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Are Teachers Overpaid and Underworked?

Are teachers overpaid and underworked?

  • Yes, they are overpaid and underworked

    Votes: 10 15.2%
  • No, they are not overpaid and underworked

    Votes: 56 84.8%

  • Total voters
    66
Teachers work all week past closing hours for wages far short of what their students will make. I'm pretty sure you have the under and over mixed up bud
 
So your solution to having lousy public schools in poor areas is to pool al the money into centralized public education, thus ensuring that rich and poor alike receive lousy public education.

Your post is yet another brilliant example of nanny state "thinking."

Your analysis of the problem and your solution are the same thing. And your post doesn't address that those lousy public schools have the worst funding.
 
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End public schools and let the market allocate teacher salaries in a privatized educational system. That is the only way to ensure that teachers will neither be overpaid nor underpaid.

If education is privatized, teachers will be paid exactly what the market will bear.

No, if education is privatized, teachers will be grossly underpaid; the top executives of these private companies will be overpaid; the company owners will overcharge the state with abandon because their generous donations to the local political machine will allow them to do so; education will take a serious downturn and eventually cost more than ever; people like you will be scratching their heads wondering what went wrong with their utterly naive, neoconservative, pseudo-libertarian "bright ideas."

If you want to know what is wrong with our education system, start examining what the schools actually pay for desks and computers, etc., and then compare these prices to what such items go for at the local Staples. Then start asking yourself why textbooks should cost as much as they do.

You can privatize all you want, but until you figure a way to keep private industry from bilking the taxpayer to death via pay-to-play schemes with local, state, and federal government officials, you will only make matters worse---much worse.
 
It is clear to anybody without an ideological ax to grind that my solution to to problem of teacher pay relates directly to the topic.

If we are concerned whether teachers are underpaid or overpaid, there is only one solution. Let their pay be determined by the free market. The market efficiently distributes resources and in a free market nobody is overpaid or underpaid, the free market has the goldilocks effect. Everybody gets paid just right.

Once again: you haven't answered the two questions in the OP, and have instead chosen to answer a completely different question, one that was not asked. Anybody without an ideological axe to grind can see that pretty clearly.
 
Even if we assume that educators are unbiased toward educators, we're still left with the fact that not all teachers are math and science teachers.

And this tells us what, in you opinion?
 
The word teacher and overpaid doesn't even belong in the same sentence.

If anything, they don't get paid enough. Not to mention, they don't get much appreciation either -- sure there are teachers that suck at their job, but there's lacking people in every profession.

Also, underworked? Are you kidding me? You'd have to be living under a rock to be thinking that.
 
End public schools and let the market allocate teacher salaries in a privatized educational system. That is the only way to ensure that teachers will neither be overpaid nor underpaid.

If education is privatized, teachers will be paid exactly what the market will bear.

The issue with a fully private education system is that you will get the education you can afford. If you're very wealthy, your children will get a top-notch education that will enable him or her to be successful in life. If you're very poor, your children will get a substandard education that will hinder them from rising to their full potential. That is the very definition of an uneven playing field. While our current system is not perfect, it is more equal than a purely private system would be.
 
No, if education is privatized, teachers will be grossly underpaid; the top executives of these private companies will be overpaid; the company owners will overcharge the state with abandon because their generous donations to the local political machine will allow them to do so; education will take a serious downturn and eventually cost more than ever; people like you will be scratching their heads wondering what went wrong with their utterly naive, neoconservative, pseudo-libertarian "bright ideas."

If you want to know what is wrong with our education system, start examining what the schools actually pay for desks and computers, etc., and then compare these prices to what such items go for at the local Staples. Then start asking yourself why textbooks should cost as much as they do.

You can privatize all you want, but until you figure a way to keep private industry from bilking the taxpayer to death via pay-to-play schemes with local, state, and federal government officials, you will only make matters worse---much worse.

You know, I dont normally play this card, and it might not necessarily be true of you, but this notion that top excurives are "overpaid" simply by virtue of being top paid executives is bogus. In a free market, in a fully privatized industry like education would be ideally, people would get paid what the market will bear. Investors and employers pay employees for their value, not a penny more nor less. The market makes sure that people are not overpaid or underpaid.

If you think teachers deserve million dollar salaries and executives don't, that is sweet and childlike in its naïveté. But it is wrong. Teachers may be doing God's work, and executives might generally be d-bags, but they get paid what the market will bear.
 
Ooops! I clicked the wrong option. My wife is a teacher and she is very much overworked.
 
Um...wouldn't this depend on the area? There are really terrible teachers in Detroit who make six figures and there are awesome teachers who work in rural areas and buy school supplies for their students out of their own check even though they are barely getting by themselves.
 
