Should teachers get paid more?

Ok, so I'm gonna start off with my observations.

- My Dad became a teacher, he went from working in a well paid job, to being just on average pay in the UK, circa £26k a year.

Being a teacher means you have to be well qualified, and have a high level of education. On top of this, it means you have to be influential, and try your hardest all the time. If you aren't working hard, the people you teach won't do well...

Why I think they don't get paid enough

I hear so many people say "teachers get a lot of time off, so it's all good"... sadly as I have seen, this isn't true. He gets up at 6AM every day, in school by 7:30 and works pretty much all day, til around 6PM. He then comes home, and most days works til 8PM, sometimes later. Weekends, he also works at least one of the weekend days.

During holidays, or current holiday, he has marking for the first 2 weeks, has some time off, then more marking and prepping course material, then a holiday, then back to school. By the way, when I say "marking", this is pretty much 9AM to 6PM, with a few breaks in between. So pretty much a normal day then. On top of this currently the UK changes with courses ETC, at least with GCSE and A level at the moment, so every year he has to update his materials anyway, which takes days to do.

I was thinking about it, and effectively he earns something like £50 a day, if i worked it out correctly (was some time ago, some leeway) however for the number of hours he works, he's potentially under the minimum wage.

The weird thing is, he's earning a tenth of what he used to earn, and the job seems more stressful as well, he clearly doesnt really enjoy it.

I have probably missed out a lot, so I will be updating this...

So why do people with such high qualifications, dedication and patience get paid so little? They are one of the key ingredients to a good society...


Cheers Ollie

 

so he went from a job making $330k/yr to $33k/yr?

?

 

pretty much mate, not posting details but it was actually a bigger leap than that

 

Teachers have one of if not the most important jobs in the world and they get paid shit, of course they deserve to get paid more.

 

i think it would be great if teachers were paid more. I know most of my teachers were the show up and collect their pay-check type. Maybe if they pay check was more worth their time I would've learned something fro them.

 

Moms a teacher - she actually makes above average money here in the states now that she has tenure (sp?). They get paid more year after year, and after 10 years they're making pretty good money. However, it's still not enough! They work their asses off

 

I can't comment on teachers outside of belgium at all. Here though i've found alot of teachers don't teach because they want to educate young people but because the job has alot of benefits even though it doesn't pay well.
Even within the circle of people i know, some want to teach because they get alot of days off and it seems "chill". This attitude is ofcourse very very wrong and i've experienced this first hand with alot of my former teachers. They lack passion, motivation and are generally lazy. Ofcourse i can't generalize all teachers and put them all in one bracket. But from what I've seen the older generation compared to the new one is enormous, alot of new teachers here lack motivation.

 

Teachers in Canada are payed extremely well. I think you can expect at least 65k+ a year in like your first years which is actually more then it seems because they get fucking like 4 months off every year lol and seeing you can also be one in like ?3 years of Unil? i know some teachers who are 24/25. They get a bad ass union with bad ass pension plans and bad ass benefits.

fun fact the highest payed teachers in my high school under like administration staff where the shop teachers. Apparently if your a Journey man in a trade you come and teach like construction they have to compensate you to what you'd be making as a private contractor. I know my welding teacher in HS was making 110K+ a year since he was my neighbor and my old mans best friend. For a 9 to 3:30 job with 4 months off each year like wtf the dream boys

 

The problem is if you give teachers a lot it will attract more people who shouldn't be teaching and don't care about the students. They will only do it for the nice pay.

 

Heres my opinion:

Becoming a teacher isn't forced onto you, its a choice. Teachers do what they do because of the passion they have. It provides a personal job satisfaction. It is a respected job.

I personally believe teachers/firemen etc... who do things for the interest of others should be caking it.. its pretty fucked how the system is atm..

Teachers play a crucial role in the development of students mentality and behaviour and I think that itself should be be enough for them to get a shit load of money. But having said all of that your pops must have known the salary before hand, he's probably stressing on the outside but secretly he loves it!

