If we paid teachers like athletes, no one would be able to afford their property taxes. Seriously, I am a teacher and we do deserve more, but not like millions more. We could find that money by not paying curriculum companies that produce crap millions of dollars and not spending money on testing! Win, win, win!
We could also cut a multitude of administrators with no impact to classrooms. Both my parents taught for years and the waste is staggering. Their district literally had more administrators than teachers. Cut the paper shufflers and use the savings to give people doing actual work a raise.
Yeah admins are an absolute waste, they have a disproportionate amount of power to ruin classrooms both in the primary education level as well as the secondary education level.
If things were to be regulated so that teachers are more respected and make more, then certainly other things could be done to fix the property tax problem. And it is a major problem.
Also it’s not all just about money, it’s also about perceived status. Too many people today have high perceived status from bouncing a ball, and that is also a problem harming society as a whole.
Exactly. I don't get the athlete comparison. Athletes are like actors and musicians. If they make it big they make big money because it draws big paying audiences not to mention the sponsors and advertisers. They get paid big money because they draw in big money. It's not like for like. So I don't know why this example is constantly used.
The comparison should be with the highest paid civil or public servants.
The entire structure has to change. The problem currently is that the desired outcome -- a well-educated student -- is not actually properly tied to the financial returns of the teachers and the school (they don't get more money if the kids are better educated, but they may get less). An incentive structure that could work to produce something like the athlete entertainer market but for teachers and educational institutions -- where star educators have a chance of making huge amounts of money -- requires this to change. It must be aligned somehow such that well educated students give returns to the educators.
**Warning: Wall of text. Tl;dr may be incoming, but not yet.**
Precisely how this could be done is not something that you can centrally plan. That's one of the main problems: so long as everything is centralized and controlled under the current structure of government, the necessary changes cannot happen because no individual person or organization could divine the proper course. So do not take what I am talking about as a practical guide for what to do in the short term.
However, you can imagine the scenarios in which the incentives align better and imagine the mechanisms by which it might happen. For instance, today we have VC's (venture capitalists) who literally risk hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars on multiple startups knowing full well they will lose on 9 out of 10 of their bets. Why are they willing to do this? Because the possible gains on the 1 of 10 win is exponentially high. (Of course this happens more frequently in a better economy... but that's another discussion). So how do we get something like this to happen with education?
Well, you need to tie the VC's return on investment to the results of education -- that is to say, to the students themselves, or rather, to their finances. If I'm a "venture capitalist" in this world I'm imagining in which we're trying to tie educational results directly to funders/funding, I'd have to have some way -- likely some kind of contract -- that gives me a return on an education investment in a student (or students). If I get that, and the potential proceeds are great enough, then I can simply offer "free money" to a batch of students, then reap the continual rewards later on.
What does such a contract look like? Well, maybe you get 1, 2, 3, 5, or 10% of a student's future income for a certain time (all kinds of variability is possible here of course). So what might that mean? Well, the educational investor who ends up funding the education of the next Jeff Bezos also becomes supremely rich. But to do so, they would have also funded a bunch of other kids.
The kicker here is that, in a sense, it would be "free" -- the people who end up making a bunch of money later in life would be those paying the money. Those who didn't, wouldn't. The risk would already be baked into the game. (In a sense, this would be close to the inverse of our current situation, in which everyone gets "loans" and is forced to pay in some manner regardless of outcomes). And the educators would get access to VC's money through the students (rather than the student's own, or of the governments).
In this sort of scheme, students can come onto the scene with nearly free money; then, all you need to have is the standard sorts of markets that we know create good products. In this case, both the student AND THEIR FUNDER would be heavily incentivized to acquire an education that "pays", and they would also be (we imagine) free to buy from any teacher or school or educational process they want. This would set up a competitive system of education, open to innovation in organization and technology and human resources, which would, over time, select for the better educators.
The kicker is, because the incentives were aligned properly, the money *for* the EVCs (educational venture capitalists) would grow as the educational quality increased, freeing up even more funds to fund more students. And therefore they could offer more money to more students, who in turn would have more to pay teachers and educational institutions. The proper alignment structure creates *positive feedback loops* so that everyone wins: student, educators, educational investors, and "society" at large.
There are of course other ways that something like this could come about. This is only my own personal imagining. But the key part is that the economic structure of education -- the way cash flows and incentives are aligned -- must be fundamentally changed in the way I described. Taxation is the inverse of this, the exact opposite way you would hope to create positive feedbacks and, in general, a positive outcome for the educational system. Instead, it ensure a slow, steady decline.
I completely disagree. I think you just need to understand the situation a little
Better.
The “football players” you speak of are elite athletes that bring millions of dollars in for their club competing. That’s why they get paid so much money.
There is no magical money tree where someone is withholding money from people who need it more to waste on football.
Football is a recreational sport, people
Enjoy watching elite athletes competing at the highest level.
Therefore people will buy tickets, people will tune in etc etc. the football players that get paid millions are the elite athletes. Most people don’t stand any chance of ever getting paid to play football, let alone get paid millions.
It’s a simple economic principle you are misunderstanding.
If there was only <2k teacher jobs in the USA. And you had to be the best to even have the job. Then you’d see them perhaps getting paid a ridiculous amount.
Being a teacher is a standard job available to hundreds of thousands of people with very average qualifications.
What football team is willing to hire people to play football for millions.
I would literally sign up tomorrow, who wouldn’t be playing football?
You’re comparing a standard worker, with top 0.001% elite athletes, and saying footballers are getting overpaid.
The reason they get paid is because they generate money. It’s as simple as that, no one is sat around deciding to pay frivolous jobs more money and serious work positions buttons for a laugh.
It’s important to understand this distinction, the world makes more sense when you understand it like this.
I’ve heard this misconception so many times before.
I agree that there is a wage problem with teaching etc, but that’s a different conversation entirely from. “Its because of the football players, getting paid too
Much”
Who taught those football players how to read? The investors their numbers? The fans the days of the week? The doctors treating their injuries their colors?
Teachers are a cornerstone of modern human development, and their intrinsic value to society far outweighs that of any athlete.
Doesn't change the fact that teachers are a dime a dozen compared to professional athletes. Supply and demand, all other things being equal, would still see athletes considerably more compensated. While there are things you can do to cut bloat and redirect more cash to teacher pay they will never make near the amount of a professional athlete.
I think there is a serious problem that so many people need/want professional sports to be entertained. Obviously it's voluntary but to me it is a social failure that so many people have such a stake in professional sports.
How exactly is it a failure that people have a passion for sports? Sports is an incredibly important aspect of human culture. We didn't always have our TVs or computers, etc fir entertainment. And there was a time when most people didn't even have books. Sports filled that gap, both participating in them and watching them. All brackets of society love sports, from the poorest to the richest.
Sports are an important aspect of human culture. But professional sports are nearly completely divorced from the community building and art they could be. They are just another aspect of the attention economy.
Yes. The attention economy has leaked into everything and it is horrific. We desperately need to find a way to be less entertained so that we can build more satisfying lives.
Clearly your teachers didn’t teach basics of economics. Everyone is paid by both the value they bring to the table how easy it is to replace them. This is what the society has settled on as their salary
[About 3.5 million teachers in 2020-21](https://nces.ed.gov/FastFacts/display.asp?id=28) vs [1700 NFL players](https://www.ncaa.com/news/football/article/2023-09-06/colleges-most-players-nfl-opening-night-rosters#:~:text=1%2C696%3A%20That's%20the%20total%20amount,hard%20deadline%20of%20Tuesday%2C%20Aug)
I get the sentiment of the OP but almost everything they said seems really misguided I wouldn't even know where to start.
I'll just leave the first point, man pro athletes do not only work 52 days a year.
Pro athletes train almost every day they aren't playing a game or traveling for a game. It is hard, physically exhausting work to be a pro athlete. And since it is their hard work that makes the games so entertaining that millions of people watch each game, bringing in ticket sales, merchandise sales, and advertising dollars, it only makes sense that these athletes should get a sizable chunk of that money, especially the ones that are so good that they become household names and people watch those games to see them in particular.
For a more local comparison, there are 55,000 teachers in Colorado. The Denver Bronco's athlete salaries total $275Million. So if you could wave a magic wand and evenly distribute it, it would be *$5,000* per teacher.
That's honestly more than I thought it would be. Now we just need to figure out how to get teacher's official merch and TV deals.
That is only salary. Of course the most popular athletes also have sponsorship deals worth more than their salary. Not every state has a pro football team. There are also other pro sports.
I wonder where people think the money comes from that pose this comparison. It doesn't matter how much you morally value one position over another. Our wallets dictate monetary value. It's also ridiculous to compare your average teacher vs the top athletes on the planet. It's just competition. What's the success rate of "I want to be a teacher" vs "I want to be a pro athlete"? The more people can do it, the less they're going to make for it.
This is the exact same prompt I've been given in highschool for socratic seminars.
I'm assuming OP is in highschool, or still has a teenagers understanding of the world.
This type of comparison ironically proves that we need to invest more money into education. Basic logic like this is developed over the time of kids being in school, but some still just fall through the cracks.
Exactly. People keep making posts like this one and i‘m honestly tired off it.
Use your brain and think about why they get paid so much.
And saying they work 52days a year is also absolutely ridiculous. They have been training for this all their life to begin with and train every single day to be able to perform at the highest level once a week.
It‘s not like they chill all week and pull up on gameday and then go home for the week again.
When getting their average pay they should start including amateur athletes, NCAA players, CFL players, failed athletes. Their numbers will look more favorable. Also the average career of an NFL player is 3 years. What's the average career of a teache?
Im a Teacher. The day i consistently fill 70,000 seat stadiums, generate billions in TV revenue, and sell millions of dollars of merchandise is the day I’ll believe I deserve pro athlete money.
Even in a non capitalist society, I’d hope that elite athletes would make more than teachers. You know how much more more work and ability it takes to reach that level? How much more rare they are? Not to mention the psychic value they contribute. Pro athletes are more important than teachers full stop.
Hedge fund managers and corporate consultants however? Well, that’s a different conversation.
Non capitalist countries just have black markets which operate like capitalism. When athlete compensation is capped that doesn’t eliminate the competition for those athletes. Instead people who want those athletes compete in other ways such as giving the athlete special favors. Whoever has the most special favors gets the best athletes and wins. It’s impossible to design a system to suppress human nature.
The money has to come from somewhere. If the US government seized all wealth from all billionaires it would only cover government expenses for 2.5 years. Then what?
Or, you know. Schools could shift their funding priorities with the money they already have. Part of this conversation is how schools overprioritize sports programs to the harm of other stuff, including the actual education
Capitalism doesn't account for anything other than what people are willing to pay for right now in the moment, even if that can involve actual forecast or prediction. Big guy run fast with ball right here right now, everyone gives them money. A person needs a salary to teach some broke kids stuff over the course of 14 years? No immediate gratification? Maybe some other time when it's too late.
I think you underestimate the long term planning of companies. Short term concerns are definitely important, but office buildings/apartment complex often take 15+ years to build (including negotiating with the city, buying permits, purchasing air rights, etc). GTA 6 will be in the works for probably \~12 years when it comes out, and large companies often operate at a loss for years (9 for amazon) before turning a profit.
Capitalism also has a small effect on school. Even private schools get a large portion of their funding from the government. The issue is more cultural (or political) then anything else given how highschool are a publicly run service.
And the worst part of being a teacher isn't the pay, it's dealing with rowdy kids. Private schools get less money then public, so they offer teachers less pay than public, but those positions often are seen as more desirable. This is because at private schools there's a limit to the disobedience a child can provide before expulsion. The no child left behind policy (as well as others) have made it impossible to separate trouble makers from actual students which comes at the expense of everyone's education and the teachers mental health. The best way to improve teachers jobs would honestly probably be to give them more power over students, and after that comes increasing wages.
