Frebis, I'm amazed that considering that seeing as you obviously know your girlfriend, you can say that about the amount of work they do. What Chirpy says is spot-on. Teachers do not get the whole summer off. The good ones take a few weeks, and then its back to prep work. Those "vacation" weeks that students get off during the year? Most teachers are doing prep work/correcting. Hell, my brother was correcting exams on Christmas. The difference for teachers is that their "on clock" time is not when they're doing all their work. Lesson plans don't make themselves. Research doesn't do itself. Tests and homework don't correct themselves. The difference between teaching and your average desk job is that when you leave your desk, your work stays there. Teachers' work tends to follow them home. Most decent teachers take work home almost every night. My brother and his ex-wife were both teachers (him teaching high school, her first grade/elementary). One of the main reasons that their marriage broke down was due to the time/energy strain of teaching. It was a rare weeknight when either of them were done before 6 or 7. Both of them done before then? Almost never. During the school year, if a teacher is going to have their shit together, we're talking at least ten hours a day on average. And then some work on the weekends. Add in the fact that classes is more emotionally/energetically demanding than your typical work staring at the computer screen, and you have a very demanding job. I absolutely agree with you about unions, and I'm not really arguing one way or the other about the pay. My brother and his ex-wife worked in a very well-off part of Canada, and hence are paid reasonable well. Its a relatively high-supply/low-demand job in that there are more people that want to be teachers than there are jobs; hence, Econ 101 would predict lower pay. Also, its inherently hard to measure their performance. But to claim that teachers only do "5.5 hours" of work a day is preposterous bullshit. The problem isn't that teachers do less work than they are paid for. On average, they do far more work than they're paid for. The difference, which Omegaham below me gets at, is that there aren't good enough ways to differentiate those who do the work from those who don't.
At the risk of sounding like an asshole, I think that our salary is actually reasonable. Right now, I get about $1200 per month. That doesn't sound like much; many professionals earn that much in a week. However, I have absolutely no living expenses. I have no rent or utilities. I have free medical, free dental, free optometry, and free food. Hell, since I barely ever drink, my biggest expenses go toward my uniforms. So, at the end of the month, I've put 800-900 dollars into the bank. How many people are actually able to save 800 bucks a month? Of course, I'm also single, don't have a mortgage or credit card bills, and don't really spend much on expensive shit, so my low salary doesn't really affect me. But to be honest, if you gave a $500 pay raise to the military, 90% of that would go to alcohol and tobacco. It would have absolutely nothing to do with quality of life. Focus: Overpaid Crappy teachers. I've known some amazing teachers. The kind that stay after school until 5:00 to help kids, the ones who genuinely love teaching their material and make learning effortless. Those guys are vastly underpaid for the good that they do. But then there's the clock-watchers. My high school biology teacher was an excellent teacher. My US History teacher was not. He was one of those people who just didn't care. He blathered on for the period and sent us on our way. When 1:55 came, he was out the door as fast as he could possibly go. He didn't grade homework, didn't grade tests, didn't grade projects. He was just uninspired. And yet, he got paid the exact same as the guys in the first crowd. That's frustrating to me, and it should be frustrating to a lot of people.
Underpaid: Educators. For the reasons already mentioned. Family Practitioners. Family Practitioners - your basic doctor that provides routine care - are among the lowest paid doctors yet are in the position to provide the most important care to their patients. The lack of adequate numbers of primary care physicians is one of the prime reasons our healthcare costs are so out of control.
Overpaid- The vast majority of teachers. Look, it's no secret that the education in US public schools is freaking awful. It's also not a surprise that most teachers are absolutely awful, do little actual teaching, but have tenure from the Teachers' Union. I'm not even surprised when I read a story about an English teacher who taught for 17 years without being able to read. I have had many, many teachers who knew less about the subject they were teaching than myself or the other bright kids in class. And I was no genius or anything. Meanwhile, they are rarely judged on their performance, and if standardized testing comes back poor, does the school district lay them off? No, it just whines for more aid money from the local government. Most teachers I know, including high school ones, do about 5 hours of lectures a day. Considering they use lesson plans from last year, and often have students to help them with the grading, and perhaps that's about 7 hours of work a day, or a 35 hour work week. Did I also mention they receive more holidays, get the entire summer off, and rarely have to bust their ass? I'm not even counting all the times a teacher wastes a class session on "study hall", has us all take a test, shows an "educational video", or simply LEAVES. Yes, I had a teacher for a high school who would, 60% of the time, tell us we had a free period or to quietly work on homework in class. She was the head of the department and received a six figure paycheck. I had a physics teacher who would spend an entire class period making fun of catatonic and paranoid people from his days working as a shrink, didn't know the fucking difference between work and torque (I had to point out to him that one was a freaking vector and the other a scalar), and taught us little to no physics. At the end of the year, we were an incredible 4 months behind the other physics class, taught by a woman who actually knew the subject. What happened to the guy that summer? He gets a promotion, because he is buddies with one of the administrators. At least 80% of the teachers I have had (and this is in supposedly outstanding school districts considered among the best in the entire US, not just California) were incompetent, lazy morons. I wouldn't hire most of them to wash the toilet of a Mexian fast food restaurant, let alone teach students. Before the teachers on this forum bitch about me, let me note that I worked as a teacher, too. I taught students various math courses, and working a couple of hours a week with me for a month or two, their test scores and knowledge improved more than they ever had with their own teacher. I genuinely enjoyed the work and seeing the pupils improve, but not once did I consider it very taxing or difficult. But I'm not some special cookie, either; a lot of my well-educated friends worked as teachers or tutors when they were teenagers, and were similarly successful. Even more disgustingly overpaid- Most school principals. This doesn't even warrant an explanation. They receive a 6 figure income while doing nothing to improve the woeful performance of their school. I won't even get into the characters or stories I know of most of the principals at the schools I went to. They were generally egomaniacs, racists, sluts, dim-witted morons, and clinically insane. NOT overpaid- CEOs. Hey, people bitching because they read some tripe in the papers, do you have any fucking clue how hard this job actually is, in most instances? I've never been a CEO myself, but I have some friends who were/are. I couldn't do their job in a million goddamn years. Many of them work a "healthy" 80-100 hour schedule for a period of years. And unlike teachers, they are judged very harshly and immediately on their performance. Board of directors, stockholders, etc. will oust them very quickly if it's not working out. They have to deal with about 100 different circumstances and problems all at once. They literally don't have any free time. Not only is there the technical complexity of the actual job, (take into account that most CEOs of pharmaceutical companies graduated top of their class with a PhD from Harvard Medical School because they fucking need it, not because the diploma looks nice), there is dealing with the government, rival companies, people within one's own company, and an endless vaguary of meetings and tough decisions. To speak with Bill Gates for fifteen minutes when he was in charge of day-to-day operations of Microsoft, you needed to book an appointment six fucking months in advance. Look, not every CEO works hard, diligently, or is competent, but they're the exception, not the rule. Because if they don't possess those qualities, their company is going to suffer for it very soon. It's easy and popular to shit upon CEOs, or to read some loony bullshit that all they have to do is be tall and look good in a suit. (Neither of which is true for the CEOs I know, or many famous ones) It's a little harder to understand what their job consists of.
KIM: I reread my post, and realized how it came off; I wasn't suggesting that CEOs didn't work hard, I was suggesting that their skillset and work ethic is much less unique than their salary would tend to indicate. (I do realize that it's utterly naive to equate how much money a company made or lost with the effectiveness of it's chief officer. Without inside information, you have no way of knowing how much worse or better it could have been. Still.) Using cherry-picked examples like Bill Gates is misleading; he was also the founder and chief creative force for his company. The fact remains, however, that (via Gladwell): The data suggests that CEOs are being paid for more than simply their work ethic and intelligence.
Huh well I'll be dammed. CEO's get paid more for their work than people with similar skills or responsibilities. This can't be because they know how to manipulate the system.
We've all had crappy teachers and I believe that's the result of tenure practices, the old affirmative action mentality and unions. But I think the above quote proves my overall point: you get what you pay for. Perhaps if teachers were paid more, more intelligent, dedicated people would sign up. So, yeah, underpaid. Just sayin'.
Not to keep the pain train moving too much longer for the lowly teachers but I agree with KIMaster here. The majority of my high school teachers epitomized the phrase "those who can do, those who can't teach." Like KIMaster said about CEO's a lot of business jobs require a shit ton of work to do outside of the 9-5 and it isn't grading papers and coming up with repetitive lesson plans and your work is assessed immediately. Two or three of our english teachers were fucking Deadheads that spent their summers touring with bands and smoking as much pot as the human body can handle. Those were probably the worst, the rest were about as apathetic about teaching as possible. On the other end of the spectrum there were probably 2 or 3 great teachers who were truly inspiring. The two biggest problems are the unions/school systems that let this mediocracy stand and the PARENTS who don't fucking push their kids and the schools to do a better job. But I tend to agree with Adam Carolla's line that parents are probably the biggest factor in why Americans have fallen way behind in education. Any who: Focus- I was under paid and over paid when I worked as a bar back. During the busy night thurs-sat the amount of physical work was murder. Moving through hundreds of drunk people with cases of beer bottles and ice non-stop for hours on end is brutal. For what we were doing compared to the actual bar tenders I think we deserved a bigger cut of the tips, but I could still walk out on a friday or saturday with 300 bucks for a ten hour shift, which mean they were making more than that. But we had a mechanical bull at the bar and the bar backs took turns night to night operating it. We got tips for it and it was retard. Honestly the hardest thing you'd do working it was trying to get a girls tube tops to slip off. After work you'd sweep around it and go home... Usually averaged 150 bucks on a good night. I remember on a dead ass Tuesday I was the lone bar back when a large group of business people came in. Three of them slapped 20 bucks a piece in my hand to give their female boss "a good ride." I made off with over a hundred bucks from working the bull and getting my bar back cut.
Really? Where are you getting any of this information from? I'm speaking from personal experience; maybe it's skewed, maybe it's leading to the wrong conclusion, but I actually know some CEOs. What are you basing your opinion from? The pharmaceutical CEOs I know got their PhDs and did their residency at John Hopkins and Harvard Medical School, respectively. Many of them were in charge of biological research labs at major schools worth hundreds of millions of dollars. (They are not in charge of Fortune 500 companies, by the way, but still, companies with revenue in the tens of or hundreds of millions each year.) The technical CEOs were all exceptionally intelligent, brilliant people who I can say generally knew more about their field than their undergrad professors from schools like MIT. If you think CEOs don't have enough mental acumen to deserve their paychecks, then who the fuck does? Is it Malcolm Gladwell, who writes contradictory, factually inaccurate, pseudo-scientific works that every econ undergrad laughs at? As for the work ethic part, that is even worse bullshit, and it's even funnier coming from Gladwell, who hob-nobs at elite New York parties, writes a book every couple of years, and makes well-compensated "appearances" at various schools and business. Realistically, he does about 10 hours of work a week, and gets paid an outrageous fortune. Yet, you're obviously a big fan of his. But tell me, what part of a "80-100 hour work week for a period of years" do you think is easy? I wouldn't be able to handle it, personally. Would you? No, it certainly isn't, because the average CEO is both the founders and chief creative force for his or her (sexist asshole) company. Really? How does this data suggest anything?! Let's assume that CEOs are indeed taller. What of it? What if it turns out CEOs prefer blue ties to gray ones? What about that "fact"? Look, I know how fucking popular it is to bash CEOs,. And that includes people in high-tech fields that should know better, and work a fraction as long or as hard as the chairman does. But I've known and seen first hand what their jobs involve. We have otherwise intelligent members of this board claiming that any tall male model would make a great CEO, instead of looking at some individual CEOs, and what their profession entails.
It was the whole financial crisis where huge banks failed, bailed out, and the top brass still got insane bonuses. I don't know how their compensation packages were structured but it was an easy sell when we needed a whipping boy.
This is off-topic, so I understand if it needs to be deleted. An interesting aside about the quality of teachers: I cannot remember where I read it, but I'll try and paraphrase. The poor teaching we experience now is partially a result of the sexual revolution. If you go back 60 or 70 years, when the average amount of formal education received was much lower than it is now but of a much higher quality, what you find is a completely different demographic in the teaching department. Prior to women winning equal rights in the workforce, there were very few jobs open to girls who didn't want to grow up and become a housewife. You could be a teacher, a nurse or a secretary. While this is discriminatory and a waste of talent, it produced an interesting side effect: the very best, smartest, dedicated and driven women became teachers (or nurses). The teacher pool was the cream of the crop in terms of education and ambition. As a result, the quality of teachers produced was very high. As more and more jobs opened up to females, less and less wanted to teach. Who can blame them? Why would you want to be teaching Grade Two shit disturbers when you could be an astronaut or a CEO or a veterinarian or a...you get the point. As it stands now, we are getting what we put into the system. Teaching is often seen as a fall-back position. Spent all that money getting an English degree and can't get a "real" job? Teach until you figure something out. Not quite good enough to continue to advanced education? Meh, find a job teaching. The teachers are of a much poorer quality because they are not drawing from the same demographic they once were. It's sad, but I haven't the first clue how to go about reversing the trend. Focus: Firemen. I don't know what they get paid, but it isn't nearly enough. Those guys fucking show up seconds after you call them, and they don't mess around. They fix the problem, and quickly. Can't say enough good things about them.
I'm speaking, somewhat off-the-cuff, about things that I've read. Don't have it in front of me, and I don't have the time to look it up this second, but I will and get back to you. It's possible that what I was reading was specifically directed at the CEOs of trading companies; in this case, we're arguing at cross purposes. Will get back to you. No arguments here. Nope, not a big Gladwell fan at all actually. He's alright, in a Simmons-y kinda way: fluffy fizzy pseudoinformation that is easy to read and digest. That being said, that doesn't mean he's always wrong, or that he can't be a useful starting point to a deeper discussion. Nope. But how many CEOs make what I make? There's a huge gulf there. I know you were kidding, but Bill Gates is a dude. Id's as a male and everything. I don't have to write his or her when talking about one man who is a man and has a penis. Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it certainly suggests it in some cases. These statistics don't exist in a volume; there's pretty convincing evidence to suggest that people have a positive association with taller men. Not bashing. I just said that they were overpaid, and that their hiring is somtimes influenced by somewhat superficial reasons. If you're referring to me, you're affirming the consequent. I said that (to simplify) that CEO's are tall, not that tall people are CEOs.
Well, I don't know any CEOs of trading companies, but I certainly wouldn't trust newspapers, either. When is the last time any of them had something good to say about any CEO? Or hell, even something deeper than a slogan or cliche? By the way, I don't want this to get too political, but the only woefully incompetent CEOs I can think of that were responsible for our current economic dilemma were the heads of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, who were supported by members of our government. For the vast majority of CEOs, who don't have buddies in Congress to fall back on, it takes both high-level skills and a tireless work ethic to succeed at their job. And if they can't hack it, they're quickly replaced. Okay, that's pretty much the same perspective from which I view him. Which is why I'm surprised you're citing Gladwell as a primary source. Is there? I don't know what your job sector is, but CEOs of most companies are not raking in incredible wealth from salary. They make the big money through stock options, and that is directly correlated to their job performance. For instance, in high school, I was friends with a kid whose father was the CEO of a GPS navigation company since the late 90s. Beyond a talk he gave at the school, I don't know the business, but according to Wikipedia, they had revenues of about $1.5 billion and 4,000 employees during the last reported fiscal year. According to what I was told, and was later confirmed, his father drew a yearly salary of $300,000 back in 2004. That's certainly not bad, but is it big bucks in the Silicon Valley? No, not really. It's about twice what a good manager at a bio-tech or software company makes here. So again, I'm curious where the idea that CEOs are overpaid come from. Besides, of course, the natural bashing of anyone wealthy as "undeserving". I was kidding, but also, there's a point there. Contrary to what you believe, at that level of business, where billions of dollars are on the line, no one gives a shit if you have a dick, vagina, if you like to fuck dogs, or your skin color is purple. There's too much at stake, and too few people that have the skills to perform successfully. If you're seriously arguing this point, let me ask a simple question; how did Gladwell learn the heights of all these Fortune 500 CEOs? I'm really curious. I can find out a lot of information about Fortune 500 CEOs through either the Internet or asking certain people I know. But how tall they are? I couldn't even tell you the height of the CEOs of the companies I interned/worked at myself! It's hardly common knowledge either, like it would be for an athlete, actor, or musician. So where did Gladwell obtain this information?
Then your girlfriend must work in some kind of magical fantasy school. Most of us work 7am to 8pm, 5 days a week and our planning period is also our lunch break. There is a lot more to teaching than just being in the classroom. Who do you think has to pick out books, make assignments, grade, do curriculum planning, have meetings about curriculum planning, have meetings with administration about various bullshit, meet with councilors, meet with parents etc... Most schools I have worked at we have to be our own IT if our system screws up and our own maintenance to clean the classroom. We may get holidays and summers off but that is our only time to get caught up on a lot of things that can't get done during the normal year when school is in session. If I have to get a substitute because I am going to be out their pay comes out of my check. The BEST part of all this is most of us make < 30K a year. If your girlfriend really works like you says she does you better tell her to never change schools. Focus: Overpaid: My babysitter. My kid isn't in diapers, is old enough to go to bed when you tell him and all she does all night is sit on my couch and watch TV and still wants $15 an hour.
I agree that's pretty bad, teachers here start around 37k or so which I think is appropriate for math and science teachers and I think 28k is good for others. If benefits were to be more like those in corporate America I'd say that 42k and 33k would be about right. Though I'd be happy to see them make six figures and drive government issued Bentleys because like Frebis, I'm also dating a teacher. Out of curiosity, what do you guys think would be a good wage range for teachers? I always hear that teachers should make more, but no one will put a number on it. I have a feeling that even if they were making 60k people would still say it's not enough. Lastly- to those saying teaching is an 80-100 hour/week job, is this your first year? Because the teachers I know have more free time than any of my other friends, but have been at it for three or more years.
I really hate to pick on you, but you've just proven that teachers are paid exactly what they're worth. You can't even spell, and don't know how to use spell-check. You can't argue that you're underpaid. The problem with teachers is that groups like the NEA keep teacher's salaries artificially low by not allowing performance-based compensation. Without that, there is no way to encourage better teachers to get into the field. There has to be some method to weed out the under-performers in order to increase salaries. We are getting exactly what we pay for. This is basic free-market economics at work. We could have better teachers by paying more money, but that process has to include getting rid of the slackers too. You can't just raise salaries and expect that education will improve by paying bad teachers more money. The babysitter is paid exactly what you think she's worth. How is that overpaid? You know that she demands $15/hr., yet you keep hiring her. That means it's worth it to you. If it weren't, you'd be at home with your kids. If she kept raising her rate - $20, $30, $50/hr - at some point you would tell her she's not worth it and either stay home or look for someone else. If you're not at that point then her pay is justified. Again, it's another classic example of a free-market economy.
I remember last year when a Rhode Island school fired all of its teachers. They got fired for the students under-performing. It seemed drastic, but I understood it. Any other job where an employee doesnt perform well, they get axed. Teachers are no different. Though, i have a softer spot for elementary and high school teachers than I do for most college professors. I understand the teachers can only do so much, especially when student's have chaotic home lives, but the buck stops with them and the parents. And sadly, you cant punish lazy, incompetent parenting. Underpaid Birthday clowns, I was one in high school. You do the math as to why they deserve more.
I'm only quoting this because I think there's a large gulf between the CEO of a company like this and a CEO of a company like Walmart or Exxon. The CEOs at most small or mid-size companies are exactly like you say: they're putting in insane hours while ensuring their companies stay alive and grow while one mistake on their part can put their company out of business, and in most cases they're certainly not pulling in obscene salaries because often the company simply can't afford it; hell sometimes they may not even be the highest paid employee. These CEOs are certainly not overpaid. On the other hand, I would say the CEOs of a lot of the large multi-nationals; the Exxons, Walmarts, and Haliburtons of the world are ridiculously overpaid. The CEO of a company like that would have to fuck up on a colossal scale to endanger his company, and even then there would need to be gross incompentence on the part of the board as well for something to occur that would endanger the likes of Walmart (or Microsoft, Lockheed, etc.). To go back to your example, the CEO of a large multinational might make 10 or even 100 times more than your friend's dad, but do you honestly think that CEO is 10 or 100 times more skilled or knowledgable? Espcially considering the margin of error for someone like your friend's dad is so much smaller, yeah, I'd say that by and large the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are overpaid.
Underpaid: Most Foreign Service Officers in the State Department. Now, I know a lot of government positions are overpaid and bloated. I'd say you are likelier to find that in the Pentagon, though. When you consider State Dept. diplomats, consider that most of them have law degrees and have chosen this path in lieu of a lucrative career with a law firm. Then, check out their salary scale, which ranges from about $30K to $140K. The former is at the start of their careers and the latter will be sometime close to their retirement, 20 years later. Most FSO are also complete workaholics by necessity. 40 hours doesn't come close to the work they put in. And, that's if they are not posted abroad, as most of them are. When that happens, you're essentially working around the clock. Also consider that the value of their work as it relates to billions of dollars worth of commerce around the world and its role as the backbone of U.S. diplomatic relations. Finally, consider that contracted positions that do literally the same job for the U.S. government will get paid anywhere between 50%-300% more.
Operative word there being "salary" which is typically only one component of the overall compensation package. Stock, options, bonuses and the like are where executives rake in the serious money and, in a way, is performance-based compensation: the better the company's stock performs, the more these compensation components are worth. As for the underpaid, persons with disabilities working in sheltered workshops. It makes the Chinese labor system look like the model of fairness.