You know, I dont normally play this card, and it might not necessarily be true of you, but this notion that top excurives are "overpaid" simply by virtue of being top paid executives is bogus. In a free market, in a fully privatized industry like education would be ideally, people would get paid what the market will bear. Investors and employers pay employees for their value, not a penny more nor less. The market makes sure that people are not overpaid or underpaid.

If you think teachers deserve million dollar salaries and executives don't, that is sweet and childlike in its naïveté. But it is wrong. Teachers may be doing God's work, and executives might generally be d-bags, but they get paid what the market will bear.

Guy, you seem to see the market as a purely rational and impartial mechanism, free from faults when let to run itself. With that in mind, what do you think the explanation is for the fact that CEO wages have increases by several magnitudes over the last few decades? What do you think led to that happening?
 
Overpaid - Generally yes, although it varies from one school district to the next. A telltale sign that people are being overpaid is if the school gets far more qualified applicants than it can actually hire. And in most schools, that is indeed the case.

Underworked - This is more of a moral judgment than an economic question...Personally I don't think teachers are "underworked," but their pay should reflect the fact that they do not work summers. As long as people are willing to accept a salary that fairly compensates them for the amount of work they do, it's no business of mine whether they work 20 hours a week, 40 hours, or 100 hours.

Respected and appreciated - I think most people respect and appreciate teachers. Although according to some of my teacher friends, there are some parents who think they know how to run the classroom better than the teacher does. But by and large, I think people have a positive view of teachers.

Just to make a point, most teachers (at least around here) don't get paid for the summer, or if they do its because they agree to paid less and still draw paychecks over the summer (making the same amount annually.)
 
Guy, you seem to see the market as a purely rational and impartial mechanism, free from faults when let to run itself. With that in mind, what do you think the explanation is for the fact that CEO wages have increases by several magnitudes over the last few decades? What do you think led to that happening?

Oh boy...this is gonna be one of those Rationalist meets Empiricist moments. I do truly enjoy those.
 
Teachers take care of you children while you are away at work. Have you ever tried taking care of and educating 5+ children at a time, how about 20+ children at a time? For the salary they make they are highly underrated and demonized for very stupid ****. Talk about the right wing finding a scapegoat for the real issues at hand.
 
Guy, you seem to see the market as a purely rational and impartial mechanism, free from faults when let to run itself. With that in mind, what do you think the explanation is for the fact that CEO wages have increases by several magnitudes over the last few decades? What do you think led to that happening?
Oh that is a great question! It is because our system is not a free market, rather it is a corrupt corporatis plutocracy. So what looks like a free market is really a wildly distorted and corrupt system that, from a libertarian perspective, is more like the Maria the a free market.
 
The issue with a fully private education system is that you will get the education you can afford. If you're very wealthy, your children will get a top-notch education that will enable him or her to be successful in life. If you're very poor, your children will get a substandard education that will hinder them from rising to their full potential. That is the very definition of an uneven playing field. While our current system is not perfect, it is more equal than a purely private system would be.
If everyone started getting a better education, that would be great, even if it was applied unevenly.
 
Oh that is simple. It is because our system is not a free market, rather it is a corrupt corporatis plutocracy. So what looks like a free market is really a wildly distorted and corrupt system that, from a libertarian perspective, is more like the Maria the a free market.

What specifically happened between 1970 and today to account for the ballooning CEO pay? In many respects the market is less regulated than it has been for a large part of the post-war era.
 
I'd say that that was more of a sign that one school district is in a more attractive location than another. Or that it is better run.

But these things are forms of compensation. What might be a too-high salary at a well-run, attractive school might be a perfectly reasonable salary at an inner-city failing school. Economics would suggest that at any given salary, the attractive school will get more qualified applicants per position than the unattractive school.

Or that there is a glut of qualified teachers available and looking for work. I'd say it is far from being an indicator that teachers are overpaid.

A glut of qualified teachers available *is* an indicator that salaries are too high. Because the supply exceeds the demand.
 
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If schools are routinely having difficulty finding qualified math and science teachers, then you're absolutely right. That's a sign that in fact they're being UNDERpaid. But in general teachers are overpaid, because there are more qualified teachers than teaching jobs.

That's just not true. If you read the abstract to the study I posted, you'll find that a) there are chronic staffing problems not just in math and science (although the problems are more marked in those fields) and b) that it has less to do with a shortage of teachers in any given field than it does with the conditions teachers work in. The clear implication is that those who are qualified to teach frequently chose not to do so, because there are other more lucrative and less troublesome fields they can go into. Conclusion: teachers are generally underpaid. Now, obviously that's not always the case, but it is the trend.
 
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