Education and Technology

1. I wonder if there are any articles out there about attorneys who are overpaid. My mediocre attorney charges $250 an hour. If she or her secretary writes us a letter, she charges us for 1/2 hour. If she calls to confirm something or ask a question, we are charged. We were in family court one morning for 3 hours, which we were charged for although she didn’t give us her undivided attention for those hours.. In that time, she was also juggling 2 other cases that were going before the judge, too. Man, I’d sure like to complain about the amount those attorneys gouge us for, but it doesn’t seem to be popular these days. Sure, pick on the teacher who makes $30 dollars an hour–and by my calculations it’s more like $15 an hour.

   Feb 4th, 2007

2. $30.00/hour? How is that figured?

   7 hours in front of a class; 1 hour meetings; 2 hours (minimum) grading, 1 hour making lesson plans. That’s 11 hours a day by my count, and it’s expected. It doesn’t include bus duty, lunchroom or hall duty, or extra hours on extracurricular activities. 55 hours a week, 36 weeks . . . that’s 1,980 hours. At $30/hour that would be $59,400, or at least $25,000 more than most teachers here in Texas make in a year.

   By the way, lawyers expect 2,000 billable hours, which is 50 weeks at 40 hours — twenty more hours than Texas teachers work.

   Now, add in 80 hours of continuing education, and we’re past an average work year.

   If teachers really were to get paid $30/hour, it would be closer to fair. And since teachers get all that work in 36 weeks, while it takes lawyers 40 weeks, shouldn’t we give out productivity awards to teachers, too?

   Now let’s add in hazard pay (I’ve had more death threats from kids in a year than I had in 10 years dealing with corrupt unions and corrupt employers); health equivalent and inconvenience pay (I regularly have blocks scheduled for six hours with no bathroom breaks — that would be illegal in any other profession); and aggravation pay for having to read crap like that in the Wall Street Journal, which should know better, and I’m due $100 bucks an hour at least.

   I’m concerned that the WSJ essentially advocates a socialist solution here — limiting teacher pay. Were they real free marketeers, they’d advocate raising teacher pay to improve the quality — you know, attract the best and brightest? Free market solutions are favored for everyone except those the WSJ wags hate — and God knows, they seem to hate teachers.

   Teaching is one of those public professions where the policy of the WSJ is “we’re gonna keep pay low until we attract the best people and quality improves!” File that in the “daily floggings will continue until morale gets better” file.

   By the way, I paid 5 times as much, and spent ten times as long, to get certified as a teacher as I spent to get my bar license. Not only are teachers paid less, they must pay more, than lawyers.

   Justice, anyone?

   Feb 7th, 2007

3. Question everything, especially authority.

   If one goes to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, one finds this first disclaimer on teacher pay:
   

   When compared with other occupations the hourly earnings for some occupations, such as teachers and airline pilots, seem higher than expected. Why is this?

   Answer: Hourly earnings are just one means of comparing the wages of different occupations. This method has the advantage of treating all occupations with a common denominator — a single hour. Unfortunately, this method may not work well for certain occupations with unusual hours. Teachers who often work only 9 or 10 months per year are an example of this problem. Another example is the airline pilot occupation. In addition to flight hours, which are highly regulated and carefully recorded, airline pilots also spend time preparing for flights. The preparation time may not be as closely monitored as flight hours. In occupations such as these, total work hours may have to be estimated. Because of these issues, comparisons of annual salaries published by the National Compensation Survey (NCS) might be more appropriate when considering certain occupations.

   Here: http://www.bls.gov/ncs/ocs/peoplebox.htm#Q01

   So far, I can’t find an hourly breakdown at BLS. I wonder what the WSJ was quoting?

   Feb 7th, 2007

4. It looks to me as if this fellow is comparing college professor pay and calling it “public teacher pay.” I can’t find a category that matches his numbers.

   Can someone else head over to the BLS site and find the stuff for me?

   Or, is this a WSJ hoax?

   Feb 7th, 2007

5. This table at the BLS shows teacher pay at just over $17/hour: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/realer.t02.htm

   I smell hoax of some sort.

