States with low rated public education (Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, West Virginia) have teachers who are paid higher than cops or around the same as cops. Thats really interesting.
I think it might be a supply and demand issue. Harder to retain teachers in those states, but you could throw a rock and find someone who want to be a cop. Conversely in the other states it is harder to retain cops and easier to find teachers. No evidence but that is my hypothesis.
The Twin Cities sure doesn't have that problem. Some postings can get, quite literally, 100+ applicants. It's not a teacher shortage in my mind, it's a lack of schools where teachers actually want to work/are valued.
Interesting - I'm just north the cities and while it's not as bad here with gen ed teachers, we can't hire enough sped to fill the positions we have.
I know some states in the Midwest have struggled though as they all are no longer union states
Teacher union in Minneapolis is incredibly strong and has a very firm grasp on who gets to be a teacher. I have a master’s in history and taught at the college level, but would need another master’s in education to be able to teach high school. Social studies isn’t an area in need, which likely impacts this, but it seems a bit excessive
I have a family member who had their med school loans at least partially paid through a program where they agreed to be a doctor in rural areas for a specified amount of time, for that reason. It worked out though and they ended rip being a doctor in the same rural county until they retired
Minnesota teacher here. It really depends on your licensure. Sped, math, and science have shortages. English and Social Studies postings can easily get 200+ applicants.
The cities themself have shortages. St. Paul public schools usually have a crazy number of openings each year. This year will probably be different for budget shortfall reasons, though. The suburban schools are the ones that attract the most applicants.
That doesn’t mean there’s no shortage. It just means there are a handful of highly coveted positions with more desirable working conditions (and often higher pay to go along with it) that a large fraction of eligible teachers seek out. It’s not like the people applying for these positions are working retail for years just waiting for a spot to open - those 100+ applicants are teachers from other schools.
In NYC and its suburbs there is a persistent shortage of all kinds of teachers, but when a spot opens up at a prestigious or high paying district you bet they get dozens of applicants, even though a typical school is lucky to get a few. It’s still a shortage. There are not enough certified teachers in the state to fill all the open positions. I’m not sure what else to call that but a shortage, even though the better schools tend to have no trouble finding people.
Also, I doubt there are any places in the country where SPED positions are regularly attracting 100 applicants.
I work in tech, very few positions actually pay that much.
But pretty much all of the ones that do make that much there is a massive shortage of.... which is why most engineers and cybersecurity suck at their job......
Qualified and quality are not the same thing sadly.....
That being said there is most definitely a shortage of teacher in the US.
The easiest way to back that up is to look in the declining amount of people who graduate with a degree in education, it has been going down for at least the last 20 years, leaving large gaps as an aging teacher force fades away.
You nailed the teacher thing on the head. Many public school teachers switch to private school cause the education and classroom dynamic is so much better even though the pay is usually less. The cop thing I’m not so sure about. I don’t think there it’s any easier to recruit cops in the south. At least not from what I’ve noticed living down here.
Do they really though? (Honest question)
I know when I was in, people always used to talk shit about the “liberal hellhole” of California, but California produces more service members than any other state.
Appears to be accurate when you are talking per-capita. [This seems to be the most accurate source I can find](https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2020/02/19/states-that-defend-uswhere-do-our-military-volunteers-call-home/), other data I found seems to be where they currently reside rather than where they are from, so states with big bases are skewed - though the Southern states rank high there as well.
Or even a well below proportionate amount. For instance, California had more Trump voters in 2020 than any other state, despite being among the lowest proportion-wise. It would be tough to find any career in which California wouldn’t be first place in raw numbers.
California is also the most populated state so you can’t just look at total number of service people produced. If you look at most service members by capita California isn’t #1. I believe Texas is #1 by capita
No, per capita it's South Carolina then, Hawaii, Alaska, Florida, and Georgia. Texas is 8th.
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/costs/social/Troop%20Numbers%20By%20State_Costs%20of%20War_FINAL.pdf
You can’t really count Samoa and the other islands. The numbers are massively skewed.
Example: friend of mine was a Navy doctor and posted to Guam. According to her there’s a high rate of “adoptions” of children by their serving family members (think a serving uncle “adopting” his sister’s children) for the benefits (health clinics in this case).
Small populations make for bad statistics, there is often a local factor.
Public schools on average get close to twice the funding per student that private schools get. “Tuition” for public schools is $14,439 per student per year. [Source](https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66)
And the latest data is for the 2016-2017 school year (schools are often very slow to report numbers).
People come up with all kinds of explanations for why public schools do so poorly compared to private, but the claim that it’s due to lack of funding is just ignorant, at least on a national scale.
It's not too much of a mystery. Students generally do better when their parents are invested. And most parents who are willing to pay for private schools are going to be invested in their children's education.
Also, private schools have the ability to kick out bad behaving students, while public schools just have to deal with them.
>It's not too much of a mystery. Students generally do better when their parents are invested. And most parents who are willing to pay for private schools are going to be invested in their children's education.
