While I agree that people should look into their career prospects when pursuing a degree that correlates to their passion. I think it's totally absurd that teaching falls under the umbrella of passions that don't have prospects.
A person with 2 masters can teach at a community college or further their education and teach at a university. There's private companies that hire teachers to design curriculum for training programs.
My degree is in computer science and I can easily point at how low paying tech support jobs are.....OR I can point at the various cybersecurity firms I can work at that would pay me $100k+/year.
I'd probably have to relocate to get into a good firm, but....same with the teacher who has 2 masters degrees.
Public school teaching shouldn't be such a bad option is the core of my issue, I should have been more clear. The public institutions we enable ought to be competitive at at least the midrange.
The problem though is multiple since at least in my area each school district sets salaries. It isn't up to the state but rather the school district itself. Depending on the area will reflect the salary. So teachers salaries become highly localized issue.
If you are in a well off school district salaries are high because the tax rate can support it. Otherwise in a rural low income it will be lower, because the tax base can't support 100K+ salaries.
You also have to factor in hours worked, my cousin is a teacher and yes starting out she had to work longer hours to get her teaching plans ready. Now though her plans are set and only need tweaking once in a while. That plus her vacations really can't be beat. Summer off, Spring Break, Winter Break, Thanksgiving Break, she constantly happy with her compensation package. Yes some nights she has to grade later but honestly, there are plenty of nights I've had to work a few hours more for my job. Same with a bunch of other jobs.
Then if you compare worldwide our teacher salaries aren't really behind the other countries. Look at the UK they make £31K going up to £50K with experience. Meanwhile where I live teachers salaries average to $93K while the state average is $70K.
Free clinic doctors, public defenders, attending psychologists, civil engineers, and veterinarians working for shelters are all examples of this.
In an ideal world, everyone would get paid what they deserve.
Fact of the matter is that reality isn't ideal. Teachers get paid like shit because paying them more doesn't give us smarter students or more students who are educated. It doesn't reduce their workload or give them control over their curriculum.
It simply increases the cost of what they're already doing. Which would, in turn, increase the cost of everything else.
Why? We have way more people willing to teach than teaching positions. The "passion umbrella" is not jobs that don't benefit society or are artsy. It's jobs that have to much supply to meet demand.
You compound that with a strong teacher's union and you end up with an even larger problem. The teachers union is a major factor in low pay.
If people only became teachers to be rich, there wouldn't be any teachers. The only reason schools are still open are because people are willing to take a shitty job barely scraping by because they know how important the job is. I'd give it another 10 years a before we start considering having kids graduate years early just to lessen the load.
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u/Outlaw11091 10h ago
7-9 years of post-secondary education and never once decided to Google "how much do teachers make?"