LOL @ Chicago, striking teachers

[Exterous]

P.S.

for every teachers that puts in longer hours, there are 10 that dont.

Ah - excellent - since you are using hard numbers I assume you have a source for this. Can you please post it?

Poor fucking teachers

median chicago salary ~38k-41k
median teacher salary ~67k

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Chicago

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/09/11/how-much-do-chicago-teachers-make/

plus teachers in chicago only work 8months out of the year. If any other worker did that, they get 75% of their salary. or 29k-31k.

The median teacher in chicago makes 2x what the median worker gets. and thats not counting benefits.

Talk about greedy.

Well - if you were to actually make a fair comparison of wages by comparing those with similar education levels you'd find a slightly different story:

http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Location=Chicago-IL/Salary/by_Degree

The median pay for someone with a Bachelor's degree is $70,000. I'd be willing to be that many of these teachers have a masters degree/continuing education as that is a common requirement so that drives the scale up even higher

 

[Exterous]

IF they are to fucking stupid to figure out how to budget then they shouldn't be teachers.

I think thats a bit unfair considering 75% of the US population can't budget. If we take the population of the US - remove those under 25 and over 65 and then take 75% of that we only have about 40 million people in the US between 25 and 65 that can budget. Divvying that up over random occupations and a (hopefully) concentrated draw from financial services and you will have a significant shortfall in the availability of people who can budget

 

[PokerGuy]

How many of you will be willing to get your full salary in 9 months and then go 3 months with no paycheck.

I would have no problem with that setup, after all it makes no difference in the total amount received either way.

What's to prevent someone from taking another position in other 3 months to earn additional income? I realize it might not be at the same rate, but what's to prevent them from, say, working at walmart for 2 months of the year to make some extra cash? Basically they would earn (on average) north of $85k per year. Not wealthy by Chicago standards, but certainly not poor either.

 

[waggy]

I think thats a bit unfair considering 75% of the US population can't budget. If we take the population of the US - remove those under 25 and over 65 and then take 75% of that we only have about 40 million people in the US between 25 and 65 that can budget. Divvying that up over random occupations and a (hopefully) concentrated draw from financial services and you will have a significant shortfall in the availability of people who can budget

naa i think its fair. you want people that can't do something as easy as a budget teaching the kids?

I think one of the big issues in education is the fact we don't take the best as teachers. big part of that is pay and respect. the pay is good but not amazing. Then they do something idiotic like have the PE coach try to teach algebra II (yes shit like that happens) and they don't know it.

Add in the fact they are getting away from "teaching" to programs. Kids aren't learning the basics. My pet peeve is everyday math. have you looked at this shit?

ugh

 

[RFE]

teachers in chicago work only 75% of the year... yet that is never taken into acount ethier.

Put it another way that 69k a year median teacher pay is equal to ~92k a year for a full time worker.

Agreed. Plus, lets not overlook pensions which most of the private sector lacks, and medical/dental throughout retirement. Regarding the considerable amount of time off each year - if private sector employers offered their employees the ability to buy additional vacation time, what would it cost to buy a few months of time off each year (you kind of answered that above)?

 

[EagleKeeper]

IF they are to fucking stupid to figure out how to budget then they shouldn't be teachers.

edit: also my wife was a teacher. we received the pay over a year's time (and many we knew were too). it made no difference. why? that was her yearly pay. she wasn't going by hours so it didn't matter.

Also any pay she recieved in the summer was a bonus to us.

not that any of that matters since well your point kinda sucks ass actually

Waggy; my point was to the idiots here that do not understand that making $69K for 9 months work does not equate to a higher overall salary. those that get the 69K do not get anything for the other 3 months; that fact goes over many heads here.

 

[abaez]

So what? They get 3 months off to do whatever they want, including getting another job.

 

[waggy]

So what? They get 3 months off to do whatever they want, including getting another job.

not true. by many have to "continue" with their education, they have to take training etc.

granted some of the training is BS but still..

but yes they get the majority of that time off. My wife (she taught 3 years) would work at gas stations on the summer. anything she made was blown on trips and "toys" heh

 

[MooseNSquirrel]

First world problems... where people making $76k strike.

Kinda like people making millions complaining about a tax hike eh?

 

[Mai72]

Hello All. First time post.