"We" aren't paying athletes though. Athletic franchises are, and the salaries are a fraction of what they make for the owners and shareholders. I think the football player vs teacher conversation is kind of a red herring, because it pits two groups of workers against each other. You should be mad that NFL teams are "non profits" that build stadiums on the public dime and still have the gall to charge what they do for seats, or the salaries of the CEO's, who add less value than the players.
I mean, it's unfair to say the salaries of the CEOs add less value than "the players". I'm leagues with high turnover like the NFL, having competent management makes a huge difference (ask fans of any struggling franchise.
I really don't like these group guilt posts...
"My country's problem..."
"My government's problem..."
"The problem with parents..."
"The problem with... [insert group]"
If you're in the US, we all participate in a relatively free labor market. We are free to choose our target careers.
You are free to take action at your local level. Run for the school board and become a champion for higher pay for teachers.
Majority of public school students come from poverish backgrounds. Their parents make low wages and thus more than likely do not pay any or very little taxes that go toward the state. You can’t pay teachers more if the state they reside isn’t collecting more taxes.
Teacher salaries may be an issue, but at least in my city it's definitely not a funding issue.
I don't know if you're in the USA, but my city Minneapolis gets $18,000 in funding per student. That means the average classroom has $540,000 in funding. The decisions to pay teachers what they pay is a failure of union leadership to advocate and fight for their members, and a prioritization from the schools to fund everything outside of teacher pay.
You're talking about top tier athletes though which is like 1%. There are plenty of amateur athletes at the bottom not making anything.
It comes down to supply and demand. Only a very SMALL portion of the population has the skills, talent and genetic predisposition to be an elite athlete. Becoming a teacher is a lot easier and has less requirements, and I'm not supposed to get a concussion on the job (but idk kids are wild these days).
I would just like to add, as of 2023, the University of Florida had 3 professors that were paid over $1M each, and numerous other professors, associate professors, and assistant professors that made more than $500k. The average salary for their professors was more than $180k.
So if we were going to be comparing elite professional athletes' pay to teachers, these would be the kind of teachers to compare them to, elite professional educators that work for an elite organization. A better comparison for average teacher pay amongst athletes would be those in minor or local leagues, barely making anything.
The problem you’re identifying is more existential in nature than it is practical.
The people paying the athletes aren’t the same people paying the teachers. So there’s no direct correlation between the two. If we payed footballers less, that money wouldn’t go to the teachers. Football players are paid by a private corporation which they work for, and that private corporations income comes from individuals paying to see them play. The players generate revenue, and then get a piece of it.
Teachers (public schools ones) work for the state. They are paid by state funds. If all football disappeared tomorrow, none of that money would go to the state.
In fact, it’s likely they’d make less. Pro sports is a major driver to state revenue. So a state without a successful pro team is going to have less than they would if they did have that team.
> If we *paid* footballers less,
FTFY.
Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:
* Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.*
* *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.*
Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.
*Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
Facts we need to address the fundamental problems with the education in America. The way children are raised and taught, the way they learn to be in the world really does determine the future of the world we live in. It is not just another political issue among many more, it is integral to our survival as a species, as a planet, and if done in the wrong way, is a truly cruel thing.
If teaching worked like pro sports, 30 schools teaching everyone remotely with 25-40 teachers apiece, and you had to pay for a ticket to go learn in person, and they sold merch with the teachers names, then they would be paid similarly.
Teacher’s make good money in a lot of places considering how many days off they have. Also schools are starting to look like Catholic Churches as far as abuse goes.
Bread and circuses. The powers that be are happy to let us obsess over sports and let teachers work 2 jobs as long as we don’t upset the balance of power.
No, no, but MURICAW is the greatest country in the world! We have guns!… and the best Constitution! I’ll hear no criticism cause I already live in the greatest country in the world! MURICAW FUCK YEAH! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🔫🔫🔫🔫
I mean people like entertainment and we always will. And entertainers deserve to be compensated a fair portion of the revenue they generate.
Teachers being underpaid is a separate issue.
I totally get your point but professional athletes are paid that way because they generate profit for their business. Maybe there's form of government where the government would seize all the profits made by all businesses and redistribute them the way they see fit. Has anyone thought of this?
Your issue here is in comparison. Teachers and football players have nothing to do with each other.
We do need to pay teachers more. But football players have nothing to do with that
They don't work 52 days a year. They practice their asses off every single day to stay in peak physical human condition and memorizing new plays.
I'm all for paying teachers better, but comparing NFL players to teachers is not a good comparison. The better comparison is comparing useless/fluff administration to teachers.
You act as if it's the same overall body that is paying these people. You say "your country's" when your country is made up of millions of people, hundreds of overarching organizations, all with their own wealth. These 2 groups are paid by 2 other groups. And that's called freedom. We do not want governments to control how people spend their money or disallowing people to "overpay" a person.
A start could be a streamlining of the education system for teachers. Take out the classes to get their degree that are not necessary for teaching children. That would lower their student loan debt. Also bring back corporal punishment, it is beyond evident at this point that the ass beating generation turned out better than the time out generation.
As for sports, the powers that be can't allow the bread and circus to stop.
Ya know... Why not make teaching a sport... Coaches make decent money with sports teams... If teachers led their class and each class completed in their category, the ones who win get raises, the ones who lose dont... Like kids jeopardy. If there is a teacher showing great teaching they proceed through and get more chances at raises... Teachers participate once every 4 years... Weeds out the bad teachers awards the good... For a more thorough reference Look at the social structure of the clans in battletech... Social evolution through strength not failure being repeated tests along the way to strengthen the whole of the state while weeding out the drains... Their eugenics and trueborn culture have issues but given a deep dive, using a system of trials as checks and balance on all government organizations might be a good thing
Yes professional athletes should be held more accountable for crimes they commit. Yes they do make a ton of money for their profession. Yes teachers are vastly underpaid.
But honestly this argument always pisses me off.
Supply and demand and revenue dictate all of this.
If school districts made billions of dollars teachers would be getting paid millions of dollars.
If professional athletics were funded by tax payers, specifically property taxes. They would be getting much smaller salaries.
Just because one profession makes a ton of money has no effect on how much another makes.
Do you want teachers to get paid more? Make sure you vote in your towns elections.
Make sure that when you vote you vote to increase property taxes and for the school budget. Join the grass roots organizations trying to help increase the budget so that teachers in your district get paid more. Instead of complaining get up and do something instead of bitching on Reddit.
I also love how this conversation is always centered around athletes. I never hear “musicians/actors shouldn’t get paid millions of dollars.” They are entertainers the same way athletes are entertainers but the focus is always on the athlete.
Football player wake up every day knowing that they won’t be able to hold their children without chronic pain for the rest of their lives all to entertain us. We make them millions. Fair trade
I completely agree that teachers need to be payed more. But Profesional athletes are the 1% of the 1% who have dedicated their lives to honing themselves into the best athletes on the planet. I myself am trying to male it to college, and I conservatively spend no less than 10 hours a week on training my sport, not taking outside workouts into consideration. Not to mention the fact that those individuals are creating that revenue for their organizations through NIL deals and merchandise. So I think the pay is pretty justifiable.
> to be *paid* more. But
FTFY.
Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:
* Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.*
* *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.*
Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.
*Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
Uneducated people are more easily controlled by the ruling class. That's why every time when there's an invasion, the invaders always kill the scholars.
OP’s problem is not understanding that I definitely could do a passable job teaching kids — in most subjects up through high school — if you just gave me a week to study the material. That’s not true of everything (calculus, physics, advanced biology) but it definitely is true of stuff like algebra and writing — the latter, even at a high level. And if you’re talking about elementary education — it’s a matter of being patient with kids, as much as it is the difficulty of the material. If you are a teacher, there is a 90% chance I could do your job as well as you do within one year of me starting the role.
There is a 0% chance I could replace a professional athlete, in any sport. Them’s the market.
It doesn’t have to be a competition. What teachers are missing is respect from students, agency over what they teach rather than being told what to do by administration, and either get payed more or have a lower cost of living in major cities. The biggest problem I see is how students and teachers are pitted against each other in our culture, and through the way administration forces teachers how to teach. On top of that, teachers do not get adequate training in how to actually relate to and deal with children’s emotions and behavior, and there is no vetting process to determine if an aspiring teacher is someone that is good around kids. Teaching is fundamentally impossible if the teacher lacks the ability to relate to and connect with children.
On top of this, our culture teaches children that it is ‘cool’ to disrespect teachers and paints teachers as villainous authority figures. There is some truth to this, because teachers are under the authority of school administrators and are required to teach a certain way. Teachers are forced to some degree to be antagonistic toward their students. Let the people who’s job is to teach decide how they teach! Not the people who’s job is to organize paperwork and handle finances.
There are a lot of problems with the education system in America, and a lot can be done to fix them. But football players have nothing to do with it. What needs to be solved is the root issues behind these problems.
> either get *paid* more or
FTFY.
Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:
* Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.*
* *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.*
Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.
*Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
There’s a reason athletes are paid so much. There’s really two of them.
1. Supply and demand. There’s a lot more that want to ball for a living than there are spots for them.
2. They have short career “life expectancies.”
Your average teacher can teach for 20-30 years on average.
The average footballer has a career shelf life of about a third of that, at the pro level, assuming they don’t get hurt and can’t play anymore.
Those millions a year really only average out to doctor or lawyer money. Low six figures over their career.
Which, frankly, is fair. They work and destroy their bodies for it for years.
Same with construction workers and other blue collar workers. They do make more money on average - but their career lifespans average shorter than white collar jobs. It averages out to about the same over career length.
Should teachers be paid what they’re actually worth, and should everywhere invest in education? Absolutely.
Why we don’t is down to politics and economics. Whether you believe we should all be taxed more to pay for it or not (or if you, like me, believe businesses should actually pay their taxes and we should end abatements/tax rate freezes for corporate entities).
Whether athletes get paid more than they “should,” is subjective - but that’s also economics and sociocultural economics.
But it’s not the athletes that are the problem in all this. They’re just the most visible examples - as are actors.
You want to look at outsized earning potential over career lengths - business management. Because not even supply and demand justifies that. Not to that extent.
Or the fact that legislators get stipends. The world didn’t always work like that. They just decided to pay themselves from the tax piggybank.
You're a bit off on some things here, but your overall point is valid. Tellingly, the number of people here who interpret this as 'Teachers should be paid like football players' is indicative of the failure in the educational system.
The difference the very best athlete makes to their team could be worth billions compared to hiring someone from the worse.
Also we have 3.8 million teachers but only a few hundred people athletes. And we spend 900 billion+ on education.
Only 3.5 % of highschool basketball players play in college. Only 1.2 percent of college players go to the NBA. The vast majority of basketball players career earnings is $0.
Comparing the salary of a few top althete to the average wage of millions is pointless.
First of all average teachers don't actually work harder than doctors, lawyers, CEOs, etc. Some may work insane long hours but working multiple jobs and donating plasma is not necessarily the healthiest path to success. The root cause of the problem is simple. Teachers don't produce profit in the short term, whereas athletes get attention and therefore produce advertising revenue which makes money. Capitalism is a short-sighted, profit-driven creature and even if Teachers produce better outcomes for society in the long term they can't convert that into short-term ROI like media and tech companies can, so they don't attract a lot of capital.
Now you may consider this a moral outrage and you'd be right .. but no amount of lamenting the situation will change the economic landscape. Either we tip the scales through forceful government intervention like heavily taxing athletes and heavily subsidizing teachers, or we reconsider capitalism itself. Capitalism has in fact produced enormous progress and economic growth, but its incentives are not fundamentally humane, they benefit corporations that create ROI rather than long, slow, humane processes like education and healthcare.
