Do teachers get paid fairly?

[Dudley]

that was actually meant as a joke. Hopefully money I have invested over the years wont completely crater and we will be able to have enough to supplement our retirement income. But if the past year is any indication, I may be working a little longer.

Yeah, I understand that! My retired teacher friends keep asking me when I am retiring and I just cant take that risk yet. My wife's 401K hasn't been doing too well lately! I definitely want to supplement my retirement with something. Have a 403B and am going to use part of the money in that to purchase an extra year of service when I retire. As long as I live an additional 11 years, buying an extra year of service ends up paying for itself. I think the rest of it will become our automobile fund to help buy autos without having to take it out of our retirement $.

[DaveS903]

Go teach for a few years then give me your opinion. Until then, wherever...

[8mpg]

When you sign on to a job you should know what the pay is going to be. If you don't like the pay don't take the job. If you accept the job at the salary that is offered you are obviously not underpaid.

So a teacher in my district, taking home about 41 grand a year at 23 years of service, who is paying right around 1000 a month for insurance (family), will save 800 dollars a month if she retires. I need to let her know.

I work for the state and we share into TRS and state benefits... I sure dont pay $1000/mo for family benefits. Its $240/month one dependent or $480ish for a family regardless of dependents

[q2xlman]

No, teacher do not get paid enough for what they are supposed to do.

[curtintex]

Absolutely, without a doubt, yes they get paid fairly. We live in a free-enterprise society. I've seen a shortage of teachers and competition for teachers among districts drive up the salaries of teachers over the last few years where a teacher fresh out of college with no experience and nothing much to offer starts out over $50k. That's for lots of districts in the area. If you're not making enough, you're working in the wrong place, for the wrong district or you don't have the right skills. People in demand will always make more money than those that can be replaced more easily.

This argument gets rehashed all the time on TBH, and everywhere else, and the only people that generally think teachers are underpaid are teachers and their spouses or people who can't do math. Biased opinions to say the least. Teachers are paid what the market bears. There is getting ready to be a big shortage of math/science teacher and you'll see those stipends increase dramatically...again, dictated by the market.

187 days X 10 hours a day= 1870 a year. $50,000/1870hrs= $26.73/hr. I worked a lot of years, a hellava lot more hours, for a lot less money, with a wife and kids to raise and I made sure that when you flushed your toilet....**** left your house. I was pretty important too.

[Dudley]

So a teacher in my district, taking home about 41 grand a year at 23 years of service, who is paying right around 1000 a month for insurance (family), will save 800 dollars a month if she retires. I need to let her know.

Yes, plus she will not have any money taken out of her check each month for TRS. And if she has a 403B or something similar, chances are that $ wont come out of her check any more either. My retirement today would save me over $1000/month when you count all the money that is coming out of my check that wont come out after I retire. That means $62,000 today will be the same as $50,000 after retirement.

[Chad C]

I work for the state and we share into TRS and state benefits... I sure dont pay $1000/mo for family benefits. Its $240/month one dependent or $480ish for a family regardless of dependents

You have options, from crappy coverage to good coverage through the TRS based insurance. I always check into my wife's options due to our cost as a small business. Comparable coverage to ours for a family through her district is $1500 a month, the district picks up 250, so $1250. That's $700 less than I'm paying at this moment so we are likely going to switch and get a better deductible as well, but that will be $1250 less on her monthly stub.

[postman]

If you teach or coach and don't LOVE it you won't stay long for what they pay. I taught school in1973 right out of college, first contract was $6666.00, I quit in 1980 my last contract was for 12,500, went to work for Dupont in1980 as an operator on shift made $25,000 the first year. Made about $70,000 in 2006 when they sold the plant to the Koch brothers and laid me off. Still have the teaching degree, but wouldn't go back to teaching because the kids are terrible now, they were bad in the 70's but those kids have kids or grand kids now.........no way. They don't make enough.

[Dakota7493]

Good lord some people have got red arse over this question. I have to say that there is a lot of misperception that is going along with it.

[Pullersboy]

My neighbor of 24 years are both teachers. History department head and a junior high science teacher. Both great people. They've had an addition put on their house, drive new cars every couple of years, have a landscaping guy come to do cleanups, have a pool service, hire carpenters/ painters when they need it done, put in a really nice outdoor entertainment area with deck, pergolas, fireplace, bbq done by contractors. Putting 2 kids through state schools. Both have the summers off and are home from work in the late afternoon.

I've done all the work on my house, no major upgrades/ additions, do all the work myself, drive cars with 150k and 335k miles, both work, maintain my pool, need to do a major back yard fix-up before I sell the house in a couple years to leave CA. I get home from work 7-7:30 pm.

Not knowing their personal finances and situation, I'd say teachers are doing OK.

My wife's a teacher and she doesn't make near enough to make this happen. As you stated, you're unfamiliar with their finances. There's no way of knowing what kind of inheritances they've received, investments they've made etc, etc. Hence, this isn't really a good gauge of how well a teacher is or isn't paid.