I am in South Korea teaching English. I have just completed my one year contract and will teach for another year. The thing that amazes me about the Korean education system is the amount of time Korean students attend school. When they enter middle school the average Korean goes to school approximately 12 hours a day. They don't get weekends off, and they don't get 3 months off per year. They are always constantly learning! For instance, once they are done public school they attend an English hagwon, math hagwon, and finally a taekwondo or a music school. Then it's back home for more studying. Korean students go to school 220 days vs 180 days for American students. That's an extra 40 days Korean students are learning.

Where am I going with this? Our school system sucks. It's outdated. The system needs to be revamped. The Teacher Unions are against extending the school calendar. Has anyone looked at the math and science scores of late? Korea constantly ranks at the top and America ranks at the bottom. It's embarrassing to be an American. My Korean students think Americans are all fat, dumb and lazy.

Finally, the job market does stink but there are jobs. But, the high paying jobs are going to people with strong math and science skills. Those high paying jobs aren't going to the average American. They are going to people from India, Korea and China. We live in a global market now, but there are Americans who still think that this is the 1950's and we are sill the world leader. This is not true anymore.

It's not all roses in South Korea. The climate is one of hyper competitiveness. On average they work 10 hours per day, and they have the 2nd highest suicide rate in the world. You can easily spot Korean business men drinking every god damn night. Depression is extremely high. On the plus side, the women are gorgeous but a little stuck up. =)

 

[JoeyP]

So if Chicago gives in and pays these teachers Moar Money, will test results get better? Is salary and benefits holding them back from getting those graduation rates up to the 90% range?

Yahoo reported that "John Kugler, a union activist representing school staff such as nurses and social workers, demonstrated outside the Chicago Public Schools headquarters on Tuesday in support of the strike because he said schools in poor areas need more resources."

So maybe if the taxpayers redirected money to those schools so they can get the needed resources, that would solve a lot of the problems.

 

[chucky2]

You can resource the sh1t out of these schools, it's not going to help. Very large majorities of the kids going there are basically uneducatable to the degree needed to have any shot of being middle class, save for being extremely lucky and getting some kind of trade job that pays well (and, lets face it: with the work ethic of those going into the trades, along with illegal immigration, the chances of that is really F'ing low).

This leaves them needing skills required for jobs that result in lower class living. Hardly hard to provide. Unfortunately they'll be competing with illegals who have far higher work ethic, but, skills wise they'll be at a rough parody.

Pretty sad....

Chuck

 

[werepossum]

why?

why protect bad teachers?

Because bad teachers pay the same union dues as good teachers, and they're likely even stronger supporters of the union as their chances of being retained on their own merits are less.

Ummm, let's compare apples to apples. Don't compare it to the median salary of everyone, compare it to the median salary of people with similar educations. I know that in NY, teachers are *required* to have a master's degree. So, to average in all the people working at Wal-mart to determine if they are over paid is a pretty poor comparison.

My patience is wearing thin. You are obviously too clueless on this to have a valid opinion, but I'll correct you again. Do you believe that you should know EVERY trivial little detail of every class you've ever taken? Why "SHOULD" they know absolutely every trivial little thing from an 8th grade class? Tell me, what are the most appropriate units for measuring sea floor spreading? meters per year? feet per year? centimeters per year? millimeters per year? (Yep, that's listed.) Or, what is the mathematical procedure for determining if a point in a set of data is an outlier, that is, if I have the following data: 2,3,4,4,5,6,6,6,7, and x, what is the minimum value of x when x would be considered an outlier?

Like I said, there are a lot of trivial things in classes that a normal person doesn't retain after a couple of years.

They're called "student teachers." What they do: "student teaching." NOT "student watching." DURRRR. Most programs with student teachers rigorously outline expectations to be met by the cooperating teacher. The student teacher observes that class for a couple of days, to get the hang of the rules, procedures of that class, names/learning styles/abilities of individual students, etc. Then, that student teacher starts taking over some of the classes. At some point, the teacher is required to leave the student teacher on their own. Even though the teacher isn't in the classroom, it can be a ton of work - reviewing all the student teacher's lesson plans (etc.), and generally cooperating teachers use that extra time to create things for their classroom that might have otherwise required way too much time to implement any other way, or do research, etc.

Your patience may be wearing thin, but it's an ocean compared to your reading skills. I specifically said

If the teacher is teaching non-standard courses, I agree she should be evaluated on the basis of how her students do when tested on that subject, and I'm all in favor of changing the rules. That's a local issue. Even though the kids are being tested on standard 8th grade curricula - which they SHOULD know - there's no reason her evaluation has to be based on that test as long as her students know the standard 8th grade material to an acceptable level.