EDIT: A personal tutor can earn anywhere between £15-£150 an hour depending on the class size. If money was really an issue all teachers can attract pupils to their tuition! The label 'teacher' must go down well with students/parents.

 

What you've got to remember is that you can't take more from a pot than what is available.

Whether you're just throwing the random 'why do footballers get paid so much, our soldiers should get it instead' or basing it on moral principles.. The fact remains that school budgeting isn't going to allow teachers to be rolling in dough when their market is essentially 0 on return.

Perhaps an engineer or a process operator for a petrochemical site might be pulling in close to £100,000 a year their return is greater than their cost, essentially. Less qualified; perhaps. However, a jobs impact on society isn't reflective of their return in profits. A stock broker making countless amounts of profit for their company will be rewarded in a percentage of their profit margin. A teacher doesn't bring any return on their invested value so they are a cost/expense to any governing body.

Say you doubled their salary, the budget isn't going to change so you half the workforce. £26,000 a year isn't the best, though it's more than the average ( I think ) and enough to live comfortably.

 

Teachers in Canada make enough considering they get 3 months off a year. Even if they're genuinely putting in 12 hour days at their most senior level they're arguably overpayed.

In addition because they're unionized it's taken away the incentive of some teachers because they're highly unlikely to get fired so they sort of just float along while being grossly overpaid for their effort.

 

Not sure how it is over in the UK, but elementary through high school teachers make like $50-65K/year ish in the area of the US I'm in. Factor in the 3 months they get off, that would be 62-81K/year if they worked as a teacher with the regular 2 weeks of vacation, which is comparable to most average jobs in America. If they're hard pressed for money, it's easy enough to offer tutoring on the side as well as have a part time summer job.

 

My mother is a teacher too, she doesn't get paid very well either. i agree with you. teacher's job is so difficult especially you really feel like its a "Job" More than anything else

 

Teachers are overpaid for the "work" they do. They make money regardless of how they perform, the children are forced to be in school regardless.

 

In a perfect world, teachers would get paid more, however, it's contingent on the labor market. As of now, at least in the U.S., becoming a teacher is not the most difficult thing. If they got paid more, it would just attract more people who don't care about the job (just the money). You could raise the requirements on what it takes to become a teacher and naturally they would get paid more, but I feel this is the only way. Maybe make teachers acquire a Ph.D.

 

I disagree. If you're talking about lazy k12 teachers who teach out of a book and don't put in effort to plan interesting classes, I totally agree, but I'm a teacher (teaching in an institute) and I can assure you there are people who put in hours of work planning classes (off paid hours) every day and have shitty public school jobs. The problem with schools is that there are too many kids and not enough teachers. The fact of learning is that you can't put 20 kids in a room with 1 teacher and expect it to be a useful class for everyone.


I teach in the private sector as a foreign language teacher and even though my students are usually adults well past their learning prime, they still learn way faster than any high school kid could. This isn't because I'm a great teacher (I am tho chill), rather that I teach 1-3 people at a time, and the company they work for can afford to pay for more teachers. This is BY FAR the best method of learning and we already know this.


The problem with all of this is that teachers are paid a pretty unexciting salaries to sit in front of 20-30 students, and are expected to interest and efficiently teach all of them. This kind of teaching entirely falls on the students motivation to absorb. This is a problem when half of the class has adapted to this method and others are entirely bored of it. It doesn't matter how long you sit a child in a room, if they aren't motivated, they won't learn shit. You can't have a system that works for everyone if you can't afford to have classroom sizes of under 10. I feel that this is often misattributed to teachers being 'bad'. I believe that MOST 'bad' teachers gave a shit at some point.


There is no way to fix this issue until we have teacher robots or fucktons of money.

You don't need a Ph.D. to teach children.


Teaching isn't hard, it just consumes all of your free time if you plan on being a good teacher. Then you arrive and cycle through 6 classes of sub-adult humans who haven’t got the slightest clue what you do for them and all just want to leave.

 

Wow, 26k a year? that's below average for teachers in my area. I thought they were underpaid. If teachers ar paid more it'd improve the quality of education

 

Yes in foreign countries especially