This is anecdotal evidence, but my mom was a teacher and she was getting paid 85k, had no masters, didn't work at all during the summer, and didn't work at home at all (<8 hour work day).

This isn't your mom's educational labor market. The stats are there to support most assertions in the above reply. They're just inconveniently scattered across the states and not all electronically accessible. I wonder whose interests that serves? When I taught in inner city Paterson back in the mid-90s most teachers worked at least two jobs but still spent many extra hours a week outside normal school time on phone conferences with parents, curriculum development and grading tests/papers, because they all had a full load of classes with 35+ students each. Things weren't much easier down here in NC two decades later where my own kids were in school (our district has a year-round calendar -- so no summers off for teachers). The master's requirement exists in NY, but practically discouraged in other places because school districts didn't want to pay the differential. Sure, none of this approaches the often 24x7x365 experience of many sysadmins and devs (my own tech experience for over 20 years), but it's also far from the bankers' hours myth that's been pushed since at least the 80s.

More power to her — that sounds a lot better than any of the teachers I know.

For me, the biggest push here is that we've had a generation or so of our society collectively telling everyone that the future for good jobs is STEM, STEM, STEM or maybe STEM. If we actually believe that, we should be paying and treating teachers well because we are targeting education-intensive subjects and because we need to hire teachers who have an understanding of subjects which pay well. Teaching shop was a great job option for a contractor who was getting older and needed the benefits but that dynamic doesn't apply to someone who can teach most STEM subjects can often get comparable benefits and likely better pay, and enjoying teaching only goes so far to compensate the various drawbacks.

Generally, states requiring masters degrees pay more than $40-50k a year. Teaching is a rewarding profession, so naturally there will be a lot of teachers willing to work, which depresses wages. Regardless, teachers get paid well above medium incomes regardless of where they live.

I agree that teachers should be paid more, particularly newer ones, but I blame the unions for this. So much money gets funneled into pensions, which only a small fraction of teachers ever get.

Three months off is not a “few weeks”. Good lord. What school district are you referencing where teachers are forced to work every day during the summer?

Yes, they don’t get paid for not working, but can usually have their employer stretch the 9 month salary to cover all 12.

There are a lot of reasons I wouldn’t want to be a modern American teacher, but the time-off schedule is not one of them.

Note that I never claimed teachers were forced to work every day of the summer. I said “a few weeks” because for the teachers I know scheduling a vacation ends up being a couple of weeks where they have a contiguous free stretch between the end of school in June (usually a week after students), staff meetings and trainings, professional development, and planning for the school year which begins in August. No, they aren’t working every day of that period but it’s nowhere near as generous as people tend to describe it sounding like June 1st to September 1st.

> Look for data on this and you’ll learn the opposite.

I looked at the data and stand by my assessment.

> Teaching requires a master’s degree in most cases

It does not. Most teachers get masters degree because pay schedule pays extra for master degree holders. Master degrees are less prevalent in private schools, because private schools are not typically so dumb to have rigid pay schedules that pay extra for degrees, regardless of whether these degrees are actually useful.

> that’s only getting you pay in the $40-50k range

That’s already above median wage. It’s slightly below median wage of all workers with a university degree, but once you take into account hours actually worked and non-wage benefits, this is actually significantly above average pay of workers with university degrees.

> A popular propaganda claim is that teachers work fewer hours based on the hope that reader doesn’t know teaching includes more than direct instructional time.

A popular propaganda claim is also that non-instructional time is a lot. It might be for some teachers, especially younger ones fresh into their careers who need more time to prepare for their classes. The non-instructional work sometimes is also pretty concentrated, making some weeks very busy and requiring hard work in those. However, most weeks are not busy, and most teachers do not spend more than a handful of hours each week on non-teaching work.