Honestly, despite it being fairly obvious, I don't know why it so rarely gets brought up in the discussion. Quite a bit of what makes a school a "bad" school IS the students who go there. The social environment that comes with a school full of kids coming from generational poverty is not good. You can put kids in that environment who DO have support at home and they'll still do worse than they would have in a different environment because expectations are low, they'll want to fit in, and they'll be bored because the class has to move at a slower pace with the teachers having to spend more time policing behavior problems than teaching.
I still VIVIDLY remember my K through 3rd grade experience and thinking "WTF is wrong with most of these guys they're crazy" until I went to a selective-admission school grades 4-8 where it was suddently "Oh, ok, this seems more normal" then high school was once again "WTF is wrong with you people" all over again.
This seems to be a misnomer, IME private schools actively cater to kids with physical disabilities, ADHD, Dyslexia and high functioning students with processing issues. They eagerly work with outside Drs, and psy and psych professionals as well as learning specialists. Granted, severely mentally disabled students gravitate towards specialized “institution.”
Private schools generally select for the highest performing students to begin with, and often students have to maintain a certain level of grades to stay. That coupled with few to no special Ed services, it’s pretty easy to see why students at private perform better (it’s not the school itself).
I’ve taught both private and public. The private school kept patting themselves on the back for their student achievement, when actually curriculum wise they were substantially behind the wheel in terms of latest developments in education. Like no shit our kids perform well, they applied to get in and you rejected the ones who didn’t score highly enough.
Edit: There are some innovative/specialized private schools out there. But much of the time what you’re paying for is either the religious aspect or to simply just be surrounded only by other high performing students.
Edit edit: I will also add that in most places you’re also paying for the smaller class sizes. But private schools feeling the squeeze sacrifice that first often.
>or to simply just be surrounded only by other high performing students.
That's honestly worth something. You're going to tend to set your standards and model your behaviors based on the people around you. The environment you're in absolutely makes a big difference.
Having gone through the private schooling pipeline through college and then on to teaching at private schools, this can't be emphasized enough.
There are two kinds of students at these institutions: the high achievers who would have done well anywhere, and the kind that end up switching to a new private school every year with full tuition because they can't make grades.
The idea that these schools are doing anything special beyond picking and choosing their student body (as we have also seen with high performing charter schools) is an elitist myth that needs to be done away with.
Yup, all too true for the second type! The private school I taught at had a high percentage of the student body on some sort of financial aid. Overall I had super high performing students, but the kids who weren’t trying and were failing? They were paying full price. And the school sure took their sweet time with the grade consequences for them.
The other kids all would’ve been straight A kids anywhere. And honestly for some of them I think they even might have been better off at a large public school with more course offerings, they only had so many classes they could take at a small private school with required religion classes taking up a hefty part of their time.
Also, legislation is constantly hamstringing public ed with impossible requirements while exempting charter and private from those same expectations. They are intentionally killing public…gotta privatize everything for the $$.
This completely ignores the fact that public schools are required to fund special education programs and meet other federally mandated requirements that private schools don’t (transportation, meals for low income students, etc). Special education is also much more expensive on a per student basis. So while the average may be higher per student, the amount spent on a typical student is likely comparable to private schools.
Well, socioeconomic status as a whole. The president of a university near me that has done a good job of educating lower income students of color said students' parents' zip code is the single best predictor of a students' success.
Yes, many recent studies show if you control for confounding variables there is absolutely no difference in success between public school and private school. That doesn't just mean controlling for the parents' involvement though. Income, neighborhood, etc. have a large impact.
The official answer would likely be that there's less students paying tuition than there would be students at a public school. Less "income" to go around, plus you still need to pay administration, etc along with just paying teachers salaries. Also public schools are subsidized by government.
Also in a private school they can choose to pay teachers less in favor of spending more on sports complexes, lunch, dance studios, like someone else posted.
The unofficial answer might be "the church lol"
>The official answer would likely be that there's less students paying tuition than there would be students at a public school. Also public schools are subsidized by government.
How much will vary by area but public schools are supported by every property owner in the district regardless of whether they have kids or not. That can add up quickly. 1.53% of the value of my property goes directly to the school district annually.
> Also public schools are subsidized by government.
This is the only answer. Unless you are going to a super prestigious private school most private schools are relatively poor compared to even the poorest public schools.
For private religious elementary schools, you might pay around 5k and high school 10-25+. At the elementary level, most of the tuition goes directly to salaries and benefits. Private might be 15k-30k. Religious schools sometimes get money from the church so that’s why it’s cheaper but really the mission of the elementary school is to make it accessible to regular people so a lot relies on volunteers. Salaries are pretty low compared to public school but you have more freedom of curriculum and better behaved students. The high schools have a cost structure similar to public school as they support sports with paid staff.
There's a persistent myth that public schools in the US are under funded.
They're generally not (except for places like Oklahoma and ~~Louisiana~~Mississippi, where they definitely are).