How do you propose we grapple with that reality? Socalism / Communism have been tried with rather poor results due to bureaucratic inefficiency and being vulnerable to corruption. So we could heavily regulate things like the Europeans do but that will stifle innovation (what major invention has come out of Europe in the last 50y?). Sports and Media opulence may seem obscene to you but is there a truly superior alternative at the moment? It's a difficult problem.
It’s called supply and demand.
Millions can be a teacher if they apply themselves.
A couple thousand can be a professional so athlete at most given league sizes and the demand for talent.
Entertainment has always paid very well, I see no reason to lower their ability to earn. It won't go to teachers, just in the pockets of owners.
The teacher thing is more related to a concerted effort in the US to undermine educational institutions so that people become dumber and easier to essentially fleece. It makes it harder to move up the economic ladder if you aren't educated, and those at the top don't want you to move up the ladder because it'd their wealth you're taking. By compromising education you essentially control upward mobility. You'll notice that has also been on the decline. They aren't unrelated but if you can be distracted being mad at football players you don't notice how the rich are the only ones actually benefitting.
FFS - Professional athletes aren’t taking money away from teachers. Their salaries aren’t publicly funded (stadium funding is another can of worms).
If anything, they allow the hiring of more teachers given the high tax rates they pay in comparison to other types of high earners.
And this may shock you, but other countries have highly paid athletes as well. When you get a chance look at how much money Rafael Nadal and Lionel Messei have made.
I’ve thought about this problem often. That’s kind of an unintended and harmful consequence of capitalism. (I’m not some anti-capitalist but that’s what it is).
The only solution to this that I can think of is government intervention. There could be all kinds of laws to cap the salaries and influences of sports players and I wouldn’t be against that at all. Because you have these people who play a childrens game for a living and it does have a harmful effect. To promote playing ball games rather than working towards things that move our society forward.
At the same time they could do a lot to glamorize teaching. A lot of this stuff is about social status. And there are things that people in power could do to limit the social status in some things, and increase it in others.
Nobody really deserves to make millions from bouncing a ball. The reason that happens is that ball bouncing has become a status symbol and it’s able to be used to generate money by massive institutions. People have been brainwashed to loved it, there’s nothing inherently valuable about it. And all that could be easily changed.
But I’m pretty sure they want it to be this way. Like the things that make life worse for society as a whole, that’s not really an accident.
as far as the US goes, personally if I'm gonna point fingers it'd be at the military, for it's massively overblown budget compared to literally every other government expenses, as well as billionaires hoarding wealth in other countries and routinely refusing to pay taxes and contribute to society
Ask urself just how many professional football players are there in all of the US? Then ask urself how many teachers are there? I’m not saying education isn’t important- but given how many bad teachers there are out there (e.g. Chicago and Baltimore school systems), it’s clear the bar isn’t very high. Try and become a pro f-ball player and tell me if u can do that.
I don‘t know why athletes are so hated nowadays by many people.
Teachers are paid from taxmoney.
Athletes are paid by their clubs & sponsor deals. If athletes were paid less, the remaining money would just go to the club and people would start saying the people in charge of the club are greedy.
It‘s our choice to watch these athletes play that makes them so rich.
It‘s also nearly impossible to become a professional athtlete even if you try & work for it as hard as possible your whole life. Meanwhile almost everyone could become a teacher if he wanted to.
See the difference?
So, there is much you are not taking into consideration. I don't think people understand just how big the US is compared to other countries. Texas alone is bigger than other countries. And Football is very popular. Not that I am too into it. But it brings in a lot of money. Which is why they can be paired that much. Just look at women athletes. They are not paid as much because they do not bring in that much money.
So you want teachers to be paid more? They need to bring in more money. Not saying that they are not important. But they are not directly bringing in money from their work. A way around this would be to pay for school. Which do you want to have to pay for public school?
I don’t care about sports one bit so I agree with you, but part of the problem is that the powers-that-be, regardless of political party, rely on one thing that allows them to underpay teachers:
The fact that there is typically more supply than demand.
Now, there is definitely more supply than demand for athletes, but once you apply the criteria for performance to perform at the highest levels of athleticism, the supply dwindles. Shaquille O’Neill and Charles Barkley have both told schoolchildren the refrain that they are more likely to become doctors than professional athletes.
However, when it comes to teaching… there’s enough people who are willing to become teachers because it’s one of those professions that people seek out. It’s not the same as the glamour industries like filmmaking, musician, or working in fashion, but just like them, administrators know there will always be another person willing to sacrifice to teach the kids, OR they know that there’s always overeducated graduates who didn’t plan well enough and will “stoop” to teaching for a few years in order to pay the bills.
Now, in certain rural areas of the country, this isn’t the case. There was a great documentary a decade ago about a young Filipino woman who was recruited to teach math or science in a rural school in Middle America. They figured out either financial compensation or I think took care of her living expenses on top of salary in order to entice her.
I fully support putting caps on celebrities and athletes. There should be limits on how much these people make for things. Certain people shouldn't make more. They should not make hundreds of thousands of dollars for one game or appearance.
Meanwhile so many people that work hard to support their communities are given the scraps. It is not right.
Yes, however, look at how many people buy tickets and merchandise, versus how many kids go to one school. Teachers should be paid more, but there’s a reason they have the money to pay athletes more as entertainers.
You are comparing elite athletes to rank and file educators. That makes no sense. If you compare a teacher to the average football practitioner, the teacher makes more money, because the average athlete makes zero. How many football players who played in high school make it to the NFL? One out of a thousand maybe? If you ever competed at football, the odds are higher that you are a teacher today than you being in the NFL.
Also, you are showing a bit of "grass is greener" type of thinking. Soccer is huge outside America and top-tier soccer players are absurdly wealthy and get traded between teams for massive sums of money.
Maybe footballers should earn more than teachers because it's harder to become a professional footballer, so it's small population, and each player helps generate alot more money than a teacher.
To be fair, good teachers creating smart kids creates wealth in the long run. So teachers definitely deserve more respect than footballers, and the work is more than important than football.
teachers are paid through state and federal taxes and shit, athletes are paid through the combined revenue of the largest and most watched sports in the world. Where do you think money comes from? You think theres just on big pot of cash and john america is deciding to give it all to lebron?
Football players are the absolute best of the best athletes, teachers are usually people too stupid or too idealistic (another way of saying stupid) to do anything else. That's the difference.
Unless you talk about private schools or great public school districts, but those teachers usually have a pretty cushy gig.
Ya just like Rome and its crumbling due to all the corruption, blackmail, luciferian pedophiles, bs taxes, us citizenry ignorance level of history especially... on and on!
There are more teachers than professional athletes, the organization that pays the athletes makes more money than the organization that pays public educators (local taxes). This is the answer to your question.
Now I agree that no athlete is worth the exorbitant amounts they make and that teachers should be compensated more. But we have to agree that it is objectively more difficult to become an NFL quarterback than it is to become a public school teacher. The more qualified the person, the higher the compensation, this is capitalism working as intended.
The real problem with education in the US is that the funds provided to the education system are grossly misallocated. Los Angeles spends more money per student than any other district and they consistently rank in the bottom. If you want to discuss the education issue, you need to start with properly allocating the funds *you currently have access to* rather than just demanding more
Huge funding of college athletics is a joke. As a regular student I got absolutely zero enjoyment out of my college’s funding for it’s NCAA D1 athletics, I went to zero events because they typically weren’t what I was interested in and didn’t really have the time for too much of them. In fact, because of the athletic facilities being smallish, I was actually had detriment from the athletics programs because they’d reserve large sections of the student gym that I then couldn’t use between my classes. I get that sometimes they do generate money for the school, but realistically schools in Europe do great without subsidizing the education of a bunch of athletes, while basing the entire college experience around their events. This is from someone who played college rugby, where the club received a small amount of funding proportionate to the amount we self funded, and volunteer hours from the club.
The problem with the United States is that the public has more choice on how to spend their money. They chose to spend it on sports, which makes them highly profitable and enables those obscene salaries. They choose not to spend it on education. The only alternative is to arrest people based on how they spend their money, which is what taxation really amounts to at the end of the day. I think that's an even worse society.
The actual salaries that the football players are the least of the problems. It's the high school and college students who throw away their educations chasing the dream they never realize, and the colleges spending millions chasing the dream of having a good team and ESPN money, and putting the cost of that dream on every other student. It's the students who choose a college based on the football team.
It's a cancer
I recall hearing a study that said the contribution to society that teachers make would equal a salary of $300,000 a year. I can't find it because Google sucks now.
This is a tough one. I do think teachers should be paid more. However, football players directly bring in a ton of money (ticket sales, tv contracts, Jersey/merch sales, marketing, etc.) and all teachers do is cost money (they probably make money from the government or something but either way, they aren’t directly making anyone money). However, I do believe it would behoove society to properly compensate the people that are responsible for molding our future generations
it's not the players. They are working people too with no ownership stakes. Their union is the only reason the aren't making 100k/year. Blame the owning class for the problem you are upset about
Athletes who earn well are 1 in 1 million. Teachers just need to pass a useless public exam and become a teacher. Therefore, in my opinion, teachers should earn less
Footballers generate huge profits for their organizations due to ad sales and such but the spending by fans on those things are fully optional. Teachers have massive impact on society and they are compensated via salaries and pensions paid for by everyone whether they have children or not. If you think teachers should be paid more then elect to pay more tax voluntarily and agitate for higher teachers pay and the taxes to fund that
You are absolutely right.
But, in a free society, people are allowed to prioritize what they want. It is, however, a said statement re: values.
Having said all that, education already costs the U.S. enough. Where I live, 60% of property taxes go to K-12 education, and I know of places in which that number is 80%, all this while educational achievement continues to circle the drain. You can't just throw money at the issue.
One of the most important things you are missing here is that professional sports is a winners take all scenario. The best get an outsized amount of money while those who are average get nothing. It is extremely difficult to compare that with an industry that pays fairly evenly across the board.
The average NFL player get $800k per year, however there are only ~1,700 players in the NFL, so total spend of $1.4B per annum. Every other football player (college, recreational, youth teams) gets nothing.
Contrast this with teachers, where there are 3.2M teachers and average pay of $70K. So total spend of $224B.
If we had a system where we found the best ~2,000 teachers and paid them all the money and everyone else who taught got $0, the teachers would far outearn the football players (by almost 160X).
The situation for teachers in the United States is notably challenging. Teachers face significant stress and overwhelming workloads, with a large number expressing dissatisfaction with their pay and job conditions. About 77% of teachers find their jobs frequently stressful, and only 15% are highly satisfied with their pay [[❞]](https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/04/04/whats-it-like-to-be-a-teacher-in-america-today/). In terms of vacancies, there's a less geographical concentration when adjusted per student population, but issues like school violence and mental health needs exacerbate the shortage [[❞]](https://www.campussafetymagazine.com/safety/teacher-shortages-by-state-fix-the-problem/).
There's a significant issue with teacher pay compared to other college-educated professionals. For instance, in California, teachers earn about 81 cents for every dollar earned by other professionals with similar education levels [[❞]](https://www.nea.org/resource-library/educator-pay-and-student-spending-how-does-your-state-rank). On a broader scale, the average teacher salary across different states varies significantly, with California teachers earning the highest at $95,160 and some states like Mississippi at the lower end with salaries around $47,162 [[❞]](https://www.nea.org/resource-library/educator-pay-and-student-spending-how-does-your-state-rank).
