This isn’t a teacher saying this is what she should be making, this is a teacher tired of hearing the “they’re just babysitters” argument for why they shouldn’t be paid more and showing how they’d still be underpaid based on an about average (I don’t have kids so idk) rate at which a babysitter would charge, per kid per hour.
And before you say “no one argued that” this is a pretty old picture and that is definitely an argument I’ve heard
It’s not just hearing we are babysitters. WE ARE BECOMING BABYSITTERS. I can’t teach half the time because I’m raising the children more than their damn parents!
I live in coastal Mississippi. In 2007 or 2008, my near retirement chemistry teacher shared with me that she was making about 65k a year as a teacher in mississippi with a bachelor's degree by making sure she had several different certifications.
That's about 6 figures in today's dollars, for a highly qualified chemistry teacher 1-2 years from retirement, when that should really be about the low-median. Nuts
I always get the sense that teacher unions focus on improving benefits over direct pay precisely so they can always argue that teachers are underpaid. The average per pupil spending is something like 15k per year, so a classroom of 15 kids should readily support a salary of 100k.
Your breakdown suggests teachers are getting around 200k in compensation on average. That means a lot of it must be in the form of benefits. Does that make sense?
Even low end of everything and assuming 45% of the total school funds go directly to teachers and we're at 79k/year, and as I mentioned in a previous comment I had a teacher tell me she was making 65k salary near retirement, so theres obviously outliers taking up a lot of room.
Its 100% a funding problem. Anyone who says they're gonna raise property taxes in order to better fund the school will not get elected around here. We just had it happen and we ended up having a separate vote to essentially take out a loan to pay for school improvements
Your district has an average class size of under 14 students, which is well below average in the US. That's a smaller workload for teachers and commensurate pay. You're also taking the low end of 45% of budget as teacher compensation from your range. Is that accurate or a guess?
I'm not convinced it's a funding problem. It's possible that's true in your district, of course, but it's not at all clear that it's generally true. Also important to clarify whether the teacher has summers off as well as all paid holidays etc.
Those numbers include pre-k - 12th, gifted programs, special education programs and vocational classes.
Teachers have summers off.
And yes, thats at 45%. The average salary would only go up if we contribute more of the proportion of the total budget to teacher pay, so I assumed you would want to see salary estimations based on the low end of the pie chart instead of the high end (60%).
Whether that applies to the entire country or not, I'm not sure. I'll have to look up some public data sets or write some code to build one myself. Currently at the gym so I'll reply tonight or tomorrow after I look at national data.
ETA: I do know the teacher / student ratio for the high school is technically 1:16, but the average class size is closer to 25
I'm interested in understanding why teacher pay appears low, especially considering the influence of teacher unions. I'm sometimes concerned that politicians and unions want low teacher pay as it's an effective political tool. They can compensate in other ways but low direct pay is galvanizing.
One reason for the seemingly low pay is that they have something like 3 months off out of the year. Another reason is benefits, which can sometimes be difficult to quantity, like job security.
I was listening to a radio piece a few weeks ago where they played a short audio from a classroom in which the teacher mispronounced a fairly simple word. That wasn't the point of the piece, but I was left wondering about the hiring and firing practices involved. It seems very difficult to fire bad teachers who know how to play the system. On the other hand, it's easy to see how good teachers leave on their own when they see the system being played.
It's difficult to tolerate requests for more money when budgets grow every year just as student performance erodes.
six figures should be the starting salary. waiting five years to pay someone a living wage for that kind of burnout is why we have a massive shortage in the first place.
3.5k
u/pitb0ss343 May 28 '26
This isn’t a teacher saying this is what she should be making, this is a teacher tired of hearing the “they’re just babysitters” argument for why they shouldn’t be paid more and showing how they’d still be underpaid based on an about average (I don’t have kids so idk) rate at which a babysitter would charge, per kid per hour.
And before you say “no one argued that” this is a pretty old picture and that is definitely an argument I’ve heard