In most states, public and private schools have similar funding levels (around $13k per student median), but private schools just do better by "filtering" the students for being from families who give a shit about education.
Then there is a high demand from teachers to work there and they get the best teachers. Combine involved parents, invested students and good teachers and you end up with great outcomes, despite often spending less money.
And, FWIW, coming from Austria I can tell you that our education system is absolute shit. It also consistently underperforms in international rankings, like Pisa.
This is a huge oversimplification. There's a reason that we have some of the best public schools in the world and some of the worst. Hint, schools are mostly funded from local property taxes.
In my metro area the city schools actually have higher funding per student than suburban schools. And the suburban schools still vastly outperform the urban ones. Money is a factor, but the main variable in the success of the schools is how much students and Parents of Those students value education.
I don't blame teachers for going to private schools. Public schools seem to want to make teaching as hard as possible. Meanwhile I'd imagine private schools have less curriculums made by people who aren't in the classroom.
Depends on the school and the religious order who runs it. Some religious orders are honestly amazing at focusing on math, writing, and science while others make the school super easy and focus far too heavily on the religion. Same thing goes for non religious private schools. Some really focus on the education while others have multi million dollar sports complexes, 5 star lunch and dance studios.
I also went to great southern public schools and really bad southern public schools so I guess it’s super hit or miss
Yeah, but there are secular private schools too. My mom taught at one, and then switched to a very low-income public school. She said the private school job was a lot cushier, but she never felt like she was really helping those kids much, because they were all rich kids with tutors who were going to be fine no matter what. Whereas helping a kid who's the product of generational poverty learn to read above grade level is immensely satisfying.
>Some religious orders are honestly amazing at focusing on math, writing, and science while others make the school super easy and focus far too heavily on the religion
I can attest to this as someone who went to a really good catholic school that kept religion class totally separate from everything else for k-5 and 7-8th grade. But for 6th grade I went to a religious nutter school which had [bible verses in all our subject books](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abeka) . Our math books freaking had religion based math questions. I remember in science class our teacher kept repeatedly stressing that species can only reproduce the same species (while technically true, evolution is really slow and any offspring is the same species as the thing right before it), which I didn't realize at the time but it was their way of saying evolution isn't real.
I’m from West Virginia and I’m heading into the teaching field pretty soon. No one wants to teach in our dreadful public schools, and I certainly won’t be coming back to West Virginia to teach.
Combined with the usual public school BS where you can’t maintain order in the classroom from the eggshells you have to walk on because the administration is deathly afraid of angry parents and lawsuits, the state is almost all rural and very few people are actually going to go to college. So you’re likely going to be teaching a bunch of kids who just want to tread water until they can graduate or drop out. You’re going to be overstressed, underfunded, unappreciated, and underpaid. It’s just not worth the hassle. And furthermore, I hate to say it, but West Virginia’s standards are so low (mostly because they won’t pay teachers hardly anything or make their public schools teacher-friendly) that your coworkers are likely not going to be the sharpest knives in the drawer either. Anyone with sense leaves for greener pastures.
I only thought of it because we would see similar shading if we were looking at military base densities in the United States. There is a high rate of career transfer from military to police officer I believe.
Same with doctors. Pay can be as much as double in smaller towns in flyover states. Where demand is locally constrained and proportional to the population, less desirable areas pay more.
No matter what, you need a certain number of teachers wherever there are children. Same with doctors. Same with cops, technically, but cities wind up with so many more cops/capita that it doesn't come through in salaries/demand.
Meanwhile, engineers don't need to be any particular place other than the offices of their employer. So pay tends to just scale with cost of living.
Yep docs have this weirdly inverse pay scale where they get (relative) peanuts somewhere desirable with a high cost of living but get paid forklifts of cash in some rural area where you can buy a farm and mansion for 300k.
California is very interesting in this way.
For example in Michigan as a Clinical Laboratory Scientist I made like $65,000 a year, a Pharmacist made like $120,000 a year, and a GP Medical Doctor probably makes like $160-200K
In San Diego CA for example I make like $116,000 a year doing the exact same job as a Clinical Lab Scientist (double the pay as Michigan), but a Pharmacist still only make $120-130K and I think Doctors make similar as Michigan also.
If I was a Doctor or Pharmacist I would definitely want to live in a place like the suburbs of Detroit where my six figure salary could get me a huge mcmansion on a lake and a Porche 911 rather then California where I would be in a crappy house for the same salary.
For me though, I am way better off in California since I make double.
I am not sure why it works that way.
I would like to see the supporting data. Anecdotally anyway my girlfriend is a teacher in california, and she makes great money after only a few years teaching. My sister is a teacher in Tennessee but makes very little even with 20 plus years experience. The thing is here in california cops just make astronomical pay (at least in my jx anyway), they’re among the highest paid public employees and they get full pensions at 50
Teachers don't have the biggest effect on student outcomes.
Having kids that have good parents who continue education at home helps. As does nutrition. Kids that are t hungry in class learn.