   Feb 7th, 2007

6. Here’s the report cited by the Manhattan Institute. Please, go look at the teacher pay stuff, such as that on page 12: http://www.bls.gov/ncs/ocs/sp/ncbl0832.pdf

   Do you think the figures are accurate?

   Feb 7th, 2007

7. The WSJ piece was based on the Manhattan Institute report found here:
   http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_50.htm

   If you look at their summary you’ll see they attempt to justify their use of BLS data, their failure to compare annual earnings, and their discounting of hours/wk due to summers off.

   As hard as they try, they fail. The BLS data is clearly a lowball figure. Annual earnings are all that really matter. Any attempt to talk about hourly rates for teachers is a joke. When the joke is told by a right wing outfit, it really is not the least bit funny.

   Feb 9th, 2007

8. The figures are accurate, but they are not clearly identifying what is being compared. The more numerous jobs in the BLS White Collar classification are teachers and techs: radiology techs, LPNs, legal assistants… By using the term “white collar” without defining it, one might give the impression that teachers make much more than they actually do. Somewhere in there must be raw numbers in each category - but I didn’t search.

   Of course, that leaves out the unreported hours.

   It is important to realize that number crunching without analysis can be used to create misleading results. It is the low-tech reading skill that reveals their manipulation.

   Feb 11th, 2007

9. jd2718 writes: “It is important to realize that number crunching without analysis can be used to create misleading results. It is the low-tech reading skill that reveals their manipulation.”

   That is very true. One of my professors, interestingly enough in a Political Statistics class once said ‘You can take any set of numbers and massage it to get whatever results you want’.

   We just need to be vigilant in how we read and digest what is placed in front of us. What my blog post and the resulting comments show are that the people that care about this issue will see through the fluff and FUD to find the true numbers. But will the average person reading the article or the main stream TV or newspaper who won’t research the data that the numbers are based on? I don’t thik they will, which is why we need to properly educate the public about this misinformation.

   Feb 11th, 2007

10. This comment has been edited by the blog author for content

    Hello,
    I am a student in Florida, and I am writing an article for my school newspaper about the low-paid teachers, and how it affects students.

    I attend West Boca High School, and perhaps you’ve heard of my school. We had a teacher here by the name of (Name Removed by blog author). Before becoming a teacher she was a model. One parent found out about her past, and went to the media, outraged that she was allowed to teach at our school. Soon, her story was all over the internet and t.v.

    She was shunned because she had a few pictures, nothing harmfull. Most who had her class thought she was a good teacher. But the parents and the media drove her to the point where she couldnt take it. She quit the job….

    But while parents were wrapped up about a model, they fail to realize that a teacher has her face on the internet for truely harmful means. She has two DUI’s and an assault charge. Why can’t the parents complain about that.

    But the source of the problem isnt the parents. Its the low pay given to teachers. School Districts lose the oppertunity to grab the more qualified educators because of low pay. Why would a qualified person want to work in a job that consumes all your time, and reaps no true reward expect that moral reward of helping students?

    The public school systems are forced to choose underqualified teachers, and the students are suffering. This isnt an issue to be held lightly. They hold the power to make or break our lives. It is getting harder and harder to earn a good education, and the low salary is the reason.

    Maybe if Florida’s state government spent less on the FCAT (a stadardized tests given to students that decide how much money the school, and the teachers make) and spend more on slaries of teachers, we wouldn’t have this problem.

    Mar 2nd, 2007

11. What I found most disturbing about the coverage of this study in the local paper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, was the following.

    The table they showed had teachers listed as being paid more than lab techs, nurses, chemists, and a few others but more than Attorneys, Doctors, etc.

    The glaring omission is that all of the jobs making less than teachers require only an undergraduate degree while the jobs listed as being higher paid requried an advanced degree.

    As a public school teacher in Cleveland I am required to have an MEd after 6 years of teaching.

    In essence the chart showed that teachers were the LOWEST paid of any profession listed requiring an advanced degree.

    They conveniently missed that point.

    Chris

    Mar 4th, 2007

1. - Feb 4th, 2007
2. - Feb 7th, 2007
3. - Feb 8th, 2007

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