Even for someone without more advanced degrees (fyi you do not need a PhD to cap out.) you cap out at $93k. Agreed that teachers (particularly beginner teachers) put in a lot of hours outside school. 10 hours a week? More? So a 40-50 hour workweek during the school year? (But with predictable scheduling, which not all professionals have.)
A roughly $1 MM dollar annuity when you retire isn't so horrible either.
Lesson planning takes less time as you get more experienced, plus you reuse your old lesson plans.
175 hours every five years for required professional development? http://www.uft.org/q-issues/maintaining-your-professional-ce...
Did I miss anything? COL in NYC is definitely higher...but you do not have to live in Manhattan. There are many affordable areas in NYC.
I made waaaaay more money working in industry and never worked anywhere near as hard or long as I do being a teacher.
Sure, lesson planning gets easier. And you can reuse old lesson plans (although, the standards get changed fairly regularly and in my district you need to use "data-driven metrics" to improve your lesson plans year after year, so if you're just reusing lesson plans you get put on the "bad teacher list" in a state with no unions which means no tenure).
Without the PdD, you don't cap out at that 6 digit number. But $93k isn't bad. That's about the entry level salary of a Software Enigneer, right? And you only need to be a teacher for 20 years to earn that. What a deal!
That's probably all a teacher deserves though. As a society we really need incentivise our best and brightest to use their skills to build new ways to share photos.
All I'm saying is that you get what you pay for. If you pay teachers $40k, then you're going to get $40k value.
One of my bêtes noires about the system is that it does not differentiate between a high school teacher getting an advanced degree in STEM versus a kindergarten teacher getting a secondary development blah blah from University of Phoenix.
My personal opinion is that some teachers are underpaid, and some are overpaid. Senior teachers should not be making twice as much as junior teachers, and high school physics teachers should not make the same as kindergarten teachers. Additionally, schools should have some leeway in rewarding better/harder working teachers, instead of the unionized lockstep pay scales.
Yes, programmers make more than teachers, on average. (Though the mean hourly wages are not that different, actually-- http://www.bls.gov/ncs/ocs/sp/ncbl1614.pdf for NY/NJ/CT). So?
Which is why everyone is a "self taught" programmer.
Imaging if you took everyone that posts to Hacker News about how they were the only person in their school that knew how a computer worked and they did all sorts of hacks and had all sorts of fun subverting authority and you went back in time and you gave them a knowledgeable mentor (read: teacher) how much better would they be at programming now?
It's 2015 and we don't have those teachers in our schools. What we have are Math teachers that are being told "We have to have a Computer Science class and we heard that programming is like math, so you're going to be teaching Computer Science next year. Go take a Java course."[0]
Also, unions are not keeping the pay scales the way they are. Texas does not have unions. Texas does not have tenure. Texas still has "lock step pay scales". Unions are not the problem.
Private schools pay teachers less than Public Schools. Private Schools don't have unions. Unions are not the problem.
I don't know what the problem is. I think it has something to do with there being very little respect or prestige for the teaching profession among tax payers (or anybody, really). But the problem isn't unions. If unions were the problem, then the problem wouldn't exist in places where there are no unions.
[0] 100% serious. I had a training this summer where 6 of the other 7 teachers were Math teachers that were told at the end of the year that they would be teaching AP Computer Science and were sent off to take their first ever Java course over the summer.
Your link says it's 6 hours and 55 minutes, including lunch. So 6 hours and 25 minutes is a work day.
Plus there's 150 minutes a week (2 and a half hours, or 30 minutes per day) for training, professional development, teacher collaboration, parent engagement and other professional activities.
150 minutes for all of that is a joke, and if any teacher was actually following that rule (union or not) then you'd be hearing about it.
What are "other professional activities?
Students that need extra help? Students that need to make up work/tests? Grading homework/tests/quizzes
I have about 150 students. If I give a test, that's 150 tests to grade. If it takes me 1 minute to grade each test, then I've just blown that entire quota of "other professional activities"
But I still do my job.
I grade all those 150 tests. Then I grade the homework that I gave all those students. Then I write my lesson plans for the next classes and I write the next test. And I email/call parents. And I meet with parents. And I see students before/after school to answer their questions and have them make up their work and tests. And I answer emails from students that have questions about their homework.
I spend 6 hours and 25 minutes a day teaching. I spend plenty more time making sure students learn.
But at least I get summer vacation, right? Sure, it's just full of mandatory Professional Development (so I can keep my teacher license up to date) and lesson planning for the next year.
But hey, in New York you can make up to $105k! After 22 years AND earning a PhD (which you paid for with your own money ... and where did you find the time to get that degree?) Rent in NY is 3x rent where I live, but the max $105k isn't even 3x the starting salary of my school district.