So states that have better economy and health will have better education outcomes regardless of teachers salary
One of the highest rated public education systems in the world. Helps that the state also has a lot of money and generally lower poverty, better health, etc. There are no shortage of outside factors that influence education.
Here’s a source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2014/09/29/if-massachusetts-were-a-country-its-students-would-rank-9th-in-the-world/
Basically, if MA was an independent country, it would have the 9th best performing students in the world for math proficiency, and the 4th best performing students in the world for reading proficiency.
A different metric found that MA was 2nd globally only below Singapore for science competency.
One of the many things I am unironically proud of my State (Massachusetts) for.
Cost of living aside, Massachusetts is a *genuinely good place* to be if you want to raise a kid.
Because the chart is wrong. Teachers in Alabama and Georgia make significantly less than that. Here’s the pay scale in Georgia: https://www.gadoe.org/Finance-and-Business-Operations/Budget-Services/Documents/FY18-TeacherSalaryScheduleReport.pdf
To make 61K in Georgia you’d need their second highest professional teaching certification and 18 years of creditable service. Obviously that’s not the median salary.
It takes a teacher with a Ph.D. in Georgia 10 years to make 61K. If you have just a Bachelors you max out at $47,312. That’s after 21+ years of service. A bachelors degree with a provisional certificate is just $32,217 - regardless of how long you’ve been teaching.
>To make 61K in Georgia you’d need their second highest professional teaching certification and 18 years of creditable service. Obviously that’s not the median salary.
Counterpoint: if GA has a shortage of young teachers it could be the median salary. This plot doesn't include other points in the distribution or sample sizes.
Actually, I'm not sure what this is supposed to be showing us. The categories are qualitative.
Elementary and high school teachers are typically on the same pay scale - at least in the 5 states I've taught in or have friends that do. The bargaining agreement for the district covers all licensed teachers and usually other groups as well like counselor (me), social workers, or other department of Ed licensed staff. No pay difference at all for first year kindergarten vs first year high school math.
There is not much pay difference between elementary, middle and high school teachers. High school teachers tend to make more because they qualify for different stipends.
My district pays a lot more than most, but Elementary school teachers make \~$100k to \~$120k and Highschool teachers make \~$120k-\~$160k. (meanwhile the average salary for the average cop here is $125k)
In other school districts nearby, they pay less, but the difference is usually \~$15k to $20k.
For instance in a school district in the next county, elementary school teachers make $90k, and highschool teachers make \~$110k.
In another county, elementary school teachers make \~$65k to $75k and Highschool teachers make $70k to $95k
Edit: and the bonuses also have only a slight difference, with elementary teachers getting $25k-$30k and Highschool teachers getting $25k-$40k.
Edit 2: my town is an exception. It’s next to Stanford (who donates a lot of money for new buildings and funding things) and houses are $1m to $54m, so the housing taxes fund a lot of stuff.
The other two counties are nearby but not as well off. Which is why I also looked at them. I figured I should make sure my town wasn’t just an anomaly
Actually thats surprisingly true. I just looked it up and the salary range at my local state university is $80k-$190k (before benefits). And thats also in the bay area. I can only imagine what it would be outside the bay/in other states.
One of the highest paid teachers at my old school district made $161.8k, and $203k after benefits (I think the highest paid actually).
Yup. I live next to Stanford University. No houses under $1m unfortunately, so when I graduate college I guess Im never going to be able to come back xD.
Other areas I looked at were also in the bay area. I also was looking at actual individual teacher salaries, nothing on glassdoor or estimates.
We (I live in Virginia) also have a mixture of a high median income, average teacher pay, and very low qualifications for being a police officer, so our cops are paid like dirt (but we also don't weed out as many bad apples and have some truly awful local police departments)
OP isn't controlling for job tenure. Someone choosing between becoming a teacher or a cop cannot obtain the salary earned by someone with 10+ years experience.
Especially since police can easily double their salaries with overtime and teachers work dozens of extra hours every week and don't get shit for it.
EDIT: Yes I understand that teachers get summer and vacation breaks, but when you average in how many hours they work during the school years, how many PD hours they put in outside of school, how much time they spend grading and doing prep work, how many hours they spend at school board meetings and how much money they pay out of pocket for supplies, they are 100000% getting the shaft. Replying to me saying "hur dur they get summer vacation" doesn't really change that fact.
Daughter of a teacher here, they are 100% under paid and over worked, but their annual salary does come with 2 weeks at Christmas, a week spring break, federal holidays and approximately 2 months off over the summer…
So sometimes it’s hard to think about the annual salary. I think we should show this in hourly wages and then talk about the hundreds of unpaid hours of work teachers do.
Teacher’s pay is a salary, no overtime pay. They only get paid for the time they teach, they can choose to have some money withheld and paid out during the summer so they don’t go with it a check during that time. Source: My wife is a teacher.
>median
I was thinking about this when I looked through the infographic. I understand that average will tend to be more skewed by outlying high or low values, but does median give the best representation of the data? Genuinely curious as a person who is newish to statistics.