An "acceptable level" /= knowing "EVERY trivial little detail of every class you've ever taken". If you doubt this, ask around. As long as advanced eighth grade students can earn, say, 80% on standardized eighth grade tests, I support evaluating their teachers on how those students test on the advanced course material. As far as student teachers, if the name makes you feel you're entitled or obligated to leave YOUR responsibility to a student teacher's dubious talents, feel free to change the name to something that allows you to do the job for which you are paid. Again, the purpose of a school is to educate the students, NOT to educate the teachers nor to provide the teachers with a good living. American teachers in aggregate have done such a poor job that your interpretation of a valid opinion, give teachers more money, less responsibility, and no accountability, is no longer acceptable to the people whose taxes pay your salary. (Which is not to say I blame teachers alone for the abysmal performance of our education system; I don't. Our culture of concentrating on whether a child has a good self-image rather than whether the child has reason to have a good self-image, as represented by parents and by politicians and administrators seeking to appease those parents rather than educate the child, is probably a much bigger cause than the quality of teachers. However, less accountability for teachers only contributes to the problem.)

As far as comparing apples to apples, by all means, let's. Start by removing tenure, pensions, and benefits after retirement, as those largely don't exist in the private sector. Then let's pay teachers for what they actually do, NOT for their level of education. If you're teaching second grade, why would you be paid extra because you have a master's? Doesn't work that way in the private sector. Then let's prorate teachers' pay for the actual days they work. Finally, let's figure out comparable difficulty. I know lots of people who dropped out of programs like engineering, biology and chemistry, and nursing to go into education because they just couldn't handle the work. I don't know a single person who dropped out of an education course of studies to go into another field. With the possible exception of journalism, there simply is no major as easy as education. Once we have a level playing field, by all means let's make teachers' pay comparable to others with similar levels of education and work requirements.

 

[werepossum]

Hello All. First time post.

I am in South Korea teaching English. I have just completed my one year contract and will teach for another year. The thing that amazes me about the Korean education system is the amount of time Korean students attend school. When they enter middle school the average Korean goes to school approximately 12 hours a day. They don't get weekends off, and they don't get 3 months off per year. They are always constantly learning! For instance, once they are done public school they attend an English hagwon, math hagwon, and finally a taekwondo or a music school. Then it's back home for more studying. Korean students go to school 220 days vs 180 days for American students. That's an extra 40 days Korean students are learning.

Where am I going with this? Our school system sucks. It's outdated. The system needs to be revamped. The Teacher Unions are against extending the school calendar. Has anyone looked at the math and science scores of late? Korea constantly ranks at the top and America ranks at the bottom. It's embarrassing to be an American. My Korean students think Americans are all fat, dumb and lazy.

Finally, the job market does stink but there are jobs. But, the high paying jobs are going to people with strong math and science skills. Those high paying jobs aren't going to the average American. They are going to people from India, Korea and China. We live in a global market now, but there are Americans who still think that this is the 1950's and we are sill the world leader. This is not true anymore.

It's not all roses in South Korea. The climate is one of hyper competitiveness. On average they work 10 hours per day, and they have the 2nd highest suicide rate in the world. You can easily spot Korean business men drinking every god damn night. Depression is extremely high. On the plus side, the women are gorgeous but a little stuck up. =)

Excellent post. Welcome to the forums.

 

[Xellos2099]

I am not sure on the hate but if you want the teacher to be held responsible to bad grade, shouldn't parent be equally responsible too? If grade are too low they are off to adoption.

 

[unokitty]

So if Chicago gives in and pays these teachers Moar Money, will test results get better? Is salary and benefits holding them back from getting those graduation rates up to the 90% range?

Yahoo reported that "John Kugler, a union activist representing school staff such as nurses and social workers, demonstrated outside the Chicago Public Schools headquarters on Tuesday in support of the strike because he said schools in poor areas need more resources."

So maybe if the taxpayers redirected money to those schools so they can get the needed resources, that would solve a lot of the problems.

When was the last time that you heard of any government agency that had "enough" money or resources?

When was the last time that you heard of any group of unionized government employees that were offered "enough" money?


