Maybe if we were given an iota of respect and paid more than 50% of what engineers are paid, we wouldn’t have to be.
A teacher who works thirty-five years can retire in virtually all states at the age of 57 - seven years before the average person. And the average teacher who does so today, can expect a pension of almost $75,000 annually for the rest of their lives. The sixty percent of teachers eligible for Social Security can expect to have a fixed income of $85,000 annually by their mid-60s.
If teachers want to have a higher salary, they should ask for smaller pensions as a trade. Pensions cost the state more money beforehand than a simple salary raise does.
That only applies to teachers who get a job immediately after graduating from college, which isn’t necessarily representative of teachers in this day and age, as many districts are essentially asking for at least a Master’s degree from prospective candidates (if not several years of experience.) For many teachers, the age is realistically more like 61 or 62 (assuming they work as teachers non-stop for 35+ years) and even then, teachers have to contribute a significant chunk of their paycheck during their working years to receive these retirement benefits, so we’re seeing even less money during our working years.
Leave it to public school teachers to be dramatic af.
Maybe if we were given an iota of respect and paid more than 50% of what engineers are paid, we wouldn’t have to be.
Maybe, if they want to be paid more, then they should be engineers? Take really hard classes in school for four years, operate under very strict project timelines, and and spend all day on CAD? instead of, y'know, spending all their time with kids, and getting 2 weeks off at Christmas + the summer, and having virtually no accountability in their positions?
Wow, this is one of the most ignorant and idiotic comments I’ve seen on Atlas, and that’s saying something. It’s not worth a serious response detailing the many very wrong things with this post. I seriously hope you’re trolling because... just wow.
Sacrificing grandma the American education system [/S] to own the libs.
If teachers want to have a higher salary, they should ask for smaller pensions as a trade. Pensions cost the state more money beforehand than a simple salary raise does.
Maybe teachers should be paid a respectable wage, be given a pension, and be expected to retire at a reasonable time, particularly taking into account demographic change. A $100,000 salary and pension for someone who works as a teacher until 65 or 70 seems reasonable. In exchange, we can drop tenure contracts and fire bad teachers just like we can in basically every other line of work. Radical idea, I know.
I don’t think anyone would disagree with the idea that bad teachers should be either fired or put on probation and an improvement plan. The problem is, how do we define a “bad teacher”? A few cases are very clear-cut, but too often, it would mean a teacher that fails a high number of students, and that’s often not at all representative of the quality of the teaching that’s going on, and most often, struggling schools struggle
despite the work teachers do, rather than because of it. We are given yearly evaluations, but most states evaluate based on student achievement rather than student growth. This gives teachers in high-income districts/neighborhoods an enormous advantage. While I’m fortunate to live in a stage that evaluates based on student growth, the evaluation process is still very impersonal and doesn’t consider the diversity of schools or the student population we serve. Ideally, our evaluator would meet with us in person many times, observe our clases multiple times, and spend much more time discussing our curriculum and learning targets with us to get a more in-depth understanding of the work we’re doing, but principals and teachers simply don’t have that kind of time.
In short, I’m not saying that engineers, doctors, lawyers, etc. have it easy. Far from it. I’m saying that a teacher’s job is also very challenging and complicated, simply in a very different way, and most people who don’t work in education either don’t understand that at all or only have a very superficial understanding of it.