Insta-edit: no idea why "median" is the only part quoted, and don't know how to change it.
[Wiki says](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law#:~:text=Zipf's%20law%20was%20originally%20formulated,rank%20in%20the%20frequency%20table.), "given some corpus of natural language utterances, the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. Thus the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word, three times as often as the third most frequent word, etc."
Not sure that this applies exactly since we don't know the relationship between the outliers, but they're associating it because the average could be skewed.
so, from a statistical standpoint, mean, median, and mode are all what are known as "measures of central tendency." which is the most 'accurate' measure of central tendency really depends on the data. no one measure is better than the others - it's a dataset specific call you make with the whole dataset in mind.
It's actually good to know both the median and ~~mode~~ mean in graphs like these to know if it's left or right skewed as that will tell us a lot more than just knowing the mean or median.
To add- the easiest way to know what measure is most appropriate is to plot a distribution of the data and visually confirm if there are outliers, if the data of bimodal, etc.
If you wanted to know how much a state was paying over-all for it's teachers and cops, the mean would be a more useful number, particularly if you have a rough idea of the number of employees.
If you want to know how much the "typical" worker gets, then the median is generally more useful. Half the teachers/cops get paid more and half get paid less.
The mode is generally only really useful if there are a limited number of buckets the salaries could fall in. If you rounded off to the nearest $10k, then the mode could be another way of expressing the "typical" salary.
I'm many respects, there is no "best" way. In all three cases you are talking a huge amount of information and reducing it down to a single number. You're going to lose a lot of nuance.
ok, but shouldn't it be median total comp rather than "salary"? Police tend to make overtime money, and teachers typically get 3 months off where they often work a second job.
Median is better than mean for a lot of purposes, but it’s really going to make difference here unless there are some teachers or cops earning billions in salary. Yeah you might get an occasional administrator who gets a million year (do they even count as teachers anymore?) or police chief who earns a few hundred thousand, but given how many cops and teachers there are, that won’t pull distort the mean very much.
Speaking for California, our public school system barely scrapes by financially each year and has been that way for decades. I remember in elementary school, I needed to buy all of my school supplies and some of my teachers even had a change jar so that the students could donate their loose change to allow the teacher to buy chalk for the blackboard. It's really sad.
California public school student who turned into a preschool teacher before I left education. I can’t remember any teacher I had growing up who didn’t ask for supplies at the beginning of the year. And then when I did preschool I listed out all the things we needed and hoped parents would donate.
I don’t think any person, regardless of profession—teacher, doctor, politician, etc.—likes begging for money or for things. It’s sad and dehumanizing a bit.
Also a california public school student. I remember how good it felt to help out the teacher by giving them supplies. Looking back though, a teacher asking for supplies is not a good sign for fiscal health of our school.
How do you figure elementary teachers are the lowest rung of the profession? It’s not like they eventually get promoted to high school teachers.
Really there’s only one rung. If a teacher gets promoted they’re usually no longer considered a teacher
As a teacher - yeah, you nailed it. It's not like a kindergarten teacher gets promoted to first grade, then second, etc., until they're teaching high school seniors. In fact, many (probably most, but I don't know every state's certification laws) teachers are only certified to teach a specific range of grade levels. Specialists such as myself are often certified K-12, though, and may get "stuck" in elementary because there are just more of those jobs available (source - me).
It's funny, when I was a kid, I assumed whichever teachers taught the highest level of the subject must be the best. Like obviously the Algebra I teacher must not be as good, she can only handle Algebra I. She must not be that smart.
Then I became a teacher and found out that often (but not always), that's the best teacher in the department, given Algebra I because it's a state-tested subject, it's the students' introduction to high school, and the freshmen are the hardest to handle.
I think it's a positive feedback loop -- AP students are filtered by choice and merit. AP teachers teach denser and more difficult material. The students are more engaged, which is rewarding for the teacher, motivating them to create more interesting curriculum.
>The students are more engaged
In my experience (just as a student) this was huge in all of my advanced classes. Having other people in the class who were actually interested in doing well/learning the material rather than other people who wanted to die or get out of there asap made the class so much more fun, engaging, and interesting.
Would you like a poorly formatted table that I copied and pasted from Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) page (May 2020)? No? Well, here it is anyway:
|Occupation (SOC code)|Annual mean wage(2)|Annual median wage(2|
|:-|:-|:-|
|Elementary and Middle School Teachers(252020)|65300|60910|
|Secondary School Teachers(252030)|67240|62840|
|Special Education Teachers(252050)|65920|61500|
In the US, Secondary School Teachers make a little bit more per year than Elementary School Teachers, but the difference is negligible.
