You picked an outlier. Most schools districts in the Bay Area (including San Francisco) have starting salaries for teachers in the $50k-$60k range. And in my experience, teachers work a lot more than 40 hours a week. I picked 3 randomly below:

Redwood City: https://www.rcsdk8.net/site/handlers/filedownload.ashx?modul...

San Mateo: http://www.smfcsd.net/en/assets/files/Employment%20and%20HR/...

San Francisco: https://archive.sfusd.edu/en/assets/sfusd-staff/contract%20a...

Enen with tech workers complaining about the high rents, I wonder how bad teachers fare? Or are these districts in "cheap" areas?

San Mateo and Redwood City are both expensive, but not as bad as SF. One article reported median rents were about 2.4k, which makes sense. There a few places advertising lower rents, but not many, and at that price you are giving stuff up. SF is worse.

Another issue is the commute. Traffic is really bad, so finding a cheaper place farther away from work will cost you in time and energy, especially if you have to cross a bridge.

It's so bad that some districts, including San Mateo, are building their own housing for teachers. https://edsource.org/2019/in-need-of-teacher-housing-more-ca...

https://sf.curbed.com/2019/8/20/20814179/housing-crisis-teac...

2.4k on rent when you're making between 31-3700 post-tax is kinda brutal.

Thanks for the additional data points!

> 3 months vacation per year

This perception is usually pretty inaccurate. There's no time given during the school year for essentials like curriculum development, continuing education requirements, training new teachers, etc, so that eats up time during the summer 'break'.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/07/myth-o...

> Klem says she’s spending the rest of her summer this year attending meetings, developing school curriculum, helping train new teachers, and contacting families of her students, among other tasks. Past summers, she says, have been equally busy: graduate-school coursework to complete her master’s degree (which isn’t required but can mean higher pay), classroom organization or relocation, and so on. While some of these responsibilities come with a stipend, teachers say they’re relatively negligible given how much time they take—no more than $1,000.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/16/hold-on-before-you-get-too-j...

> As an educator you constantly have to be on top of trends, so it’s not like it’s just six weeks of me laying by the pool,” said Sara Holloway, a fifth-grade English language arts teacher from Monongahela, Pa.

> “You are taking classes in the summer, or you are reading material, or you are conferencing or blogging with other teachers, you are planning for the next year,” she said.

I appreciate the perspective that you’re coming from, but I come from a family of educators. They do have occasional in service days over the summer and obviously are expected back at work a week or so before classes start. Other than that, it very much is a three-month vacation, one that shaped a large part of my childhood.

The distribution seems bi-modal. My wife was a teacher, and she had maybe one free week the whole summer, between development classes, curriculum work, and so on. On some summer days I would leave work at 7pm and then join her in her classroom until 8 or 9pm where she was just finishing up a 12 hour day.

Then there were other teachers at the school who took off on the last day of school and you didn't see them again until the week before school started. Those were the teachers that were still teaching material from 30 years ago that all the parents dreaded their kids getting.

Similar experience for my wife. Some teachers just don’t give a shit and never update their curriculum or materials and repeat the same drivel over and over. She on the other hand spent the majority of her free time developing new material and kids actually looked forward to her lessons.

I would get suspicious in my wife was going to work for 3 months while her colleagues enjoy their vacation

My understanding is that it's also often heavily weighted to the early years, unless you have someone else's lesson plans to use (and even then, you probably want to prep and maybe do a dry run).

Just like any job, if 90% of what you're doing is new to you or something you have to develop yourself if vastly different than if 10% of what you're doing is new or something you're developing yourself. Given the actual in class time doing the lesson plans is fairly static, that means the non-classroom hours of the day, or your own time, is what is required to make up the slack.

I imagine teachers of fields that have lots of changes (or of districts or states that adopt whole new curriculums) have it worse than some others. At least if they care about doing a good job.

It would be interesting to hear what your family members have to say about their first few years teaching compared to later years, and what period your memories correspond to.

I wrote a whole story about a family member being incredibly inefficient in preparing for a class she got (but was completely unqualified for, save for a masters in education). It turned out to just be really depressing, so I'll just say this:

1. Teachers in positions new to them probably do have more work to do

2. A lot of that work may be due to their own inefficiency having not yet learned the role.

3. That inefficiency ends up being paid for with a) time and b) stress, including family stress.

4. Even still, I sincerely cannot remember a single time in my childhood where we were not traveling all summer long.

5. Fortunately budget cuts can end nonsensical programs and save everyone the hassle :-/

What a weird period of time that was.

As an engineer, I have to pursue a lot of "keeping up with trends" on my own time. I spend my own time setting up my computers. I get a stipend for professional development, but I bare the bulk of the cost and time (most of the time). I often work a lot more than 40h. I think all that you mention is not uncommon for professionals who want to develop their skills in a continuous manner. I could say the same for lawyers, business people, etc.

Sure, but no one claims you have 3 months of vacation when you are spending time doing those things...

My mother was a teacher in Ontario. She insisted her salary should be looked at over a 12 month period, not ~9.5 month. Even though for those ~2.5 months, she was free to do whatever she wanted, including taking on additional full time work (though, more often than not, she vacationed).

No, but this is my free time and how I use it. If I chose to do that during my vacations, no one would be "well poor you, you don't really have 4 weeks of vacation a year, since you decided to pursue professional development during these weeks". People would simply say that I chose to use my free time to do these things, and some of these things are quite essential to my continued employment.

The line between that decision being made freely vs. being forced by labor market competition or other economic reasons is pretty fuzzy.

A young teacher still getting their masters and fighting for tenure will probably put in some work, yes. Young people in any profession will try to get out ahead of their peers early on.

The idea that most teachers are attending conferences or blogging about teaching all summer is odd though.

I come from a family of teachers. My mother started teaching later in life, got her Masters and was hustling when I was a teenager. After a decade teaching, I don't think she spends even a minute thinking about school during the summer.

My dad is now retired and has probably the best sort of pension imaginable in this country. Certainly nothing like that safety net will ever exist for me. I can't really compare his experience though because it was a different generation of teachers. He was very involved with his union too.

Teaching just seems like a varied profession based on where you are. I hear and believe the talk about teachers being undervalued, underpaid, overworked etc. But my family has done very well for themselves back in NY, with a lot less uncertainty than a lot of other professions.

My teachers in suburban Michigan had starting salaries in the $70ks... in 2007.

Starting salaries in North Carolina -- in 2019 -- are $35,000 for first year teachers. The top end is $58k. It's embarrassing.

http://www.ncpublicschools.org/docs/fbs/finance/salary/sched...

Also, for a married couple raising a family, it's hard to beat a job that, by definition, coincides with the kids' schedule. If one spouse has a decent full-time job, the additional income from teaching is almost incidental compared to the flexibility of working the same hours and location as the kids.