I can tell you when I sat down to prepare our taxes this year and started going through her stack of receipts, I was blown away by how much money comes out of our finances to by school supplies for somebody else's kids, either because the parents won't or the ISD won't. As if we don't pay enough in taxes. Now we're shelling out about $1,500 a year in school supplies for other folks kids right out of own pockets. My wife puts in a tone of hours preparing lesson olans, grading papers, doing special projects to make the learning environment engaging and educational at the same time, etc, etc. This not only cost lots of hours that she could be doing things with her own family, but it's compounded by the fact that she's spending money to do alot of this. She does get time off during the summer, but it's not like mst folks think. They get done for the summer well after the students and go back to work well before the students return. There are training course to go to during the summer. She usually spends a couple or three weeks during the summer attending classes to make sure she up to date or is getting a new certification. Yes, they get time off during summer, but it's not all summer long like everybody thinks. For the amount of time and effort she puts in, I'd say she's underpaid.

Before she became a teacher, I was always of the opinion that teachers get paid enough. Now that she is one, I see things differently. That having been said, I don't intend to complain, necessarily because she knew what the salary was going into this field. But, I'm not sure she fully understood the amount of time this job requires for that salary. Either way, she loves her job and those kids like they're her very own. I feel like by the time we're a month into the school year that I know all these kids because it's what she loves to talk about.

I guess my biggest complaint is the fact that we're spending our family's money on school supplies for other family's kids. We already buy our kid's suppkies, now we're buying supplies for 23 other folks' kids. Of course, they show up (some of them) with what's on the school supply list, but that goes very quickly, even with the teacher monitoring usage. I've told her before that this would stop if all of the teachers would get together and stop buying this stuff out of their pockets and force the parents to buy it.

[curtintex]

Good lord some people have got red arse over this question. I have to say that there is a lot of misperception that is going along with it.

Because people keep asking this stupid-assed question knowing that there is no right answer.

[8mpg]

You have options, from crappy coverage to good coverage through the TRS based insurance. I always check into my wife's options due to our cost as a small business. Comparable coverage to ours for a family through her district is $1500 a month, the district picks up 250, so $1250. That's $700 less than I'm paying at this moment so we are likely going to switch and get a better deductible as well, but that will be $1250 less on her monthly stub.

I guess we have different benefit setups. We both work for the state but her options apparently are different. I dont get an option, there is 1 health plan (PPO) but there are different plans as far as vision/dental. My employer pays way more than a flat $250 for benefits. They pay 75% like most businesses.

[Jon-Paul]

Absolutely, without a doubt, yes they get paid fairly. We live in a free-enterprise society. I've seen a shortage of teachers and competition for teachers among districts drive up the salaries of teachers over the last few years where a teacher fresh out of college with no experience and nothing much to offer starts out over $50k. That's for lots of districts in the area. If you're not making enough, you're working in the wrong place, for the wrong district or you don't have the right skills. People in demand will always make more money than those that can be replaced more easily.

This argument gets rehashed all the time on TBH, and everywhere else, and the only people that generally think teachers are underpaid are teachers and their spouses or people who can't do math. Biased opinions to say the least. Teachers are paid what the market bears. There is getting ready to be a big shortage of math/science teacher and you'll see those stipends increase dramatically...again, dictated by the market.

Spot on and I agree with you and my wife is in the education field.

[Mudslinger]

I know several who do this. When they work their time off in the summers they end up doing better than lots of other people. Why not utilize that time?


I think they're paid fair for time spent working.

When you have trainings every couple of weeks to stay employed, it is hard to do a summer job!

[Mudslinger]

Absolutely, without a doubt, yes they get paid fairly. We live in a free-enterprise society. I've seen a shortage of teachers and competition for teachers among districts drive up the salaries of teachers over the last few years where a teacher fresh out of college with no experience and nothing much to offer starts out over $50k. That's for lots of districts in the area. If you're not making enough, you're working in the wrong place, for the wrong district or you don't have the right skills. People in demand will always make more money than those that can be replaced more easily.

This argument gets rehashed all the time on TBH, and everywhere else, and the only people that generally think teachers are underpaid are teachers and their spouses or people who can't do math. Biased opinions to say the least. Teachers are paid what the market bears. There is getting ready to be a big shortage of math/science teacher and you'll see those stipends increase dramatically...again, dictated by the market.

187 days X 10 hours a day= 1870 a year. $50,000/1870hrs= $26.73/hr. I worked a lot of years, a hellava lot more hours, for a lot less money, with a wife and kids to raise and I made sure that when you flushed your toilet....**** left your house. I was pretty important too.

So another words you want me to leave my current teaching position to move to a city that pays over $50,000 for a starting teacher. I may not have a lot of years teaching, just my 4th year, but I have one hell of a lot of other experience that helps what I do, I will 63 on the 20th. Texas has a state base salary and each school is able to offer more than that, all depends on their tax structure. The higher the salary for a school, the higher it will cost you to live there. Your argument in my opinion is moot. The only reason I quit teaching in 1978 was because my salary for teaching that year was a base of $8600 per year with a coaching stipend of $1500, plus I had to drive a dang school bus every morning for $50 per month. Try starting our your morning with 72 screaming kids every **** day!
I am an elementary teacher working with emotionally disturbed kids. WE are the foundation in elementary schools for what your kids might eventually turn out to be. They have taken away every bit of discipline from us and these kids know it. they have also taken out religion and when they did both of these things, they started the destruction of our schools. Yes even elementary school age kids know there is no discipline we can basically do.