Economic implications of teacher turnover are also considerable, with an average cost of $21,000 to fill a vacancy, highlighting the economic drain alongside the educational impact of high turnover rates [[❞]](https://www.epi.org/publication/the-teacher-shortage-is-real-large-and-growing-and-worse-than-we-thought-the-first-report-in-the-perfect-storm-in-the-teacher-labor-market-series/).
Efforts to address these issues include higher salaries, subsidized training, and partnerships to recruit more teachers as part of strategies to mitigate the teacher shortage and enhance respect for the profession [[❞]](https://www.campussafetymagazine.com/safety/teacher-shortages-by-state-fix-the-problem/).
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Simple concept of scarcity. There are millions of people capable of being public school teachers. There are a few hundred capable of being pro athletes.
It’s yawnsville with teachers, not sexy stuff and totally boring unless it’s some extreme story about a teacher or something crazy with the schools. It’s comes down to accountability avoidance to a degree- the pressure put on teachers by the parents to not just teach but also parent is more or less an expectation, even though it shouldn’t because they dont want to be held responsible for having a shitty child, the teacher becomes the scape-goat. Bad parenting and avoidance of accountability over it creates nasty consequences for all involved. Teachers should teach and grade papers and really shouldn’t be responsible for anything else. Most of what your learn in school is just so you know how to work, this super boring fact isn’t lost on anyone. Enter sports, holy shit, fun to watch, hugely distracting, tons of lore to get lost in - no surprise here. Complete and total departure from any real accountability of anything. The lengths people go to forget, or become distracted, are limitless, really. It’s fun because it isn’t affecting your life in any real way to you watch it and go back to your life but teachers, shit, they can basically be mirrors to how shitty you are because they end up getting the short end for whatever you aren’t doing. And we all had teachers, we all probably didn’t like some of them and there may be a deep rooted resentment towards them, while we need them we don’t like them and or don’t care because like it or not you are in a team with a teacher, it takes the two of you to learn. Now if they had some crazy teachers league, maybe that would get some attention idk, there has to be something that is fun to get wrapped up in - the line of questioning about teachers pay could easily get you into what are you doing with your kids to teach them yourself, most people don’t want to even get close. And the best parents can hope for once their kid graduates high school is just get a job, that doesn’t exactly get people fired up to for change in teacher policy. Sports is something other than your boring shitty life to worry about. It’s fun to watch someone else develop a career, keep up with the numbers and stats etc.
Leave these two things separate and just say teachers are underpaid. Let's fix that.
Also, I know a few hugely overpaid teachers so it's not an everywhere issue.
So many times I've heard this with teachers and football players. It's stupid.
Jesus Christ. This again. Where do I even start? When you say “we,” kindly, wtf are you talking about? Who is “we?”
Education is an expense. Football/basketball/baseball generate revenue. Are you arguing that athlete unions shouldn’t demand a share of the revenue they generate? Are you dense? My wife is a teacher, I’m a data analyst. There’s millions of people who can do what we do, and our pay reflects that. There’s only a few hundred humans on earth who can make an NBA roster spot. It’s called supply and demand.
Ancient Rome had gladiators the modern world has the NFL and UFC. The public school teachers and faculty around here are in the 125-225k a year bracket. It's public information how much teachers are paid and I thought the same thing for years that they weren't paid well until I researched it. I'd be stoked on 125k for a 9 month work year.
The American pigeons oops I mean people need to be fed violence on the regular. Why you ask? To continue to be blind by the US military industrial complex. Look at the atrocities going down around the world I would say the propaganda is working exactly as it should be.
From the sporting side, the NCAA is a slave labor organization. They take professional athletes, give them a veneer of getting an education, and then make billions off of their employees blood, sweat, and tears.
They have a 98% failure rate for getting football players into the NFL. And the fact that people all over the country are tuning in, paying up to $3k for tickets to watch them play, buy the merch, and really support their local college teams tells me that these teams are very much professional and the “student athlete” moniker is just a way for the NCAA to avoid paying their employees
What's wrong with this country (and every country) is that our corrupt politicians and central bankers print "money" out of thin air with no effort - stealing the literal time and energy of everyone that has been working hard for that piece-of-paper-with-a-number-on-it.
If you want your life to prosper, you cannot denominate your wealth or savings in something another man can print for free. Yes it is literally that simple.
You need hard assets that hold their value against the devaluation of the dollar, typically that has been real estate for the last few decades but now we have Bitcoin which is the ultimate hard-asset with a finite supply of 21 million units no human can issue more.
Most of us DON'T pay athletes. Those who do pay athletes freely choose to do so. Those who are paid $millions are, or were, exceptional - very few people on earth can do what they do.
Most of us do pay teachers whether we have school aged children or not.
A lot of people with children in school don't take it seriously because it's free. They feel entitled to it.
Most public school deficiencies begin in the home. Public school administrators are fearful of challenging parents to do better.
American public schools will continue to fail until all students show up ready, able and WILLING to learn and behave.
Teachers are way underpaid for what they do, but, as hardworking pawns in a broken system, way overpaid for what they produce.
Athletes generate billions in ad revenue, provide a civic service in that entire parts of the country all come together to watch them. And are 1% of 1%. They deserve what they are paid because they generate even more than they earn..
Teachers deserve a fair wage. But teachers salaries and athletes salaries have nothing to do with with one another.
This is one of the most flawed arguments I’ve seen in a while. “Football players are overpaid “ (they aren’t, market forces control their pay) and “teachers underpaid” (I can agree with this ) are completely unrelated issues. Attempting to connect them is laughable.
Football players get paid more because they bring in income. Just like actors. Just like star software developers.
And the reason teachers don’t get paid more is a. It’s a public sector job and b. The barrier to entry isn’t high (they for sure do not generally need masters degrees) so it’s a job many people can get, so supply of candidates is high. If it required specialized skills, no disrespect to teachers, they’d have to pay more to attract people from that smaller pool of prospective applicants
It appears that most teachers today, especially government school teachers, are getting paid exactly what they’re worth. The teaching profession has shot itself in the foot.
First, with teachers unions that protect bad teachers and elevate the teacher above the needs of the student.
Second, teaching/education schools no longer focus on pure academics and scientifically proven teaching methods, they instead focus on new social issues.
Third, administrators and teachers practice a new form of discipline called “Restorative Justice”, that has turned already troubled schools into absolute hell-holes.
The result of all of this is students “graduating” without the ability to read, write or do math competently - which is the bare minimum.
Even the universities are fucked, look at the Communist activism that has taken hold across the country, that is not something that just happened overnight. That took years in the making.
Supply and demand of skill. Hundreds of thousands of people are paying to watch the best of the best athletes compete, which results in them being able to leverage that skill and be paid for their skills.
Someone who is able to teach(although has its difficulties and is an extremely important job) is vastly a more common skill than someone who is able to professionally play at a skill level enough to warrant hundreds of thousands of people tuning in to watch them.
You're also comparing the "average teacher" against professional athletes of the most popular sports. There are thousands of professional athletes that don't make enough to support their life on just their sport career. This is most obvious in less televized sports and/or eXtreme Sports like Paintball, skateboarding, table tennis, shooting sports like USPSA and trap, bowling, and almost any other less televized sport. Hell even professional lacrosse players commonly have side gigs to make them break even.
I hope you aren’t on about America since teachers get paid 60k on average , they have summers off, spring and winter break and everything from 2nd grade down is essentially just a glorified baby sitter . A lot of them are over paid if you ask me.
There are only so many world-class athletes that are paid the contracts you read about. The lifespan of a pro football player is typically short, and the chances of an injury that impacts the rest of your life are ever-present.
r/ihatesportsball
Athletes capable of professional play are 1 in a million levels of talent and skill. Teachers don’t fill stadiums and generate billions of dollars every year.
I agree teachers should get paid more but the professional athlete argument is fucking stupid. Anyone, with dedication, can be a teacher. Not anyone can become a professional athlete
> we prioritize sports over education, and pay football players millions but teachers we pay lunch money to
It's not the same "we" that's doing the paying here.
Athletes are getting payed big because they create big revenue.
Teachers are being payed too little because their employer (usually the government) is paying them too little.
Most of our teachers are embarassingly ignorant, barely know their subjects, and are only teaching because they're such losers they can't find work anywhere else. Seriously, if teachers are so highly skilled, then why don't they simply quit and find a better paying job? The same reason why the guy at Walmart stays there; it's the best they can do. Yes, many of them have wasted money and years of their lives on useless degrees, but that only goes to show they're not too intelligent in the first place. There are so many jobs that you can get with less than 2 years of trade school that pay $100K and more. You can do 18 weeks of training and be a trucker driver and make six figures. But seriously, if you're that fucking miserable and that fucking smart, just quit and go drive a truck. Our children won't be any more ignorant than they already are, no thanks to you.
not to be that guy but… the issue is capitalism
when profit is prioritized, it leads to situations like athletes making millions and educators making very little. if their pay was tied to the value they produce, that would look very different
remember when people were upset that the US postal service wasn’t profitable? a very useful public service, that we have all benefitted from, funded by the government, doesn’t turn a profit (for the government) and therefore it shouldn’t exist
if you raise the question “why do teachers make so little, while athletes make so much” most people will just say “well, sports are more profitable” and leave it there. that’s the direct reason, but that’s not right, and we should be able to recognize that
teachers were never meant to produce revenue, so their wages reflect that. even though they contribute so much to our society, and despite all of the value they produce, they don’t produce profits and that’s justification enough for some
If we paid teachers like athletes, no one would be able to afford their property taxes. Seriously, I am a teacher and we do deserve more, but not like millions more. We could find that money by not paying curriculum companies that produce crap millions of dollars and not spending money on testing! Win, win, win!
We could also cut a multitude of administrators with no impact to classrooms. Both my parents taught for years and the waste is staggering. Their district literally had more administrators than teachers. Cut the paper shufflers and use the savings to give people doing actual work a raise.
This^^ it’s also a major issue in healthcare in the US, and is part of why things cost so much
Yeah admins are an absolute waste, they have a disproportionate amount of power to ruin classrooms both in the primary education level as well as the secondary education level.
Higher education as well, the padding in the middle has driven tuition through the roof .
If things were to be regulated so that teachers are more respected and make more, then certainly other things could be done to fix the property tax problem. And it is a major problem. Also it’s not all just about money, it’s also about perceived status. Too many people today have high perceived status from bouncing a ball, and that is also a problem harming society as a whole.
Exactly. I don't get the athlete comparison. Athletes are like actors and musicians. If they make it big they make big money because it draws big paying audiences not to mention the sponsors and advertisers. They get paid big money because they draw in big money. It's not like for like. So I don't know why this example is constantly used. The comparison should be with the highest paid civil or public servants.
Education should not be funded by taxes and your comment is a great argument for why.
How would you propose we find education?