Besides, there is a difference between educating students and operating a government funded daycare. And since the teachers union is taking the position that student performance shouldn't have any correlation with their pay, it appears that the union is focusing on the latter.


There is a reason that the President didn't send his kids to Chicago Public Schools when he lived there. There is a reason that the Mayor doesn't send his kids to Chicago Public Schools. And there is a reason that 39% of the Chicago Public School teachers send their kids to private school.


Uno

 

[monovillage]

Ah - excellent - since you are using hard numbers I assume you have a source for this. Can you please post it?



Well - if you were to actually make a fair comparison of wages by comparing those with similar education levels you'd find a slightly different story:

http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Location=Chicago-IL/Salary/by_Degree

The median pay for someone with a Bachelor's degree is $70,000. I'd be willing to be that many of these teachers have a masters degree/continuing education as that is a common requirement so that drives the scale up even higher

Can you tell me why a K-9 grade level teacher needs an advanced degree instead of a 2 year degree and a certificate? Oh yeah and a background check.

 

[piasabird]

In Illinois where I live in the south, they refuse to hire teachers with masters degrees because they have to pay them more. There is no requirement for a Master's Degree.

 

[michal1980]

Ah - excellent - since you are using hard numbers I assume you have a source for this. Can you please post it?



Well - if you were to actually make a fair comparison of wages by comparing those with similar education levels you'd find a slightly different story:

http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Location=Chicago-IL/Salary/by_Degree

The median pay for someone with a Bachelor's degree is $70,000. I'd be willing to be that many of these teachers have a masters degree/continuing education as that is a common requirement so that drives the scale up even higher

And the teachers work 25% less then the median pay for someone with a bachelors degree, and get better benefits.

The master degree/continuing education is union bargained junk that the used instead of actually evaluating teachers.

Because somehow getting a master degree makes one a better grade school teacher.

Teachers unions don't want responsibilities. They don't want to be responsible for teacher quality, they don't want to be responsible for student performance, they don't wont to be responsible for teacher behavoir, etc etc.

But they want more money, for less work, and a guaranteed job no matter how poorly they do theirs.

 

[Xellos2099]

How about parent don't want the responsible of teaching their kid either?

 

[waggy]

How about parent don't want the responsible of teaching their kid either?

There is that too. going to school and learning is only part.

I just got finished helping my kids do homework and read (they got out early today! 2 hours? bah waste of time) (5th and 1st grade).

we went over my daughters homework. stuff she got done in study hall and what she did at home. then we went over the multiplication table. she has a book report due so she will read today since she has 3 hours before gymnastics.

my son had a easy day. just study for his spelling test and read "lost puppy"(it was a good book! heh)

i have the time to sit with the kids and make sure they understand the stuff. i want to make sure they both are success in life. part of that is getting a good education.

 

[Thegonagle]

Always nice to see complete idiots bashing teachers and the work they do.

It ain't a job for a 14 year old babysitter, although that's how some people want to pay them.

I shudder to think of the state of their profession if they DIDN'T have their union.

 

[Xellos2099]

There is that too. going to school and learning is only part.

I just got finished helping my kids do homework and read (they got out early today! 2 hours? bah waste of time) (5th and 1st grade).

we went over my daughters homework. stuff she got done in study hall and what she did at home. then we went over the multiplication table. she has a book report due so she will read today since she has 3 hours before gymnastics.

my son had a easy day. just study for his spelling test and read "lost puppy"(it was a good book! heh)

i have the time to sit with the kids and make sure they understand the stuff. i want to make sure they both are success in life. part of that is getting a good education.

Exactly, Rahm want to grade teacher base on student's grade, how about parent? Should we take the kids away from their home if they are failing? Our stupid mayor only want to deal with one part of the equation while completely ignoring the second part; yet both part together is the key. Yes I am politically incorrect so sue me.

 

[Thegonagle]

And the teachers work 25% less then the median pay for someone with a bachelors degree, and get better benefits.

How insulting. How about calling to raise your own standard, instead of trying to pull others down to your level?

Golden rule: Don't be a dick.

 

[MrColin]

Unions are an important counter balance to corporate power and excess profits.

The problem with public unions is there are no corporate profits to divvy up. So who exactly are they acting as a balance to?

Teachers deserve to be paid enough that they can reside outside of the ghetto and eat well. They are the only hope to counter pop-culture and the religious right, which both teach that stupidity is a virtue.