The Herritage Foundation thinks I'm overpaid.
According to this report, sponsored by the Heritage Foundation, et al., teachers are overpaid.
Here is an analysis from Time magazine via Yahoo News that summarizes the report. The claim that teachers are overpaid is based upon the following assumptions:
1) Teachers have lower cognitive ability-- or to put it another way, IQs.
Really? I'll put my IQ up against that of Joseph Coors (one of the original founders of the Heritage Foundation) any day. And I know plenty of mentally negligible people who work in the brewing industry.
2) Public school teachers get paid more than private school teachers.
Right, and private school teachers also are often not certified, or many of them would teach in the public schools.
3) People entering teaching from other fields get an average 9% raise over the pay from their previous job.
How does this prove anything other than the fact that people indeed usually try to move into a new profession in order to make more money than in the profession they are leaving behind?
Apparently, they also calculated "vacation" into the benefits that makes teachers over paid. There's always that misconception hanging out there. So let me try to explain this simply: Teachers get NO paid vacation. Part-time UPS drivers get more paid vacation than we do. We have unpaid summer breaks, during which times many teachers work second jobs or work for free on planning and preparation for the upcoming school year.
The whole thing is laughable.
Labels: teacher compensation
posted by "Ms. Cornelius" @ 1:01 PM
9 Comments:
I must be an idiot. I took a 20% pay cut to teach.
Ha ha ha, jealous gits. Anything to try to degrade us further. We know our worth and we know we are worth it; there isn't a single day I leave the school thinking "I didn't actually earn my pay today" and I feel GREAT about that.
Actually, most private school teachers are certified. I work for the Archdiocese of Chicago, one of the largest Catholic school system in the nation, and teachers must be certified to teach. We choose to teach in a Catholic school. I could also choose to teach in a public school if I wanted. I am certified and have my Master's degree.
Just wanted to clarify.
LOL....Paid vacation!!!!
Hmm...meetings, required classes to keep that certification, re-tooling units because someone somewhere requires it to look yet another way, re-thinking new policies and procedures trying to make them fit into my classroom, spending the month of July cleaning my classroom and setting it up for the new year because we all known it CAN'T be done properly in the three pre-planning days they give you prior to the start of the new.
Yep.....paid vacation. LOL!!!!
Ricochet, yeah, I could have made more in the private sector too, but I am content where I am. Just don't say that I am overpaid.
Karenina, me too. This is part of my vocation.
barrysbites, thanks for your comment, but that is NOT the case in the diocese in which I live, especially at the high school level. Now, that doesn't mean that those people aren't great teachers, but many of the ones I know are NOT certified.
EHT, and yet, people BELIEVE this kind of crap! I have been listening to that "three months of vacation" grumping from civilians since I was a student teacher. Perhaps it should be called "three months of furlough."
I wish I could laugh at this, but I'm too bitter.
Another thing that is difficult to get most people to understand is that even during the school year the board plays a shell game with our pay. In the district where I taught most recently teachers are on a 10 month contract (so that's two months of summer, not three). We do not work the week of Thanksgiving, two weeks in December, and a week in the spring. (Yes, that adds up to another month, just not a month of summer.) And don't get me wrong, I LOVE those breaks. I count it as one of the few remaining perks of the job. But our pay is evenly divided over the ten months of the contract, giving the illusion (to the uninformed) that we are getting paid for that time off. Actually, for every ten days we work we get paid for only nine days. (Two of the checks are for only eight days.) While it is really nice to be able to count on a relatively stable (although too small) paycheck every two weeks, it means that the board withholds part of our salary every pay period (without paying interest) and doles it out later.
Agreed, Tim. Also, we definitely don't get compensated for before and/or after school tutoring. We don't get compensated for the 2-3 hours a night we spend grading. We don't get compensated for working endless hours on the weekend as we grade and lesson plan. We don't get compensated for the the time taken away from our "conference period" for the endless meetings we have to attend. We don't get compensated for the required professional development hours we complete. I don't even try to figure out what I make an hour anymore. It would be utterly ridiculous.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Post a Comment
<< Home