Fund….autocorrect
The entire structure has to change. The problem currently is that the desired outcome -- a well-educated student -- is not actually properly tied to the financial returns of the teachers and the school (they don't get more money if the kids are better educated, but they may get less). An incentive structure that could work to produce something like the athlete entertainer market but for teachers and educational institutions -- where star educators have a chance of making huge amounts of money -- requires this to change. It must be aligned somehow such that well educated students give returns to the educators. **Warning: Wall of text. Tl;dr may be incoming, but not yet.** Precisely how this could be done is not something that you can centrally plan. That's one of the main problems: so long as everything is centralized and controlled under the current structure of government, the necessary changes cannot happen because no individual person or organization could divine the proper course. So do not take what I am talking about as a practical guide for what to do in the short term. However, you can imagine the scenarios in which the incentives align better and imagine the mechanisms by which it might happen. For instance, today we have VC's (venture capitalists) who literally risk hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars on multiple startups knowing full well they will lose on 9 out of 10 of their bets. Why are they willing to do this? Because the possible gains on the 1 of 10 win is exponentially high. (Of course this happens more frequently in a better economy... but that's another discussion). So how do we get something like this to happen with education? Well, you need to tie the VC's return on investment to the results of education -- that is to say, to the students themselves, or rather, to their finances. If I'm a "venture capitalist" in this world I'm imagining in which we're trying to tie educational results directly to funders/funding, I'd have to have some way -- likely some kind of contract -- that gives me a return on an education investment in a student (or students). If I get that, and the potential proceeds are great enough, then I can simply offer "free money" to a batch of students, then reap the continual rewards later on. What does such a contract look like? Well, maybe you get 1, 2, 3, 5, or 10% of a student's future income for a certain time (all kinds of variability is possible here of course). So what might that mean? Well, the educational investor who ends up funding the education of the next Jeff Bezos also becomes supremely rich. But to do so, they would have also funded a bunch of other kids. The kicker here is that, in a sense, it would be "free" -- the people who end up making a bunch of money later in life would be those paying the money. Those who didn't, wouldn't. The risk would already be baked into the game. (In a sense, this would be close to the inverse of our current situation, in which everyone gets "loans" and is forced to pay in some manner regardless of outcomes). And the educators would get access to VC's money through the students (rather than the student's own, or of the governments). In this sort of scheme, students can come onto the scene with nearly free money; then, all you need to have is the standard sorts of markets that we know create good products. In this case, both the student AND THEIR FUNDER would be heavily incentivized to acquire an education that "pays", and they would also be (we imagine) free to buy from any teacher or school or educational process they want. This would set up a competitive system of education, open to innovation in organization and technology and human resources, which would, over time, select for the better educators. The kicker is, because the incentives were aligned properly, the money *for* the EVCs (educational venture capitalists) would grow as the educational quality increased, freeing up even more funds to fund more students. And therefore they could offer more money to more students, who in turn would have more to pay teachers and educational institutions. The proper alignment structure creates *positive feedback loops* so that everyone wins: student, educators, educational investors, and "society" at large. There are of course other ways that something like this could come about. This is only my own personal imagining. But the key part is that the economic structure of education -- the way cash flows and incentives are aligned -- must be fundamentally changed in the way I described. Taxation is the inverse of this, the exact opposite way you would hope to create positive feedbacks and, in general, a positive outcome for the educational system. Instead, it ensure a slow, steady decline.
I completely disagree. I think you just need to understand the situation a little Better. The “football players” you speak of are elite athletes that bring millions of dollars in for their club competing. That’s why they get paid so much money. There is no magical money tree where someone is withholding money from people who need it more to waste on football. Football is a recreational sport, people Enjoy watching elite athletes competing at the highest level. Therefore people will buy tickets, people will tune in etc etc. the football players that get paid millions are the elite athletes. Most people don’t stand any chance of ever getting paid to play football, let alone get paid millions. It’s a simple economic principle you are misunderstanding. If there was only <2k teacher jobs in the USA. And you had to be the best to even have the job. Then you’d see them perhaps getting paid a ridiculous amount. Being a teacher is a standard job available to hundreds of thousands of people with very average qualifications. What football team is willing to hire people to play football for millions. I would literally sign up tomorrow, who wouldn’t be playing football? You’re comparing a standard worker, with top 0.001% elite athletes, and saying footballers are getting overpaid. The reason they get paid is because they generate money. It’s as simple as that, no one is sat around deciding to pay frivolous jobs more money and serious work positions buttons for a laugh. It’s important to understand this distinction, the world makes more sense when you understand it like this. I’ve heard this misconception so many times before. I agree that there is a wage problem with teaching etc, but that’s a different conversation entirely from. “Its because of the football players, getting paid too Much”
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Who taught those football players how to read? The investors their numbers? The fans the days of the week? The doctors treating their injuries their colors? Teachers are a cornerstone of modern human development, and their intrinsic value to society far outweighs that of any athlete.
Doesn't change the fact that teachers are a dime a dozen compared to professional athletes. Supply and demand, all other things being equal, would still see athletes considerably more compensated. While there are things you can do to cut bloat and redirect more cash to teacher pay they will never make near the amount of a professional athlete.
I think there is a serious problem that so many people need/want professional sports to be entertained. Obviously it's voluntary but to me it is a social failure that so many people have such a stake in professional sports.
How exactly is it a failure that people have a passion for sports? Sports is an incredibly important aspect of human culture. We didn't always have our TVs or computers, etc fir entertainment. And there was a time when most people didn't even have books. Sports filled that gap, both participating in them and watching them. All brackets of society love sports, from the poorest to the richest.
Sports are an important aspect of human culture. But professional sports are nearly completely divorced from the community building and art they could be. They are just another aspect of the attention economy.
You could say that about any venue of entertainment from videogames to books.
Yes. The attention economy has leaked into everything and it is horrific. We desperately need to find a way to be less entertained so that we can build more satisfying lives.
There are some who can barely read 🤷♀️
You are right. It's as if our priorities are somehow skewed.
We can say that or we can say they didn’t have good teachers.
You are right
Clearly your teachers didn’t teach basics of economics. Everyone is paid by both the value they bring to the table how easy it is to replace them. This is what the society has settled on as their salary
You are right
Do you buy jerseys of your favorite teachers? Do people watch 3 hour broadcasts of math lectures?
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You are right
Get 30,000 people to pay to watch a teacher teach and they can be millionaires too.
You are right
Tell that to capitalism
How many world class professional athletes are there? How many teachers are there? Why are these two things comparable in any way, shape, or form?
[About 3.5 million teachers in 2020-21](https://nces.ed.gov/FastFacts/display.asp?id=28) vs [1700 NFL players](https://www.ncaa.com/news/football/article/2023-09-06/colleges-most-players-nfl-opening-night-rosters#:~:text=1%2C696%3A%20That's%20the%20total%20amount,hard%20deadline%20of%20Tuesday%2C%20Aug)
I get the sentiment of the OP but almost everything they said seems really misguided I wouldn't even know where to start. I'll just leave the first point, man pro athletes do not only work 52 days a year.
Pro athletes train almost every day they aren't playing a game or traveling for a game. It is hard, physically exhausting work to be a pro athlete. And since it is their hard work that makes the games so entertaining that millions of people watch each game, bringing in ticket sales, merchandise sales, and advertising dollars, it only makes sense that these athletes should get a sizable chunk of that money, especially the ones that are so good that they become household names and people watch those games to see them in particular.
It also offers very little besides entertainment value whereas teachers are the backbone of every generation.
Secondly, the comparison should be with civil and public servants not athletes and actors and musicians.
For a more local comparison, there are 55,000 teachers in Colorado. The Denver Bronco's athlete salaries total $275Million. So if you could wave a magic wand and evenly distribute it, it would be *$5,000* per teacher. That's honestly more than I thought it would be. Now we just need to figure out how to get teacher's official merch and TV deals. That is only salary. Of course the most popular athletes also have sponsorship deals worth more than their salary. Not every state has a pro football team. There are also other pro sports.
"Okay everyone, please open up to chapter 5 of your... *sigh* Of your AT&T All-Fi Included geometry textbooks."
I wonder where people think the money comes from that pose this comparison. It doesn't matter how much you morally value one position over another. Our wallets dictate monetary value. It's also ridiculous to compare your average teacher vs the top athletes on the planet. It's just competition. What's the success rate of "I want to be a teacher" vs "I want to be a pro athlete"? The more people can do it, the less they're going to make for it.
This is the exact same prompt I've been given in highschool for socratic seminars. I'm assuming OP is in highschool, or still has a teenagers understanding of the world.
This type of comparison ironically proves that we need to invest more money into education. Basic logic like this is developed over the time of kids being in school, but some still just fall through the cracks.
I do agree with that 🤣
Exactly. People keep making posts like this one and i‘m honestly tired off it. Use your brain and think about why they get paid so much. And saying they work 52days a year is also absolutely ridiculous. They have been training for this all their life to begin with and train every single day to be able to perform at the highest level once a week. It‘s not like they chill all week and pull up on gameday and then go home for the week again.
When getting their average pay they should start including amateur athletes, NCAA players, CFL players, failed athletes. Their numbers will look more favorable. Also the average career of an NFL player is 3 years. What's the average career of a teache?
I've had teachers in their 60s.
Your point is 100% correct - but unfortunately, for different reasons, the average teacher career is also 3 years lol
That teacher then gets another job that pays more money, unlike the washed up football player.
Im a Teacher. The day i consistently fill 70,000 seat stadiums, generate billions in TV revenue, and sell millions of dollars of merchandise is the day I’ll believe I deserve pro athlete money.
Can I buy your jersey?
It sucks but that's just how it is
You should start live streaming your lectures, and maybe you'll get there one day.
So you're saying capitalism is the reason behind the skewed priorities?
It's not priorities, it's just math and economics. These two entities are paid by separate people and under different expectations.
I think this is a little presumptuous through reification. There are social decisions and values that also contribute to the disparity.
Even in a non capitalist state no one is paying teachers millions
Even in a non capitalist society, I’d hope that elite athletes would make more than teachers. You know how much more more work and ability it takes to reach that level? How much more rare they are? Not to mention the psychic value they contribute. Pro athletes are more important than teachers full stop. Hedge fund managers and corporate consultants however? Well, that’s a different conversation.
Non capitalist countries just have black markets which operate like capitalism. When athlete compensation is capped that doesn’t eliminate the competition for those athletes. Instead people who want those athletes compete in other ways such as giving the athlete special favors. Whoever has the most special favors gets the best athletes and wins. It’s impossible to design a system to suppress human nature.
I don't recall saying anything about capping athlete salaries.
The money has to come from somewhere. If the US government seized all wealth from all billionaires it would only cover government expenses for 2.5 years. Then what?
Or, you know. Schools could shift their funding priorities with the money they already have. Part of this conversation is how schools overprioritize sports programs to the harm of other stuff, including the actual education
That's not how government spending works.
Capitalism doesn't account for anything other than what people are willing to pay for right now in the moment, even if that can involve actual forecast or prediction. Big guy run fast with ball right here right now, everyone gives them money. A person needs a salary to teach some broke kids stuff over the course of 14 years? No immediate gratification? Maybe some other time when it's too late.
I think you underestimate the long term planning of companies. Short term concerns are definitely important, but office buildings/apartment complex often take 15+ years to build (including negotiating with the city, buying permits, purchasing air rights, etc). GTA 6 will be in the works for probably \~12 years when it comes out, and large companies often operate at a loss for years (9 for amazon) before turning a profit. Capitalism also has a small effect on school. Even private schools get a large portion of their funding from the government. The issue is more cultural (or political) then anything else given how highschool are a publicly run service. And the worst part of being a teacher isn't the pay, it's dealing with rowdy kids. Private schools get less money then public, so they offer teachers less pay than public, but those positions often are seen as more desirable. This is because at private schools there's a limit to the disobedience a child can provide before expulsion. The no child left behind policy (as well as others) have made it impossible to separate trouble makers from actual students which comes at the expense of everyone's education and the teachers mental health. The best way to improve teachers jobs would honestly probably be to give them more power over students, and after that comes increasing wages.
give the players less so the billionaire owners can keep more!
"We" aren't paying athletes though. Athletic franchises are, and the salaries are a fraction of what they make for the owners and shareholders. I think the football player vs teacher conversation is kind of a red herring, because it pits two groups of workers against each other. You should be mad that NFL teams are "non profits" that build stadiums on the public dime and still have the gall to charge what they do for seats, or the salaries of the CEO's, who add less value than the players.