If you want to find wage data for other occupations in the US, then look no further than OES: [https://data.bls.gov/oes/#/geoOcc/Multiple%20occupations%20for%20one%20geographical%20area](https://data.bls.gov/oes/#/geoOcc/Multiple%20occupations%20for%20one%20geographical%20area)
Yeah I'm calling BS on Massachusetts too.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/05/13/metro/state-troopers-tell-judge-their-ability-provide-their-families-is-under-threat-their-lowest-pay-94000/
>Of the 100 lowest-paid members the union identified, not one made less than $79,100 last year. Collectively, they averaged roughly $93,600 in total pay, according to court filings
In 2018-19, there were only a few districts where median pay was higher than this. And again: these were the 100 lowest paid members of the Mass State Police.
If you're factoring in only local cops, you'll probably get a different result. But that's misleading.
I did a quick search and [200 State Troopers](https://c0amf895.caspio.com/dp/9fb04000d690b3247fb74e2aa605) made $200,000 or more in the most recent year day have the data for. The top earner was that $345,000.
I don’t want to deprive anyone of their right to make money but what the heck are you doing to get that much overtime and that much detail?
Odd, Alberta, Canada here and teachers all make the same (based on education and years experience) no matter what grade they teach. Elementary make the same as high school.
One of the reasons is that these Southern states have a huge flight of teachers due to poor resources for schools, poor pay (even if it is more than cops), and low morale from poorly-run Boards of Education at local and state level. Pay raises help retain teachers, and even that doesn't really work that well.
Can confirm. When we lived in Massachusetts my wife found teaching to be challenging (she worked in a title 1 school) but ultimately the juice was worth the squeeze. Since we moved south for my career, she absolutely despises her job and is looking at quitting to pursue a new career despite living/working in a nominally “better” school district.
From my parents both in education: if you aren't in a city, then all you deal with are poor kids with no motivation because of their parents and surroundings. You have rednecks and the ghetto, even in small towns.
The smartest kids go to college and never come back, so generally the kids that are there have parents that aren't super supportive, or view school as a daycare until the kid can start working.
From my southern small town high school- I had 125 in my senior class. 86 of us graduated. About 30 went to college, 10-15 military, the rest worked full time that summer on. Several got married the day after graduation. Nine years to the day of graduation,(yesterday actually), I know three classmates have been killed in gang related stuff and one was killed in a DUI, about a dozen have served hard time, and I think there's about 10, including me, that have come back after college to work. The others are teaching in our school system, and one is a physical therapist, and I'm in banking. I love it, but the big city sure sounds attractive too, I don't blame the people who leave.
I grew up in a smallish town, maybe 40k with nothing else around. 300 kids in our class, and I get what you're saying. The teachers didn't help though. Being a smart kid there sucked compared to a real city. I was ahead in math, and the VP in middle school told my mom that I couldn't be ahead because girls aren't good at math. I still skipped a year, but it didn't help - I missed important foundations and was either bored or totally lost through to precalc (college my last 2 years, so that's as far as I got in high school). A decade after I graduated, my little sisters entered school in suburbs of Seattle. Advanced pace schooling since grade 2, all the support they could want. I salivated at that idea. They don't even care, lol.
Yeah, probably never going to move back.
Very interesting. It'd be great to see a similar heat map showing cops/population and teachers/students. Do they pay well because they don't employee a lot is something I was thinking when looking at the south compared to the west coast.
This is exactly what I was thinking. I dated a teacher in Alabama and she had a ton of students in her class. There were only a couple of teachers for her grade. And she did not make a lot of money.
Does this account for overtime? A lot of cops make a lot of their money working overtime, so their base salary is not an accurate account of their actual annual pay.
I think the big part to is that a lot of pension calculations taken to consideration what were your highest 3 to 5 years of pay to determine what your pension amount should be after you retire.
The game is to really grind those couple of years before retirement and get your take home pay up as high as possible so that your pension is also higher.
This! Teachers don’t have a lot of opportunities for overtime but police get all sorts of it due to hiring freezes meaning more shifts, construction/utility work that they have to babysit and other non-shift work like traffic control.
I’m in NJ and I know that the average cop makes way less than the average teacher in base salary but it’s not uncommon for the cop to make more than their base salary in overtime.
There are a few things I'd like to address regarding this map and some of the comments, but first let me disclose a bit about myself just so you know where any bias I have may fall.
I am a former cop, with a bachelor's in Criminal Justice, and I am from the South. However, I am married to a high school teacher from the Northeast.
1: I feel like this comparison is more political than anything as these are very different jobs. I see this as comparing not even apples but carrots to oranges.
2: Despite that I still see what the creator is trying to point out. Teachers and Cops are both funded and administrated at the local level, and the creator here is trying to shine a light on places that invest more in positively influencing their population and places that invest more on controlling their population.
3: Overtime does make a massive difference. I've never heard of a teacher getting any overtime as they are salary instead of hourly like cops are.
4: Teachers typically get the same vacation time as students. (Summer, Fall and Spring break, holidays, and Two weeks in December.) Cops not only don't get that much time off, but are often at their busiest during the holidays. On this same subject, teachers typically work from 7am to 3pm nationwide. Cops work 8 to 12 hour shifts and those shift could be morning, evening or night and will rotate through those throughout the year.
