In order to afford student loan payments and rent, I worked three jobs. Still missed meals and was late in payments regularly.
The cities your mentioning are very high COL areas, and relatively affluent. Competition for those teaching positions is going to be very intense, and mostly go to senior teachers with at least 5-10 years experience. It's not representative of the nation.
Not so much the second though -- yes, these high salaries are in HCOL areas, but I'm not aware of crazy amount of competition to be a teacher even with those salaries. I'm now in Chicago, where teachers fresh out of college fetch about $60k in my district, and there's always plenty of openings.
It took me over a year after graduation to get a job, and I had applied to over 130 postings. I ended up finally getting a job in an inner city school.
The situation could very well have been very different in Chicago, though, depending on a lot of factors.
For more reliable data, go to the BLS, which is systematic. In CA:
Elementary teachers (except special ed), mean $85,100.
Kindergarten teachers (exc. special ed) $76,450.
Middle school teachers (exc. special ed and career/technical) $81,490.
Secondary school teachers (exc. special ed and career/technical) $86,900.
(And special ed and career/technical are lower in each category.)
https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_ca.htm
> Edit: Look at some of the salaries on the main page, $230K-$420K - I wonder who these teachers are in Elementary and High schools with such high salaries..
Probably bad data handling; since its deanonymized, its probably based on public employer data sets, which are often released in unstructured form and potentially listing different pay for the same employee separately; to try to deal with this, sometimes people merge records by name. Sometimes this is right. Sometimes this merges duplicated data or data for distinct but same first and last named individuals (being a CA public employee and having had family members who were, I’ve seen media (one step removed from the public release) data sets where my or other family members’ data was wrong or duplicated, and derived data sets where those errors were compounded.
https://www.sanjoseca.gov/home/showpublisheddocument/72973/6...
From a source that, unlike yours, isn't completely opaque and unreliable, $92,500 for the highest paid segment (Secondary) of K-12 non-special ed teachers, $101,500 for secondary special ed, the absolutely highest of any K-12 category.
I assume the values for the San Jose teachers are also total compensation, not salary.
You also happen to have cherry picked the state with the best teacher pay in the nation, as mediocre as that is for such a high cost of living state. If you repeat your analysis in, for example, South Dakota, you'll find that the median teacher there is paid about $48k. That's not that far from the statutorily required minimum wage in San Jose.
https://calsalaries.com/job/teacher-salary
Average $97K.
I searched for an elementary school teacher, 1st Grade, in San Jose area to see a salary of $142.5K in 2019. Another teacher, 2nd Grade, had a salary of $141.6K in 2019.
To be honest, these don't seem too low to me.
Edit: Look at some of the salaries on the main page, $230K-$420K - I wonder who these teachers are in Elementary and High schools with such high salaries..
Edit2: Please note I'm not a teacher, nor do I have any family members who are teachers. I'm merely pointing to the data since I too was curious about it. I have no way of verifying that the data presented by that website is accurate.