^Not disagreeing, but I think teachers make disprportionately more money.
Starting salary at Northside ISD in San Antonio is $51,085. Starting salary for an enforcement officer at the Comptroller’s office (Texas’s version of the IRS) is $29,990.
At least we don’t pay them as much as we pay underperforming fund managers.
it’s tough to know what a market salary would be without the government wedging itself between the custormer and the provider of the service. go figure.
And remember on your first point, that’s for nine months of work.
+2000 to S2000Magician for that kind of teaching. That’s how you do it.
There are private schools.
In my area, private schools fall into 2 groups, Catholic schools and “private” schools. The Catholic schools are relatively inexpensive and the teachers get paid much less than public school teachers with the same quals, but they provide more job security for younger teachers as local public schools have to offer tenure to any teacher after their 2nd or 3rd year of employment. It’s not uncommon for younger teachers to be let go after 3 years so they don’t become tenured, while their Catholic school collegues stay at the same school for 8 or 9 years. I have no personal experience with the “private” schools, but assume their teachers make at least as much as comparable public school teachers.
My wife has been the principal of a middle school for the last 5 years (6th, 7th, and 8th grade), she was an Asst Principal for 4 years before that and taught 7th grade science for 5 years when she got out of college. She has her masters and Ed.D The stories she tells me make me very wary about humainty (somewhat tongue in cheeck, but not much). My view is that teacher’s don’t make enough. The bullsh!t they have to put up with from parents and students should double their salary. The hazard pay should quadruple it. I’d kill a damn kid if they pulled some of the sh!t she tells me. Her school is a Title I school (90% free and reduced lunch) so there could be some corollary but, either way, In spite of it all, she loves her kids and gives everything she has for them, so I support her.
The sh!tty teachers give the good ones a bad rap. There’s teachers up at her school all the time for tutoring (NCLB), and sports events, and choirs concercts, and drama plays, etc., etc, etc, etc, etc, You may be aware of what time the bell rings for your kid to get out of school but you’re probably not aware of what time that teacher or coach left the school…sometimes waiting on your inconsidate a$$ to get up there an pick-up your worthless kid.
I’ll STFU now. Everyone have a great weekend!
I have a hard time feeling sorry for the good teachers because they’re the ones who allow the bad ones to stick around by not accepting merit-based pay and continuing to insist on tenure. If the good teachers, who I believe are the vast majority, would give up tenure and years of service-based pay schedule, bad teachers would get fired, mediocre teachers would see inflationary raises at best, and good teachers would get paid accordingly. Good teachers are afraid to give up their tenure and guaranteed raises though, so they protect the bad teachers and deserve the downside they enable.
I am with you 100% but I don’t think it’s the good teachers that are impeding progress toward merit based pay.
I have heard this from people I know that are teachers all over. It shocks me how much crap the teachers get from the parents. Like its the teachers fault little johnny is an idiot who cant do math, while they dont sit with him and work on his homework either. Parents and teachers are supposed to be on the same side. I am not sure where the break happened but now they think the schools not giving their kid an A even though he cant do geometry are the reason their kid isnt getting into Harvard.
And to get rid of a teacher. It’s fvcking ridiculous. My wife just finally got rid of a truly, legit, certifiable, nut-job as a teacher. You or I would have been fired in a nanosecond. Videos of the teacher leaving campus, while kids are in her class. After one write-up she told my wife that she might kill herself in her (my wife’s) office. All sorts of crazy sh!t that she just had to keep documenting until finally the higher ups allowed my wife to fire this lady. The stories are endless.
I assume you are cool with instituting this same policy for police? If so I am ok with it, I just spoke with a republican politician a few months ago and listened to him tear apart teachers unions and blaming them for everything wrong with schools. When I asked him about the police union protecting officers wrongdoings and allowing the bad ones to keep their jobs, I was given a cookie cutter “I love and support our police” response. If we are going to try and turn public unions into a more merit based system (which I am fine with) it has to be done across the board.
Absolutely.
I think the problem here is that government administrators (let’s say Governor) is elected by people. So it’s like people electing their own boss. Of course they will have his balls in hand.
The discussion has morphed from academia to primary/secondary ed., but I thought I’d chime back on the original topic in as a b-school prof. There’s a lot of heterogeneity across fields. Some (like engineering) are pretty in tune with “real-world” stuff. Others (liberal arts/humanities, anyone?) are out in la-la land.
Even within a business school, the accounting and finance folks are pretty tuned in. Marketing is also. We all look and the Management/Organizational Behavior folks like they’re whack jobs.
Most folks choose/get a Finance PhD because (1) they’re got good math chops, (2) They’ve been good students and are pretty intellectually curious, and (3) They can handle long-term projects (if not, they don;t make it through the dissertation phase.
Pay is actually pretty good - for AACSB (our accrediting body), mean starting salary for an assistant prof was $150,000 last year. At a top school, with summer support (additional mone paid over the summer to support research), all-in comp can be $225-$250. However, if you’re not publishing in top journals, you won’t get tenure there, and end up moving down the food cahain. Even at second-tier schools, a lot of folks are pulling in close to $200k a year. And for those who have the right research areas, they get to consult with industry at pretty good hourly/daily rates, too.
The big problem is that research-focused schools don’t value teaching that much (the incentives are skewed towards publishing). So even though a school has a great reputation based on research, that doesn’t necessarily follow that the classroom teaching is any good.
Based on what S2000 has said, he’s doing it right - lots of quizzes and making the little buggers put pencil to paper. I do similarly, but since I teach case courses this semester, it’s quizzes before the case to make sure they’ve read them, putting them on the spot in class (I’m old-school), and quizzes afterwards.
I hate multiple choice exams. When I teach, I often have a small section with multiple choice to cover a few concepts quickly, but the largest part of the exams that I produce are short answer or calculations. There’s a big cost there, however, which is that they take a lot longer to grade and correct.
One thing that non-teachers often fail to realize is that it is surprisingly difficult to produce good exam questions. This is one reason for the CFA’s policy about not discussing specific questions of the exam. Questions have to be relevant to what’s covered, simple enough to be answerable under test conditions, clear enough that an attentive student knows exactly what’s being asked and what’s expected of an answer. There has to be a balance between topics so that the final score reflects an accurate measure of the most important learning objectives covered so far.
A lot of teachers choose multiple choice questions because you can just download them from an online test bank and they are easy to grade. For adjuncts, they are paid so little that it’s hard to argue that it’s worth their time to do otherwise. For standard professors, laziness and/or the desire to take time for publishing rather than teach.
Gee, I should have studied Business. The comp figures for assistant profs are closer to what I saw full profs getting in the social sciences.