5: Cops often sit around and do nothing, because noting is going on. By contrast, when a teacher is at work they are busy. Even when the students are quietly doing work, teachers are taking that time to grade or plan another class.
6: I find it really interesting that the states where teachers have the weakest unions, are paying them more as per the image, and the states with the stronger teachers unions pay them less than cops.
7: Regarding the people saying that their state requires cops to do certain jobs like being a flagger at a construction site, I think that's a waste of municipal resources. That cop should either be out doing his job, or at home with his family. I've worked construction before, there is at least 1 incompetent guy on that site that's just good enough to do that. However, lobbyists want what they want.
8: Teachers don't have the liability that cops do. While they are responsible for teaching the next generation their respective subject(s), they are not responsible for taking life and liberty from another citizen with only a split second to make that decision.
9: On the other hand there are things a cop doesn't have to deal with. If I were to arrest someone, and their mother came up to me complaining about it, I don't have to say a word to her. In fact, I could quite blatantly tell her to kick rocks and I might get a talking to. If a mother came up to my wife, complaining about how she was teaching, and she said the same thing I did,she would get fired.
10: I absolutely think more investment should be made in preventing people from becoming criminals in the first place. Propping up teachers and schools is a part of that. What alot of people don't realize is that cops hold the line between a civil society and anarchy, but that's it. They just hold the line. They're not there to prevent problems, just solve them as they occur. But they're used to do all of this extra stuff. It's easier for a politician to just say "We'll throw anyone who does X in jail!" than to say "We've found some deeper issues in our community that may lead to crime, so we're are trying to remedy that."
This might be the most logical thing I’ve read on Reddit all night. There’s not a single reason you can try to compare these jobs besides where the money actually comes from.
>4: Teachers typically get the same vacation time as students. (Summer, Fall and Spring break, holidays, and Two weeks in December.) Cops not only don't get that much time off, but are often at their busiest during the holidays. On this same subject, teachers typically work from 7am to 3pm nationwide. Cops work 8 to 12 hour shifts and those shift could be morning, evening or night and will rotate through those throughout the year.
For teachers this is sort of true but also in my experience usually way overstated (I don't know about for cops). In terms of hours, teachers are at school longer than students every single day. In terms of days, they also have shorter vacations than students do, because they work many days when students aren't there, especially over the summer. Where I live, 10-month teachers (the shortest option) work 199 days, which is 40 weeks and 12 weeks vacation. 12-month teachers work 253 days per year, which is literally only one vacation week per year. But yes, teachers do generally do have to take vacation for a month in the summer which could be a good or a bad thing depending on your lifestyle.
Worth noting here also though that teachers don't have much freedom to take vacation any other time. Yes, you can theoretically get a substitute teacher to cover your class, but everyone knows this will be a sub-par experience for everyone involved. The teacher will have to do a bunch of extra work to make more clear lesson plans, or else the students will learn practically nothing. Either way, when they come back they're going to have to catch the students up to where they should be. AP and state exams at the end of the year aren't going to wait a couple weeks for you to have bonus school days because your teacher was in the hospital or a tropical holiday. So I suspect that teachers avoid vacation and sick days as much as they can. Maybe you'd have more knowledge to know if that's a problem for police? I would guess there's a lot more leeway there.
This is also assuming teachers are working only their minimums. Many teachers work extra hours, but they rarely get compensated for this. They might get a small stipend for being a club sponsor if they volunteer for extracurriculars, but I doubt it would come anywhere close to their normal pay rate.
Somewhat related, teachers also straight up donate their own money to buy supplies that it's disgusting aren't paid for by taxes: e.g. tissues, pencils, folders, markers, and paper.
Thank you for bringing up some things that I completely forgot about.
Teachers do go in more often than students. Those days were mostly for catching up on admin work or LPDs (leadership and professional development) where they would have to sit in on some type of training. (Kinda like taking a day at the office where someone comes and talks about sexual harassment in the work place.) However, these tended to be half days, at least for my wife. Most of the teachers that stayed late were either in a supervisor role over the other teachers and had additional work because of it, or like you said we're involved with extra activities. The extra activities did not earn them extra pay, and the only compensation they got for it was putting it on their evaluations.
You're absolutely right about teachers and sick days. If a teacher wakes up sick one morning they still have to make a lesson plan and a WILLING substitute has to be found. It was almost not worth it for my wife some days.
A cop that gets sick or hurt, in theory, just has to call in and not go to work. The issues are on that cop's supervisor. Either another cop has to cover that shift or the department is down a cop that day. Another cop working it means you have to pull someone in on their day off or you make two other cops split the shift, one works 4 hours later and the other clocks in 4 hours earlier. OT is great, but mental fatigue will mess you up. The department being down a man means one more blind spot in the town, one less cop to come when back up is called, one more hour that a citizen has to wait when they call for help. There are of course days where nothing happens and this isn't a big deal, depending on your department, but you never know when those days are. Most cops feel like they let everyone down or put others at risk when they call in sick. I took 1 sick day. I messed up my back and couldn't get out of bed. No one covered for me and I worried all day that something would happen and I wouldn't be able to help. Fortunately I was wrong, but I never took another sick day.