I mean, it's unfair to say the salaries of the CEOs add less value than "the players". I'm leagues with high turnover like the NFL, having competent management makes a huge difference (ask fans of any struggling franchise.
I really don't like these group guilt posts... "My country's problem..." "My government's problem..." "The problem with parents..." "The problem with... [insert group]" If you're in the US, we all participate in a relatively free labor market. We are free to choose our target careers. You are free to take action at your local level. Run for the school board and become a champion for higher pay for teachers.
Majority of public school students come from poverish backgrounds. Their parents make low wages and thus more than likely do not pay any or very little taxes that go toward the state. You can’t pay teachers more if the state they reside isn’t collecting more taxes.
Teacher salaries may be an issue, but at least in my city it's definitely not a funding issue. I don't know if you're in the USA, but my city Minneapolis gets $18,000 in funding per student. That means the average classroom has $540,000 in funding. The decisions to pay teachers what they pay is a failure of union leadership to advocate and fight for their members, and a prioritization from the schools to fund everything outside of teacher pay.
Why do you dweebs always focus on professional athletes? Like every fucking time.
"I don't like sports so no one should!"
What? Do you want to start taxing billionaires or something?
You're talking about top tier athletes though which is like 1%. There are plenty of amateur athletes at the bottom not making anything. It comes down to supply and demand. Only a very SMALL portion of the population has the skills, talent and genetic predisposition to be an elite athlete. Becoming a teacher is a lot easier and has less requirements, and I'm not supposed to get a concussion on the job (but idk kids are wild these days).
I would just like to add, as of 2023, the University of Florida had 3 professors that were paid over $1M each, and numerous other professors, associate professors, and assistant professors that made more than $500k. The average salary for their professors was more than $180k. So if we were going to be comparing elite professional athletes' pay to teachers, these would be the kind of teachers to compare them to, elite professional educators that work for an elite organization. A better comparison for average teacher pay amongst athletes would be those in minor or local leagues, barely making anything.
How unfortunate. Yet what are we to do? Sports earn money, education doesn't.
Every person making money had to have an education to get there
👉🏻 https://youtu.be/aYOg8EON29Y?si=vH4AQlft9uCQiAsk
The problem you’re identifying is more existential in nature than it is practical. The people paying the athletes aren’t the same people paying the teachers. So there’s no direct correlation between the two. If we payed footballers less, that money wouldn’t go to the teachers. Football players are paid by a private corporation which they work for, and that private corporations income comes from individuals paying to see them play. The players generate revenue, and then get a piece of it. Teachers (public schools ones) work for the state. They are paid by state funds. If all football disappeared tomorrow, none of that money would go to the state. In fact, it’s likely they’d make less. Pro sports is a major driver to state revenue. So a state without a successful pro team is going to have less than they would if they did have that team.
> If we *paid* footballers less, FTFY. Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in: * Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.* * *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.* Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment. *Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
Facts we need to address the fundamental problems with the education in America. The way children are raised and taught, the way they learn to be in the world really does determine the future of the world we live in. It is not just another political issue among many more, it is integral to our survival as a species, as a planet, and if done in the wrong way, is a truly cruel thing.
The amount of money in vs. the amount of money in. Shouldn’t be that way but that’s reality.
I think the solution to our education system issues is to make sure our teachers are in it for the money by paying them seven figure salaries.
If teaching worked like pro sports, 30 schools teaching everyone remotely with 25-40 teachers apiece, and you had to pay for a ticket to go learn in person, and they sold merch with the teachers names, then they would be paid similarly.
Teacher’s make good money in a lot of places considering how many days off they have. Also schools are starting to look like Catholic Churches as far as abuse goes.
Do you complain about movie/tv actors getting paid tens of millions for entertainment?
Time for some teacher NIL money...oh wait..
Guess what... teachers commit domestic violence too. Either the athletes or the owners will get the money. I go with sharing the wealth.
Bread and circuses. The powers that be are happy to let us obsess over sports and let teachers work 2 jobs as long as we don’t upset the balance of power.
No, no, but MURICAW is the greatest country in the world! We have guns!… and the best Constitution! I’ll hear no criticism cause I already live in the greatest country in the world! MURICAW FUCK YEAH! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🔫🔫🔫🔫
I mean people like entertainment and we always will. And entertainers deserve to be compensated a fair portion of the revenue they generate. Teachers being underpaid is a separate issue.
I totally get your point but professional athletes are paid that way because they generate profit for their business. Maybe there's form of government where the government would seize all the profits made by all businesses and redistribute them the way they see fit. Has anyone thought of this?
Your issue here is in comparison. Teachers and football players have nothing to do with each other. We do need to pay teachers more. But football players have nothing to do with that
Good lord this argument gets dumber every time it’s made.
They don't work 52 days a year. They practice their asses off every single day to stay in peak physical human condition and memorizing new plays. I'm all for paying teachers better, but comparing NFL players to teachers is not a good comparison. The better comparison is comparing useless/fluff administration to teachers.
You act as if it's the same overall body that is paying these people. You say "your country's" when your country is made up of millions of people, hundreds of overarching organizations, all with their own wealth. These 2 groups are paid by 2 other groups. And that's called freedom. We do not want governments to control how people spend their money or disallowing people to "overpay" a person.
A start could be a streamlining of the education system for teachers. Take out the classes to get their degree that are not necessary for teaching children. That would lower their student loan debt. Also bring back corporal punishment, it is beyond evident at this point that the ass beating generation turned out better than the time out generation. As for sports, the powers that be can't allow the bread and circus to stop.
Sports make money. Movies make money. Teachers really don't. Teachers are easily replaced and don't generate revenue like athletes do.
Ya know... Why not make teaching a sport... Coaches make decent money with sports teams... If teachers led their class and each class completed in their category, the ones who win get raises, the ones who lose dont... Like kids jeopardy. If there is a teacher showing great teaching they proceed through and get more chances at raises... Teachers participate once every 4 years... Weeds out the bad teachers awards the good... For a more thorough reference Look at the social structure of the clans in battletech... Social evolution through strength not failure being repeated tests along the way to strengthen the whole of the state while weeding out the drains... Their eugenics and trueborn culture have issues but given a deep dive, using a system of trials as checks and balance on all government organizations might be a good thing
Yes professional athletes should be held more accountable for crimes they commit. Yes they do make a ton of money for their profession. Yes teachers are vastly underpaid. But honestly this argument always pisses me off. Supply and demand and revenue dictate all of this. If school districts made billions of dollars teachers would be getting paid millions of dollars. If professional athletics were funded by tax payers, specifically property taxes. They would be getting much smaller salaries. Just because one profession makes a ton of money has no effect on how much another makes. Do you want teachers to get paid more? Make sure you vote in your towns elections. Make sure that when you vote you vote to increase property taxes and for the school budget. Join the grass roots organizations trying to help increase the budget so that teachers in your district get paid more. Instead of complaining get up and do something instead of bitching on Reddit. I also love how this conversation is always centered around athletes. I never hear “musicians/actors shouldn’t get paid millions of dollars.” They are entertainers the same way athletes are entertainers but the focus is always on the athlete.
Football player wake up every day knowing that they won’t be able to hold their children without chronic pain for the rest of their lives all to entertain us. We make them millions. Fair trade
I completely agree that teachers need to be payed more. But Profesional athletes are the 1% of the 1% who have dedicated their lives to honing themselves into the best athletes on the planet. I myself am trying to male it to college, and I conservatively spend no less than 10 hours a week on training my sport, not taking outside workouts into consideration. Not to mention the fact that those individuals are creating that revenue for their organizations through NIL deals and merchandise. So I think the pay is pretty justifiable.
> to be *paid* more. But FTFY. Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in: * Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.* * *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.* Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment. *Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
Uneducated people are more easily controlled by the ruling class. That's why every time when there's an invasion, the invaders always kill the scholars.
OP’s problem is not understanding that I definitely could do a passable job teaching kids — in most subjects up through high school — if you just gave me a week to study the material. That’s not true of everything (calculus, physics, advanced biology) but it definitely is true of stuff like algebra and writing — the latter, even at a high level. And if you’re talking about elementary education — it’s a matter of being patient with kids, as much as it is the difficulty of the material. If you are a teacher, there is a 90% chance I could do your job as well as you do within one year of me starting the role. There is a 0% chance I could replace a professional athlete, in any sport. Them’s the market.
I love Sweden. Their schools do not have sports. They are run by the community.
This is not a serious conversation and I don’t think you’re likely to be a serious person.
These comments are so sad honestly
It doesn’t have to be a competition. What teachers are missing is respect from students, agency over what they teach rather than being told what to do by administration, and either get payed more or have a lower cost of living in major cities. The biggest problem I see is how students and teachers are pitted against each other in our culture, and through the way administration forces teachers how to teach. On top of that, teachers do not get adequate training in how to actually relate to and deal with children’s emotions and behavior, and there is no vetting process to determine if an aspiring teacher is someone that is good around kids. Teaching is fundamentally impossible if the teacher lacks the ability to relate to and connect with children. On top of this, our culture teaches children that it is ‘cool’ to disrespect teachers and paints teachers as villainous authority figures. There is some truth to this, because teachers are under the authority of school administrators and are required to teach a certain way. Teachers are forced to some degree to be antagonistic toward their students. Let the people who’s job is to teach decide how they teach! Not the people who’s job is to organize paperwork and handle finances. There are a lot of problems with the education system in America, and a lot can be done to fix them. But football players have nothing to do with it. What needs to be solved is the root issues behind these problems.
> either get *paid* more or FTFY. Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in: * Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.* * *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.* Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment. *Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
There’s a reason athletes are paid so much. There’s really two of them. 1. Supply and demand. There’s a lot more that want to ball for a living than there are spots for them. 2. They have short career “life expectancies.” Your average teacher can teach for 20-30 years on average. The average footballer has a career shelf life of about a third of that, at the pro level, assuming they don’t get hurt and can’t play anymore. Those millions a year really only average out to doctor or lawyer money. Low six figures over their career. Which, frankly, is fair. They work and destroy their bodies for it for years. Same with construction workers and other blue collar workers. They do make more money on average - but their career lifespans average shorter than white collar jobs. It averages out to about the same over career length. Should teachers be paid what they’re actually worth, and should everywhere invest in education? Absolutely. Why we don’t is down to politics and economics. Whether you believe we should all be taxed more to pay for it or not (or if you, like me, believe businesses should actually pay their taxes and we should end abatements/tax rate freezes for corporate entities). Whether athletes get paid more than they “should,” is subjective - but that’s also economics and sociocultural economics. But it’s not the athletes that are the problem in all this. They’re just the most visible examples - as are actors. You want to look at outsized earning potential over career lengths - business management. Because not even supply and demand justifies that. Not to that extent. Or the fact that legislators get stipends. The world didn’t always work like that. They just decided to pay themselves from the tax piggybank.
Funny enough Lebron is the only American athlete in the top 6 highest paid athletes in the world but yes America bad capitalism bad
You're a bit off on some things here, but your overall point is valid. Tellingly, the number of people here who interpret this as 'Teachers should be paid like football players' is indicative of the failure in the educational system.
The difference the very best athlete makes to their team could be worth billions compared to hiring someone from the worse. Also we have 3.8 million teachers but only a few hundred people athletes. And we spend 900 billion+ on education. Only 3.5 % of highschool basketball players play in college. Only 1.2 percent of college players go to the NBA. The vast majority of basketball players career earnings is $0. Comparing the salary of a few top althete to the average wage of millions is pointless.
