>a profession that requires a college degree- start at $32k. Embarrassing.

I remember a piece in the San Jose Mercury News (I've referenced this before, but haven't been able to locate it. I expect it was never put online) from back in 2000 about full-time public school teachers living in San Jose homeless shelters because they couldn't afford to rent or buy in the city where they worked.

I expect that in expensive areas, teachers still need to commute hours to work if they want to teach there.

That's appalling to me. Given that teachers, second only to parents, have enormous impact on the development of our children.

Clearly, children are not a valuable resource. They are just not productive enough to be important in our society. /s

It's one of the biggest areas of age discrimination out there -- unions negotiating tiny starting pay for new members so they can give continuous increases to older members. They give them the worst classrooms, too. Teacher pay overall is just fine.

Your comment is misleading and I'm hoping it's not intentional.

As with anything in the bizarre municipal-county-state-federal labyrinth that constitutes the US public school system, things vary dramatically from place to place. One issue with many districts' pay tables is that they have too few steps, which is not good for "older members." As someone who was a public school teacher for six years, I also think many teachers would challenge your opinion that "teacher pay overall is just fine."

I'd like to see data on places where, as you imply, unions decide who gets the "worst classrooms" - when I was teaching in Chicago Public Schools, I heard that was once the case in a bygone era. Is this actually happening in 2021?

If pay overall is ok, is the issue wage inequity?

Maybe it is more interesting to see the rising housing prices as the real problem, instead of the salaries themselves.

Housing and Healthcare the 2 expenses that single handedly make America unaffordable. Food, travel and everyday activities are affordable enough. 4 year Student loans can be kept under $50k, if you work part-time to offset living costs and go to state schools.

$32k is criminally low, but the $60k number doesn't sound that bad to start. The US is large, and land is practically free. If the US just gets its act together, and starts building dense housing, they can offset a huge part of this divide. Ofc, they won't do that, but it is important to make the distinction between salaries being too low, and houses being too expensive for no good reason.

A big problem is, at least in CA, the rates of pay don't tend to change much from area to area. 32k might be livable in Blithe, but not so much in the bay area.

I'm not saying teachers are fairly compensated, just that you'd probably have to determine compensation county by county

Most of the people here simply don't care that most of their peers are languishing at 1/2, 1/3, 1/4 their starting salary, years into their careers, despite engaging with our education system equally. In fact, I think HNers secretly revel in that fact. What's the saying? It's a feature, not a bug.

I suggest you look closer...

First off First year teacher can be paid pretty low depending on what grade it is, and if they are even working full time. Many first year teachers are not full time

In my city where the median Household is somewhere around 55K, there are several high school teachers making 80K+

I would urge you to look up the actual salaries for teachers with more than 3 years experience, most teacher salaries are part of the public records, there are databases out there that will show individual salaries.

If we are going to debate if teachers are underpaid we need to start with an actual fact base.

Finally the fact the position requires a degree has no bearing on the rate of pay.