Supporting reference: Your Child's Growing Mind http://books.google.com/books?id=V1wfk_l2Ch4C
This is the classic practical book on brain development in children and adolescents. One of its main themes is that children mature in different areas at different rates, and that teaching them something before they're ready is fruitless, emotionally risky, and actually damages their later ability to reason naturally.
True, but most groups of 30-40 children are roughly the same. There will be a few smarties, a few morons, and a multitude of people in the middle. It's called the law of large numbers.
Or even better, you can compute a statistical predictor of his student's expected performance, and measure the deviation between predicted and actual performance.
The point is that individual variation in students is irrelevant. It is extremely unlikely that a teacher will get a class full of dumb kids.
- people who can't do any better in life
- people who love teaching so much that they are willing to forgo much more lucrative careers
Not only is this pool rather small, it also selects poorly for talent. This places the poor black kids (as you put it) at an even greater disadvantage, since their teachers lack either the talent or the inclination to pull them forward.
http://web.missouri.edu/~podgurskym/articles/files/fringe_be...
tl;dr: it's not thankless, but it's not exactly an awesomely compensated profession either - there's lots of hidden shit teachers have to do/provide that should count against their compensation.
I'm often asked how we can possibly spend that much money on her class and it's a little bit complicated. While maybe $500 goes towards supplies such as pens, pencils, paper, notebooks, recorders and other basic implements we also spend money directly on the students. My wife typically buys every student a book for Christmas, we supply everything to holiday parties etc. Each year my wife spends another $500 or so on new wall hangings, new books for her library, teaching aids, resource books and more. The majority of the money however is spent taking care of the students in the most need. 100% of the schools students are on the free and reduced lunch program and the school is classified as Title II which means a dinner program is also provided to the neighborhood. Each winter we end up buying a large number of warm jackets, boots, gloves etc. In a neighborhood with 85% of the families living at or below the poverty level you wouldn't believe how much of a difference small amounts of help like that mean to the students and their families. My wife once had a student break down in tears when he received a winter coat. He told her that now his mom didn't have to worry about it and could pay the power bill. At Christmas we buy gifts (clothes) for the students that aren't included in the district wide program for the "underprivileged".
We certainly don't have to spend any of that money however my wife is there for the children and not for the money.
As for whether the summer is paid or not, so what? Your wife earns $54k/year, she just doesn't work all year.
Your quoted salary also completely ignores the fact that teachers in most states get benefits (e.g., defined benefit retirement at age 55, gold plated health care) which are vastly better than average. Teachers get more fringe benefits but less wages. Cry me a river.
Every salary'd job that requires a degree that I'm aware of gets benefits, and the benefits most school systems have are NOT better than average anymore. I pay less for health care, and have better retirement options at my private employer than any of the local school districts. We don't have a pension/retirement benefit (other than 401k), but school districts around here are laying teachers off and not hiring new ones because they don't have the money to pay them in the first place.
On top of that, most other professions don't require you to provide your own work supplies (ie: you get a paper to print reports on, pens/pencils and notepads, etc.), while teachers must purchase all of their non-textbook, non-furniture educational materials. Library of books, reams and reams of paper for work packets, colored paper, art supplies, science project materials (we've spent hundreds on various plants, moths, butterflies, etc. for life sciences experiments). Buying even paper and pencils for 72 kids over the course of a full school year is a non-negligble expense, especially at the salary being paid.
The TUS is a random sampling of Americans, the report in particular is the same data restricted to teachers. But I'm sure you can do a better job of sampling by asking your wife and her friends than the BLS can by calling randomly selected people.
Regarding benefits, it varies from state to state. You may be unlucky and live in one of the few states where teachers can't retire at 55 (i.e., retirement benefits which are 2.8x better than those of normal employees, ignoring completely the costs of defined benefits). Most states, however, give ridiculously good fringe benefits to state employees at the cost of some wages.
Also, many professions involve purchasing various goods and services. Doctors often purchase medical supplies, consultants purchase equipment (laptop, etc), I purchase books, most people in banking purchase expensive signaling clothes (can't get promoted if you don't look the part). Really nothing unique here.
Poor black kids are going to stay lower than everyone else, because poor black kids, statistically, have much less family involvement, and a (again, statistically), substantially less 'structured' home life. THIS is the number one problem with the low end of the socio-economic academic performance ladder. Rich white kids and poor black kids attending the same class, at the same school, will not perform the same, unless the parents are both involved to the same amount. Making everybody take tests to prove this out doesn't accomplish anything. Firing teachers because parents won't do anything to help their children also does not accomplish anything.
This issue is near and dear to me - I worked in one of the school districts cited in the NYT article for 7 years, and my wife is currently teaching there. It's a farce.