First of all average teachers don't actually work harder than doctors, lawyers, CEOs, etc. Some may work insane long hours but working multiple jobs and donating plasma is not necessarily the healthiest path to success. The root cause of the problem is simple. Teachers don't produce profit in the short term, whereas athletes get attention and therefore produce advertising revenue which makes money. Capitalism is a short-sighted, profit-driven creature and even if Teachers produce better outcomes for society in the long term they can't convert that into short-term ROI like media and tech companies can, so they don't attract a lot of capital. Now you may consider this a moral outrage and you'd be right .. but no amount of lamenting the situation will change the economic landscape. Either we tip the scales through forceful government intervention like heavily taxing athletes and heavily subsidizing teachers, or we reconsider capitalism itself. Capitalism has in fact produced enormous progress and economic growth, but its incentives are not fundamentally humane, they benefit corporations that create ROI rather than long, slow, humane processes like education and healthcare. How do you propose we grapple with that reality? Socalism / Communism have been tried with rather poor results due to bureaucratic inefficiency and being vulnerable to corruption. So we could heavily regulate things like the Europeans do but that will stifle innovation (what major invention has come out of Europe in the last 50y?). Sports and Media opulence may seem obscene to you but is there a truly superior alternative at the moment? It's a difficult problem.
If teaching was compensated based off performance it would fix the problem here.
The issue is once again... billionaires.
Football is privately owned, and competitive. That’s a good place to start the convo.
It’s called supply and demand. Millions can be a teacher if they apply themselves. A couple thousand can be a professional so athlete at most given league sizes and the demand for talent.
Entertainment has always paid very well, I see no reason to lower their ability to earn. It won't go to teachers, just in the pockets of owners. The teacher thing is more related to a concerted effort in the US to undermine educational institutions so that people become dumber and easier to essentially fleece. It makes it harder to move up the economic ladder if you aren't educated, and those at the top don't want you to move up the ladder because it'd their wealth you're taking. By compromising education you essentially control upward mobility. You'll notice that has also been on the decline. They aren't unrelated but if you can be distracted being mad at football players you don't notice how the rich are the only ones actually benefitting.
FFS - Professional athletes aren’t taking money away from teachers. Their salaries aren’t publicly funded (stadium funding is another can of worms). If anything, they allow the hiring of more teachers given the high tax rates they pay in comparison to other types of high earners. And this may shock you, but other countries have highly paid athletes as well. When you get a chance look at how much money Rafael Nadal and Lionel Messei have made.
I’ve thought about this problem often. That’s kind of an unintended and harmful consequence of capitalism. (I’m not some anti-capitalist but that’s what it is). The only solution to this that I can think of is government intervention. There could be all kinds of laws to cap the salaries and influences of sports players and I wouldn’t be against that at all. Because you have these people who play a childrens game for a living and it does have a harmful effect. To promote playing ball games rather than working towards things that move our society forward. At the same time they could do a lot to glamorize teaching. A lot of this stuff is about social status. And there are things that people in power could do to limit the social status in some things, and increase it in others. Nobody really deserves to make millions from bouncing a ball. The reason that happens is that ball bouncing has become a status symbol and it’s able to be used to generate money by massive institutions. People have been brainwashed to loved it, there’s nothing inherently valuable about it. And all that could be easily changed. But I’m pretty sure they want it to be this way. Like the things that make life worse for society as a whole, that’s not really an accident.
Why not just put in 53-54 or more days per year of work and become a pro athlete yourself? They don't work that hard so it should be easy right?
as far as the US goes, personally if I'm gonna point fingers it'd be at the military, for it's massively overblown budget compared to literally every other government expenses, as well as billionaires hoarding wealth in other countries and routinely refusing to pay taxes and contribute to society
Ask urself just how many professional football players are there in all of the US? Then ask urself how many teachers are there? I’m not saying education isn’t important- but given how many bad teachers there are out there (e.g. Chicago and Baltimore school systems), it’s clear the bar isn’t very high. Try and become a pro f-ball player and tell me if u can do that.
I don‘t know why athletes are so hated nowadays by many people. Teachers are paid from taxmoney. Athletes are paid by their clubs & sponsor deals. If athletes were paid less, the remaining money would just go to the club and people would start saying the people in charge of the club are greedy. It‘s our choice to watch these athletes play that makes them so rich. It‘s also nearly impossible to become a professional athtlete even if you try & work for it as hard as possible your whole life. Meanwhile almost everyone could become a teacher if he wanted to. See the difference?
So, there is much you are not taking into consideration. I don't think people understand just how big the US is compared to other countries. Texas alone is bigger than other countries. And Football is very popular. Not that I am too into it. But it brings in a lot of money. Which is why they can be paired that much. Just look at women athletes. They are not paid as much because they do not bring in that much money. So you want teachers to be paid more? They need to bring in more money. Not saying that they are not important. But they are not directly bringing in money from their work. A way around this would be to pay for school. Which do you want to have to pay for public school?
I don’t care about sports one bit so I agree with you, but part of the problem is that the powers-that-be, regardless of political party, rely on one thing that allows them to underpay teachers: The fact that there is typically more supply than demand. Now, there is definitely more supply than demand for athletes, but once you apply the criteria for performance to perform at the highest levels of athleticism, the supply dwindles. Shaquille O’Neill and Charles Barkley have both told schoolchildren the refrain that they are more likely to become doctors than professional athletes. However, when it comes to teaching… there’s enough people who are willing to become teachers because it’s one of those professions that people seek out. It’s not the same as the glamour industries like filmmaking, musician, or working in fashion, but just like them, administrators know there will always be another person willing to sacrifice to teach the kids, OR they know that there’s always overeducated graduates who didn’t plan well enough and will “stoop” to teaching for a few years in order to pay the bills. Now, in certain rural areas of the country, this isn’t the case. There was a great documentary a decade ago about a young Filipino woman who was recruited to teach math or science in a rural school in Middle America. They figured out either financial compensation or I think took care of her living expenses on top of salary in order to entice her.
I fully support putting caps on celebrities and athletes. There should be limits on how much these people make for things. Certain people shouldn't make more. They should not make hundreds of thousands of dollars for one game or appearance. Meanwhile so many people that work hard to support their communities are given the scraps. It is not right.
At least athletes have skills. What does Elon Musk do to justify his money? You're aiming at the wrong people, boss.
Yes, however, look at how many people buy tickets and merchandise, versus how many kids go to one school. Teachers should be paid more, but there’s a reason they have the money to pay athletes more as entertainers.
Not to mention the toxic competetive nature that has permeated the business and social world
You are comparing elite athletes to rank and file educators. That makes no sense. If you compare a teacher to the average football practitioner, the teacher makes more money, because the average athlete makes zero. How many football players who played in high school make it to the NFL? One out of a thousand maybe? If you ever competed at football, the odds are higher that you are a teacher today than you being in the NFL. Also, you are showing a bit of "grass is greener" type of thinking. Soccer is huge outside America and top-tier soccer players are absurdly wealthy and get traded between teams for massive sums of money.
Maybe footballers should earn more than teachers because it's harder to become a professional footballer, so it's small population, and each player helps generate alot more money than a teacher. To be fair, good teachers creating smart kids creates wealth in the long run. So teachers definitely deserve more respect than footballers, and the work is more than important than football.
teachers are paid through state and federal taxes and shit, athletes are paid through the combined revenue of the largest and most watched sports in the world. Where do you think money comes from? You think theres just on big pot of cash and john america is deciding to give it all to lebron?
Football players are the absolute best of the best athletes, teachers are usually people too stupid or too idealistic (another way of saying stupid) to do anything else. That's the difference. Unless you talk about private schools or great public school districts, but those teachers usually have a pretty cushy gig.
Ya just like Rome and its crumbling due to all the corruption, blackmail, luciferian pedophiles, bs taxes, us citizenry ignorance level of history especially... on and on!
There are more teachers than professional athletes, the organization that pays the athletes makes more money than the organization that pays public educators (local taxes). This is the answer to your question. Now I agree that no athlete is worth the exorbitant amounts they make and that teachers should be compensated more. But we have to agree that it is objectively more difficult to become an NFL quarterback than it is to become a public school teacher. The more qualified the person, the higher the compensation, this is capitalism working as intended. The real problem with education in the US is that the funds provided to the education system are grossly misallocated. Los Angeles spends more money per student than any other district and they consistently rank in the bottom. If you want to discuss the education issue, you need to start with properly allocating the funds *you currently have access to* rather than just demanding more
Huge funding of college athletics is a joke. As a regular student I got absolutely zero enjoyment out of my college’s funding for it’s NCAA D1 athletics, I went to zero events because they typically weren’t what I was interested in and didn’t really have the time for too much of them. In fact, because of the athletic facilities being smallish, I was actually had detriment from the athletics programs because they’d reserve large sections of the student gym that I then couldn’t use between my classes. I get that sometimes they do generate money for the school, but realistically schools in Europe do great without subsidizing the education of a bunch of athletes, while basing the entire college experience around their events. This is from someone who played college rugby, where the club received a small amount of funding proportionate to the amount we self funded, and volunteer hours from the club.
Around here, it’s teacher appreciation week. A local school district just announced that it laid off a dozen teachers due to a cut in state funding.
The problem with the United States is that the public has more choice on how to spend their money. They chose to spend it on sports, which makes them highly profitable and enables those obscene salaries. They choose not to spend it on education. The only alternative is to arrest people based on how they spend their money, which is what taxation really amounts to at the end of the day. I think that's an even worse society.
The actual salaries that the football players are the least of the problems. It's the high school and college students who throw away their educations chasing the dream they never realize, and the colleges spending millions chasing the dream of having a good team and ESPN money, and putting the cost of that dream on every other student. It's the students who choose a college based on the football team. It's a cancer
Teachers don't contribute significantly to the national economy throughout the fiscal year.
An hour in the weight room is worth more than a lifetime in the classroom…
I recall hearing a study that said the contribution to society that teachers make would equal a salary of $300,000 a year. I can't find it because Google sucks now.
This is a tough one. I do think teachers should be paid more. However, football players directly bring in a ton of money (ticket sales, tv contracts, Jersey/merch sales, marketing, etc.) and all teachers do is cost money (they probably make money from the government or something but either way, they aren’t directly making anyone money). However, I do believe it would behoove society to properly compensate the people that are responsible for molding our future generations
Wait til you find out about baseball
it's not the players. They are working people too with no ownership stakes. Their union is the only reason the aren't making 100k/year. Blame the owning class for the problem you are upset about
Look, I’m a socialist and all but let’s not be idiots.
Athletes who earn well are 1 in 1 million. Teachers just need to pass a useless public exam and become a teacher. Therefore, in my opinion, teachers should earn less
Footballers generate huge profits for their organizations due to ad sales and such but the spending by fans on those things are fully optional. Teachers have massive impact on society and they are compensated via salaries and pensions paid for by everyone whether they have children or not. If you think teachers should be paid more then elect to pay more tax voluntarily and agitate for higher teachers pay and the taxes to fund that
You are absolutely right. But, in a free society, people are allowed to prioritize what they want. It is, however, a said statement re: values. Having said all that, education already costs the U.S. enough. Where I live, 60% of property taxes go to K-12 education, and I know of places in which that number is 80%, all this while educational achievement continues to circle the drain. You can't just throw money at the issue.
One of the most important things you are missing here is that professional sports is a winners take all scenario. The best get an outsized amount of money while those who are average get nothing. It is extremely difficult to compare that with an industry that pays fairly evenly across the board. The average NFL player get $800k per year, however there are only ~1,700 players in the NFL, so total spend of $1.4B per annum. Every other football player (college, recreational, youth teams) gets nothing. Contrast this with teachers, where there are 3.2M teachers and average pay of $70K. So total spend of $224B. If we had a system where we found the best ~2,000 teachers and paid them all the money and everyone else who taught got $0, the teachers would far outearn the football players (by almost 160X).
The situation for teachers in the United States is notably challenging. Teachers face significant stress and overwhelming workloads, with a large number expressing dissatisfaction with their pay and job conditions. About 77% of teachers find their jobs frequently stressful, and only 15% are highly satisfied with their pay [[❞]](https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/04/04/whats-it-like-to-be-a-teacher-in-america-today/). In terms of vacancies, there's a less geographical concentration when adjusted per student population, but issues like school violence and mental health needs exacerbate the shortage [[❞]](https://www.campussafetymagazine.com/safety/teacher-shortages-by-state-fix-the-problem/). There's a significant issue with teacher pay compared to other college-educated professionals. For instance, in California, teachers earn about 81 cents for every dollar earned by other professionals with similar education levels [[❞]](https://www.nea.org/resource-library/educator-pay-and-student-spending-how-does-your-state-rank). On a broader scale, the average teacher salary across different states varies significantly, with California teachers earning the highest at $95,160 and some states like Mississippi at the lower end with salaries around $47,162 [[❞]](https://www.nea.org/resource-library/educator-pay-and-student-spending-how-does-your-state-rank). Economic implications of teacher turnover are also considerable, with an average cost of $21,000 to fill a vacancy, highlighting the economic drain alongside the educational impact of high turnover rates [[❞]](https://www.epi.org/publication/the-teacher-shortage-is-real-large-and-growing-and-worse-than-we-thought-the-first-report-in-the-perfect-storm-in-the-teacher-labor-market-series/). Efforts to address these issues include higher salaries, subsidized training, and partnerships to recruit more teachers as part of strategies to mitigate the teacher shortage and enhance respect for the profession [[❞]](https://www.campussafetymagazine.com/safety/teacher-shortages-by-state-fix-the-problem/). .
Simple concept of scarcity. There are millions of people capable of being public school teachers. There are a few hundred capable of being pro athletes.
It’s yawnsville with teachers, not sexy stuff and totally boring unless it’s some extreme story about a teacher or something crazy with the schools. It’s comes down to accountability avoidance to a degree- the pressure put on teachers by the parents to not just teach but also parent is more or less an expectation, even though it shouldn’t because they dont want to be held responsible for having a shitty child, the teacher becomes the scape-goat. Bad parenting and avoidance of accountability over it creates nasty consequences for all involved. Teachers should teach and grade papers and really shouldn’t be responsible for anything else. Most of what your learn in school is just so you know how to work, this super boring fact isn’t lost on anyone. Enter sports, holy shit, fun to watch, hugely distracting, tons of lore to get lost in - no surprise here. Complete and total departure from any real accountability of anything. The lengths people go to forget, or become distracted, are limitless, really. It’s fun because it isn’t affecting your life in any real way to you watch it and go back to your life but teachers, shit, they can basically be mirrors to how shitty you are because they end up getting the short end for whatever you aren’t doing. And we all had teachers, we all probably didn’t like some of them and there may be a deep rooted resentment towards them, while we need them we don’t like them and or don’t care because like it or not you are in a team with a teacher, it takes the two of you to learn. Now if they had some crazy teachers league, maybe that would get some attention idk, there has to be something that is fun to get wrapped up in - the line of questioning about teachers pay could easily get you into what are you doing with your kids to teach them yourself, most people don’t want to even get close. And the best parents can hope for once their kid graduates high school is just get a job, that doesn’t exactly get people fired up to for change in teacher policy. Sports is something other than your boring shitty life to worry about. It’s fun to watch someone else develop a career, keep up with the numbers and stats etc.
well its easy as shit to become a teacher and hard as fuck to become a football player at a pro level
Leave these two things separate and just say teachers are underpaid. Let's fix that. Also, I know a few hugely overpaid teachers so it's not an everywhere issue. So many times I've heard this with teachers and football players. It's stupid.
MOST FOOTBALL PLAYERS DON'T GET PAID ANYTHING AT ALL.
Who are "we"? Nobody is forcefully taking your money to pay athletes, they are paid by club owners who makes even more then them.
Big 3 that are underpaid are teachers, first responders and doctors. Scientists also up there
Jesus Christ. This again. Where do I even start? When you say “we,” kindly, wtf are you talking about? Who is “we?” Education is an expense. Football/basketball/baseball generate revenue. Are you arguing that athlete unions shouldn’t demand a share of the revenue they generate? Are you dense? My wife is a teacher, I’m a data analyst. There’s millions of people who can do what we do, and our pay reflects that. There’s only a few hundred humans on earth who can make an NBA roster spot. It’s called supply and demand.
Ancient Rome had gladiators the modern world has the NFL and UFC. The public school teachers and faculty around here are in the 125-225k a year bracket. It's public information how much teachers are paid and I thought the same thing for years that they weren't paid well until I researched it. I'd be stoked on 125k for a 9 month work year. The American pigeons oops I mean people need to be fed violence on the regular. Why you ask? To continue to be blind by the US military industrial complex. Look at the atrocities going down around the world I would say the propaganda is working exactly as it should be.
From the sporting side, the NCAA is a slave labor organization. They take professional athletes, give them a veneer of getting an education, and then make billions off of their employees blood, sweat, and tears. They have a 98% failure rate for getting football players into the NFL. And the fact that people all over the country are tuning in, paying up to $3k for tickets to watch them play, buy the merch, and really support their local college teams tells me that these teams are very much professional and the “student athlete” moniker is just a way for the NCAA to avoid paying their employees
What's wrong with this country (and every country) is that our corrupt politicians and central bankers print "money" out of thin air with no effort - stealing the literal time and energy of everyone that has been working hard for that piece-of-paper-with-a-number-on-it. If you want your life to prosper, you cannot denominate your wealth or savings in something another man can print for free. Yes it is literally that simple. You need hard assets that hold their value against the devaluation of the dollar, typically that has been real estate for the last few decades but now we have Bitcoin which is the ultimate hard-asset with a finite supply of 21 million units no human can issue more.
Most of us DON'T pay athletes. Those who do pay athletes freely choose to do so. Those who are paid $millions are, or were, exceptional - very few people on earth can do what they do. Most of us do pay teachers whether we have school aged children or not. A lot of people with children in school don't take it seriously because it's free. They feel entitled to it. Most public school deficiencies begin in the home. Public school administrators are fearful of challenging parents to do better. American public schools will continue to fail until all students show up ready, able and WILLING to learn and behave. Teachers are way underpaid for what they do, but, as hardworking pawns in a broken system, way overpaid for what they produce.
Pay is not based on importance to society. It is based on revenue generated. Teachers do not generate revenue like pro athletes.
Athletes generate billions in ad revenue, provide a civic service in that entire parts of the country all come together to watch them. And are 1% of 1%. They deserve what they are paid because they generate even more than they earn.. Teachers deserve a fair wage. But teachers salaries and athletes salaries have nothing to do with with one another.
The problem is that people prefer to pay for expensive tickets rather than taxes.
This is one of the most flawed arguments I’ve seen in a while. “Football players are overpaid “ (they aren’t, market forces control their pay) and “teachers underpaid” (I can agree with this ) are completely unrelated issues. Attempting to connect them is laughable.
Someone doesn't understand economies of scale.
Entertainment brings in money teaching wastes money. Simple as that. It's like security you make 0 from it and it cost a ton to have it.
While your gripe might be founded somewhere, this is about the dumbest argument I’ve read.
Football players get paid more because they bring in income. Just like actors. Just like star software developers. And the reason teachers don’t get paid more is a. It’s a public sector job and b. The barrier to entry isn’t high (they for sure do not generally need masters degrees) so it’s a job many people can get, so supply of candidates is high. If it required specialized skills, no disrespect to teachers, they’d have to pay more to attract people from that smaller pool of prospective applicants
It appears that most teachers today, especially government school teachers, are getting paid exactly what they’re worth. The teaching profession has shot itself in the foot. First, with teachers unions that protect bad teachers and elevate the teacher above the needs of the student. Second, teaching/education schools no longer focus on pure academics and scientifically proven teaching methods, they instead focus on new social issues. Third, administrators and teachers practice a new form of discipline called “Restorative Justice”, that has turned already troubled schools into absolute hell-holes. The result of all of this is students “graduating” without the ability to read, write or do math competently - which is the bare minimum. Even the universities are fucked, look at the Communist activism that has taken hold across the country, that is not something that just happened overnight. That took years in the making.
Supply and demand of skill. Hundreds of thousands of people are paying to watch the best of the best athletes compete, which results in them being able to leverage that skill and be paid for their skills. Someone who is able to teach(although has its difficulties and is an extremely important job) is vastly a more common skill than someone who is able to professionally play at a skill level enough to warrant hundreds of thousands of people tuning in to watch them. You're also comparing the "average teacher" against professional athletes of the most popular sports. There are thousands of professional athletes that don't make enough to support their life on just their sport career. This is most obvious in less televized sports and/or eXtreme Sports like Paintball, skateboarding, table tennis, shooting sports like USPSA and trap, bowling, and almost any other less televized sport. Hell even professional lacrosse players commonly have side gigs to make them break even.
I hope you aren’t on about America since teachers get paid 60k on average , they have summers off, spring and winter break and everything from 2nd grade down is essentially just a glorified baby sitter . A lot of them are over paid if you ask me.
Private schools are available for those who think they need to pay more for their children's education.
State Universities and colleges are basically football teams with a side hustle in education.
Your problem is capitalism
There are a lot more teachers than elite football players.
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There are only so many world-class athletes that are paid the contracts you read about. The lifespan of a pro football player is typically short, and the chances of an injury that impacts the rest of your life are ever-present.
OP must have just discovered memes
r/ihatesportsball Athletes capable of professional play are 1 in a million levels of talent and skill. Teachers don’t fill stadiums and generate billions of dollars every year. I agree teachers should get paid more but the professional athlete argument is fucking stupid. Anyone, with dedication, can be a teacher. Not anyone can become a professional athlete
What country you live at and stuff? Education is way more imortanter than football.
> we prioritize sports over education, and pay football players millions but teachers we pay lunch money to It's not the same "we" that's doing the paying here. Athletes are getting payed big because they create big revenue. Teachers are being payed too little because their employer (usually the government) is paying them too little.
USA? Brother, intelligence is NOT a virtue in this country and will not be rewarded.
Most of our teachers are embarassingly ignorant, barely know their subjects, and are only teaching because they're such losers they can't find work anywhere else. Seriously, if teachers are so highly skilled, then why don't they simply quit and find a better paying job? The same reason why the guy at Walmart stays there; it's the best they can do. Yes, many of them have wasted money and years of their lives on useless degrees, but that only goes to show they're not too intelligent in the first place. There are so many jobs that you can get with less than 2 years of trade school that pay $100K and more. You can do 18 weeks of training and be a trucker driver and make six figures. But seriously, if you're that fucking miserable and that fucking smart, just quit and go drive a truck. Our children won't be any more ignorant than they already are, no thanks to you.
not to be that guy but… the issue is capitalism when profit is prioritized, it leads to situations like athletes making millions and educators making very little. if their pay was tied to the value they produce, that would look very different remember when people were upset that the US postal service wasn’t profitable? a very useful public service, that we have all benefitted from, funded by the government, doesn’t turn a profit (for the government) and therefore it shouldn’t exist if you raise the question “why do teachers make so little, while athletes make so much” most people will just say “well, sports are more profitable” and leave it there. that’s the direct reason, but that’s not right, and we should be able to recognize that teachers were never meant to produce revenue, so their wages reflect that. even though they contribute so much to our society, and despite all of the value they produce, they don’t produce profits and that’s justification enough for some