the order of layoff under this Section” (page 106 of the agreement).
Mandatory union membership – As a condition of employment, teachers must join the Seattle Education Association and pay dues, or pay a fee equal to the amount of the dues.
Monthly dues transfers – The Seattle School District collects money from employee paychecks as dues and deposits them into union bank accounts. For example, in May 2008, the district transferred $286,181 to the Seattle Education Association. Between May 2007 and May 2008, the district forwarded a total of $3.29 million to the union.
Dues payments to other unions – District officials also collect dues for 18 other unions. From May 2007 to May 2008, District officials transferred a total of $509,811 in dues to these unions.
Paid leave for union officials – Education funds are used to pay for union members to work on union business. Each year Seattle education funds pay for up to 320 substitute teaching days to cover for teachers who spend the day on union-related activities. Statewide this practice reduces school budgets by about $3 million per year.
The full study includes three recommended policy changes that would improve learning for children in Seattle Public Schools:
- End the “seniority-only” rule in teacher assignments and layoffs – Local principals should control the assignment of teachers in their own schools, regardless of seniority, so they can assemble a teaching team that best serves the needs of students and the community.
- Allow performance pay – School District officials should be allowed to reward the best teachers based on measurable performance standards, particularly the ability to raise the academic achievement of students.
- End the automatic transfer of education funds to union accounts as monthly dues – About $290,000 a month is transferred as dues to union accounts. Discarding automatic withholding lets the union, as a private organization, be responsible for collection of its own dues, and would save
- the District bookkeeping and other costs.
On the whole teachers in Seattle schools work hard, and deserve support from policymakers, parents and the public. Most teachers are deeply concerned about the children entrusted to their care, and they should receive the classroom resources needed to carry out their educational mission. A new collective bargaining agreement that liberates the best in teachers and encourages bold community leadership in principals would provide vital support to fulfilling the District’s vision of “every student achieving, everyone accountable.”
It Depends:
There’s a meme going around that teachers are “underpaid;” you can read one manifestation of it
in this Hacker News comment, but I’m sure you’ll run across lots of other examples if you read the news. Here’s the poster’s main point about teaching: “It’s way harder than you think, and unless you’re a tenured professor at a university, teachers make shit.” I’ve never taught high school, but I’m a grad student and teach freshmen, so I have some experience standing in front of people for long periods of time and trying to be both interesting and informative at the same time. A few observations:
1) The first time you teach a class, it’s incredibly hard and time consuming, but the difficulty drops like a logarithm to a relatively low plateau after you’ve done it a few times. This appears to be reflected in data. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data, the average teacher works slightly less than 40 hours per week. If you have better data, I’d like to see it. Note too that people getting teaching degrees at the graduate level get substantially lower GRE scores than those in almost all other disciplines. This will come up later.
2) At one point I thought about teaching high school English. Seattle Public Schools paid about $36K / yr with a Masters or $30K / yr without, and those numbers topped at around $70K and $55K after 30 years (IIRC, Bellevue Public School teachers made something like ~10K more). You can verify that as of July 2011 through the 2010 – 2011 salary schedule (it’s actually a little higher than I remembered, or raises have been substantial). That doesn’t count retirement; teaching is unusual because a lot of the benefits are backloaded in the form of retirement pay. One woman in my grad program taught English for 26 years in Michigan and took an early retirement offer; I think she gets 70% of her last year’s salary for life. Granted, those deals are going away because of the budget crisis, but a lot of the retirement stuff is still baked in.
3) You can multiply those numbers by 1.2 or so because teachers only have mandatory work for nine months of the year. People in most professions gets two weeks to a month off.
4) After two to three years, you effectively can’t be fired because of union rules (unless you sleep with a student and get caught in a flagrant manner, don’t show up, etc.). See
this post for lots of citations on that, as well as a lot of the information that’s going into this comment. Not being able to be fired has value. Paul Graham figured this out a while ago, and
wrote in an essay that “Economic statistics are misleading because they ignore the value of safe jobs. An easy job from which one can’t be fired is worth money; exchanging the two is one of the commonest forms of corruption. A sinecure is, in effect, an annuity.”
Note: there are major downsides to teaching. You have to like working with relatively undeveloped people (if you’re teaching high school) or children (if you’re teaching elementary school). In teaching, it’s very hard to make substantially more money if you really want to; whether you’re a good or bad teacher isn’t likely to make you more money. Still, you’ll hit the median household income neighborhood of $40,000 pretty quickly. My big impression is that teaching isn’t going to make you rich, but you’re also unlikely to ever be poor. To say that “teachers make shit” isn’t really true. It is to true to say that teachers have back-loaded compensation packages that tend to be high in benefits (e.g. good health care, retirement) and low in upfront salary.
Given this, we’re still left with the question of whether this is “too much” or “too little.” Some teachers are probably “underpaid” and some “overpaid,” depending on the demand for their field. To understand why, look at Payscale.com’s salary data for college majors. Humanities and social science majors are on the low end of the starting salary scale—not far from education majors, who start at $35K and have a mid-career median at $55K. This isn’t far from the pay at Seattle Public Schools, although Seattle probably has a higher cost of living than most places in the country. Salaries also vary by district; there’s been a lot of fury over, for example, New Jersey teacher salaries, since they’re relatively high, especially when one factors in health care. Arizona, by contrast, does not appear to suffer from that problem. The “underpaid” kind are experiencing major shortages—math, science, computer science, and so forth, which start in the vicinity of $50K and have a mid-career median in the $100K range. Those fields start close to where teachers can expect to be after 15 years. If you’re teaching computer science instead of taking a job that starts at $100K from Microsoft, Google, or Facebook, you’re underpaid. That’s why it’s so hard to districts to find really good math or science teachers.[Ahhh, but as a senior programmer who is chasing contract jobs that last typcially 6 to 12 months with 3-6 months inbetween, I've seen programmers with cs degrees who are scraping by at less than $25,000 per year]
There’s also the issue of student quality. In Seattle, there’s a strong north-south divide, with most of the southern schools being really tough and much more dangerous than the northern schools (the breakdown occurs along racial lines,
as discussed in this 2006 Wall Street Journal article). If the pay is the same—and in Seattle, it is—most teachers will prefer the easier schools.
In the U.S., pay is in part proportionate to risk. Bill Gates isn’t just rich because he’s smart and hardworking; he also spent long hours in a company he created that could’ve easily netted him nothing. To some extent, teachers have collectively traded firing risk for lower salaries. Among other things, educational reformers are trying to sever this link, since getting great performance out of people who have no incentive for great performance save the goodness of their own hearts is problematic. Most people who experienced public schools—which is to say, most people—are probably aware of this on some level. There’s a movement afoot to make teachers more accountable, and I think it’s going to succeed. This should drive more money to great teachers, less to lousy ones, and more to people in technical fields. If teachers as a whole want more money, they better be ready to take more risk and be prepared to have their performance evaluated—like it is in virtually every other white-collar profession.
[There are also lots of unglamorous jobs that pay $50-$70,000 per year - utiltity worker, policman,firefighter, postal worker, garbage truck driver, bus driver that don't need a computer science degree or a 120 IQ]
There’s a meme going around that teachers are “underpaid;” you can read one manifestation of itin this Hacker News comment, but I’m sure you’ll run across lots of other examples if you read the news. Here’s the poster’s main point about teaching: “It’s way harder than you think, and unless you’re a tenured professor at a university, teachers make shit.” I’ve never taught high school, but I’m a grad student and teach freshmen, so I have some experience standing in front of people for long periods of time and trying to be both interesting and informative at the same time. A few observations:
