She got a job working in a corporate office for a big company. This is pretty typical of not-retail-worker-salary beating out public sector nine times out of ten.
Why would someone ever be a teacher for <50k? Anybody with an education background can move to Seattle, Washington (or other state close to big city pay) and be a corporate trainer and move up to a director level role and get paid many times what they would ever be paid as a teacher…
…except so many want to stay near family, not be near a big city, can’t move because of xyz, want a couple months off each year… etc etc etc.
To quote somebody: Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defense.
Just isn’t that way today and there is a big political and economic mess in the way of getting there.
Uneducated people overthrow governments. Educated people involve themselves so they make a better, longer lasting, more stable and effective government in the long run.
There’s this consistent delusion that if we just burn everything down and start anew that this time it will all work out for the best.
It hasn’t worked for the past two millenia, it’s not going to magically work now. All it does is give rise to new fascist states.
The French revolution is far from the most well-regarded outcome, & yet, I think it was preferable to no revolution, at the time… I agree that having a knowledgeable populace is essential to social stability.
But maybe educated young people will join the govt a well, and make it better, so that we will not want to overthrow the govt.
The mess is allowing decades of union-busting to be effective. Teachers in my state of Victoria (Australia) are heavily unionised, so US$50k is the starting salary. You would absolutely be making what she is now, $64k, if you’d worked for 8yrs like she had.
Edit: And that’s just for public teaching jobs. Australia has way more private schools than the US and those pay even more. With 8yrs of experience it would be easy to get one of those positions and be making $70k.
Those salaries still sound far too low for a teacher, especially since, as I understand it, your dollar doesn’t buy you guys as much as our (US) dollar, or is that just in electronics and video games?
Either way, the vice principal in The Breakfast Club cites that he’s making $35,000 a year in 1985. I’ll assume that’s the higher end of the scale since he’s admin, and has been teaching for years at that point. The thing is that adjusted for inflation that $35,000 is closer to $87,000 today. It’s not just teachers either. No essential worker has had a raise since the early 1970s, in fact we’ve had pay cuts when you look at inflation, and expected productivity.
Edit: just noticed you specified US dollars, sorry.
It depends, some things are more expensive here. But for an example, Baldur’s Gate 3 retails at US$70 in the states, but US$57 (A$90) here. A brand new iPhone 15 Pro costs US$200 more here however.
The high end for a public school teacher is US$87k. But public school admin pays a lot more. The starting salary for an Assistant Principal is US$96k, and goes all the way up too US$147k on the high end for a Principal.
Finally, while we absolutely have a housing crisis going on, rent is still a lot cheaper here. I live in a three bedroom house in the suburbs of Melbourne. We have a backyard big enough for a few chooks, a dog and a cat. It’s a half hour’s train ride into the city centre. Our rental laws mean the landlord basically couldn’t say no to the animals. He also can’t terminate the lease without cause, and has limits on how much and how often the rent can be increased. We pay US$1260 (A$1955) a month. From what I’ve seen, it can cost $2000/month for a small apartment in a comparable city in the US.
Speaking of Unions actually, we have renter’s unions here that will help if you’re being fucked over and agitate for better rights. I pay A$12/year in dues and they’ve helped me out a few times when I’ve had a landlord trying to break the laws.
Sorry for the whole rant, I just have had people reply similarly before in a way that feels a bit dismissive. Thanks for the apology, and have a great day/night :)
Edit: Oh yeah, there’s also not having to spend money on essential medical care, that makes a big difference too.
25 years ago in my suburban Chicago public high school district, my stats teacher brought out the teacher pay schedule for us to play with.
There were six columns:
Bachelors, bachelors+30, bachelors+60 Masters, masters+30, masters+60
The +30 or +60 refer to credit hours of additional college coursework
Each row showed the number of years of experience.
In 1998, the upper-left (fresh out of college, no experience) salary was around $38,500 or something.
The bottom right (masters+60 or doctorate, and 30 or 35 years of experience [I forget]) was $151,000. And they got a great pension (fatter than what teachers in IL starting now will get).
You also got a small multiplier for each extra curricular you ran.
We had mostly excellent teachers as a result. Couple of duds too, but that’s life. 70+% of graduating seniors went to college of some kind within two years. I believe I went to a good school.
But this is what happens when you fund schools through property taxes: the good neighborhoods get good schools, and it propels a virtuous cycle. The bad neighborhoods get bad schools, and they just spiral downward. It’s a dumb way to fund education.
So, expensive for me who is already completely priced out of ever responsibly having children. We all have a responsibility to the future generations so I’d still vote for it. But oof. It is a tough sell to place even more tax burden on people who will never realize the benefits.
It’s not a sell for the people who will have children. It’s a sell for the children who will grow up under that education and have their job prospects determined by it. Hey - weren’t you once a child?
It is a tough sell to place even more tax burden on people who will never realize the benefits.
But you will. We all benefit from a well-educated society. A poorly educated workforce isn’t competitive with one that is well-educated, and they attract employers with jobs that can take advantage of them. They provide the work for good-paying jobs and drive the economy we’re growing old in and hopefully retiring from someday.
Public education benefits everyone, not just the children.
I live in Oklahoma. I make $40k/year teaching. I can not afford the up front cost of moving to Seattle. Long term I’d love to end up in a corporate job, but because teaching is so shit and a lot of people are leaving, transitional jobs are difficult to find.
Seattle was just TFA’s literal job location.
You could move to Oklahoma City or Tulsa or something. If you can’t save a few grand to move anywhere whatsoever i’d suggest getting a second job a couple nights a week or over the summer during break to make enough to do so. It’s your livelihood anyway.
Today: What do you do when you need a new car to get to work and yours stops working from age? give up? walk many miles to work? assume the fetal position until death? I promise there is a possible way in this world to have enough to relocate, the only question is what you’re willing to sacrifice to get it done. My wife lived on rice and beans for months while she saved up enough to afford tuition which ultimately made her income go from a few hundred dollars a month in another country to a little over a thousand. She learned English on her own and got a job that was a two hour commute from her home and made even more money. Now she makes over double what you do. I’m not saying it’s easy, i’m not saying it’s fair, i’m just saying it’s possible.
The headline is really misleading. She now works for Costco corporate doing marketing training. The typical store employee is still around $18/hour.
This just in: Corporate jobs pay more than public school teaching jobs. Film at eleven!
The headline is really misleading. She now works for Costco corporate doing marketing training. The typical store employee is still around $18/hour.
Downvoting you, because you are mischaracterizing the article content.
The first half of it describes how she started there and the regular positions she had, before she moved up and into the teaching position she has at corporate office, which is similar to the teaching position she had before; both are of a teaching.
From the article…
At first, I made $18.50 an hour — a little less than what I earned as a teacher. I put in 40-hour workweeks, five days a week, and got a $1-per-hour raise when I hit 1,000 hours.
How TF am I mischaracterizing it? The teacher in this story got a pay bump by taking a marketing job with Costco corporate, not by working in the warehouse. The headline implies that she got a raise by working for her local Costco. That’s misleading.
Well then in that case your reading comprehension is pretty bad.
In September 2022, I started full-time on the memberships team at a new warehouse in Athens, Georgia. I had two 15-minute breaks, and 30 minutes for lunch. Otherwise, I was on my feet all day.
At first, I made $18.50 an hour — a little less than what I earned as a teacher. I put in 40-hour workweeks, five days a week, and got a $1-per-hour raise when I hit 1,000 hours.
The article also describes how she worked in the bakery.
School teachers often get physically and verbally abused by both parents and students, with the abusers getting little to no reprocussions. In a corporate environment that would get you fired or arrested.
Just because its obvious doesn’t mean its not also bullshit.
Education is the single most important thing affecting a societies longevity and well-being. If the people responsible for that education aren’t able to support themselves, it erodes the very foundation of the country.
Whether or not it affects the bottom line of an investment firm may be an important metric to you but it doesn’t necessarily mean what’s best for everyone.
Doing training in the corporate offices of a for-profit company is going to pay more than a school teacher. This shouldn’t be news to anyone.
And the first half of the article? When you keep describing again and again is the latter half.
The whole article is about somebody’s career profession change and advancement, not just change.
“Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don’t need little changes, we need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. Competition for the best teachers should be fierce; they should be making six figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to it citizens, just like national defense.”
I hate how a 23 year old quote from the West Wing is still so relevant…
Next line that you left off speaks to that…still.
“That’s my position. We just haven’t figured out how to do it yet.”
That hits hard. Will we ever figure out how to do it here?
This might be the most memorable quote from the entire run of the West Wing for me. Our teachers are doing their job out of good will and our society is taking advantage of them because their value far outstrips what they are paid.
We’re several generations deep into a manufactured apathy meant to fragment and dilute any workers rights reforms
We stumbled into work from home due to the pandemic, but that genie will be put back in the bottle within 2 generations.
Robber barons never left, they just got smarter.
When I got sick Costco graciously moved me to a food prep and service position!
<_< That’s so great…
I was so annoyed in high school though, because I actually did have a biology teacher who was the opposite. That boogeyman anti-faith “evolutionist” strawman.
He openly polled the class and asked each student, row by row, if they were religious, and that they had to choose between “make believe” and science.
It pissed me off not so much because of what he did, but that he proved that there really were science teachers like that, and all the anti-science conservative families whose children took his class would be using that story as an example of the “evil anti-God agenda” of science educators.
I’m my state, substitutes don’t need to have their credential. You get some rough candidates as a result.