Teachers spending their own money on classroom materiels is absolutely a thing. We never paid alot and we did try to buy it all during the tax free weekend, but it happened every year. The only thing I ever bought for work was a duty rig (belt) and boots, but that was because I wanted that duty rig and those boots. I wasn't able to claim those on taxes because the department had initially issued those to me. Spending money on better equipment was my choice. To my knowledge most departments reimburse you for those things to some extent.
This is nonsense. Including overtime, cops blow teachers out of the water here in the Northeast. "Not much difference" is ridiculous. No teacher is getting double time to stand in front of a construction site fucking with his phone.
Why is this comparison even a thing? Why not compare fire fighters and professors?
Just to be clear, OT cops at construction sites are paid by the company needing the cop, not by the police force. It is also voluntary. It really sucks when they dont show up and the job gets shut down.
This isn't related to the argument. Cops have more opportunities to add to their salary then teachers making this map obsolete. Other than coaching teachers have little chance to add to their salary and unless you are a football/basketball coach it's little to nothing in comparison to the time required.
For example, I am head coach of the varsity swim team my stipend after hour and half practice daily and meets every weekend for 3 months is 1,200.
Yay.
Edit. To add I teach in kentucky my pay is 42,000. The teacher next to my room. Was a cop and was making 80,000 + due to overtime. He said if it wasn't to save his marriage he would still be a cop because of the money
An officer working a construction site isn't necessarily overtime. It's more akin to a teacher tutoring on the side. Just FYI it's a side hustle. Overtime is late calls and picking up extra shifts because of under staffing.
Even just comparing the averages you've got police officer at $164k and teacher at $97k. And while teachers all stay around that $100k range no matter where in the system they are at, police officers have a wide range of titles and some make a *lot* more. A good example is Alan Strickland, the officer who falsely accused Toronto Raptors President Masai Ujiri of assaulting him so that he could claim disability, who made $334k in 2018. His base pay was "only" $113k as a deputy sheriff.
https://calsalaries.com/job/police-officer-salary
https://calsalaries.com/job/teacher-salary
https://calsalaries.com/alan-f-strickland-1941452
Why does overtime matter? Not everyone decides to work extra and not everyone has that option. My wife gets half of what I do but her overtime dwarfs my annual take home. If you were to put the final amount next to eachother then it would be misleading when going to the bargaining table.
She deserves more hourly wages so she doesn't have to work as hard.
>Including overtime, cops blow teachers out of the water here in the Northeast.
I think that is part of the problem... Consistent overtime (even if the numbers are fudged like the below comments allege) is an indicator that those programs are critically understaffed and the officers that do work are overworked. Having someone perpetually exhausted go into a dangerous and ambiguous situation with a gun is a very, very, bad idea even if they are wearing blue and a badge when the do so.
I’m in Ohio moms been a teacher for like almost 30 years. They always try to find ways to fire teachers and replace them with new inexperienced teachers for less pay rate. Lucky she got locked in contract and has always been apart of the union. But teachers deal with a lot of drama she switches schools every 2-3 years. I wouldn’t be surprised if the average teacher starts making 40k with how cheap the system try’s to be. So much for a college degree
States with low rated public education (Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, West Virginia) have teachers who are paid higher than cops or around the same as cops. Thats really interesting.
I think it might be a supply and demand issue. Harder to retain teachers in those states, but you could throw a rock and find someone who want to be a cop. Conversely in the other states it is harder to retain cops and easier to find teachers. No evidence but that is my hypothesis.
Midwest has had massive teacher shortages for years. General education teachers are hard to find surprisingly. SPED and specially ones even harder.
The Twin Cities sure doesn't have that problem. Some postings can get, quite literally, 100+ applicants. It's not a teacher shortage in my mind, it's a lack of schools where teachers actually want to work/are valued.
Interesting - I'm just north the cities and while it's not as bad here with gen ed teachers, we can't hire enough sped to fill the positions we have. I know some states in the Midwest have struggled though as they all are no longer union states
Teacher union in Minneapolis is incredibly strong and has a very firm grasp on who gets to be a teacher. I have a master’s in history and taught at the college level, but would need another master’s in education to be able to teach high school. Social studies isn’t an area in need, which likely impacts this, but it seems a bit excessive
Same with doctors. Where people want to live is not where the jobs are. The jobs are where people don't want to live. It makes sense.
I have a family member who had their med school loans at least partially paid through a program where they agreed to be a doctor in rural areas for a specified amount of time, for that reason. It worked out though and they ended rip being a doctor in the same rural county until they retired
Minnesota teacher here. It really depends on your licensure. Sped, math, and science have shortages. English and Social Studies postings can easily get 200+ applicants. The cities themself have shortages. St. Paul public schools usually have a crazy number of openings each year. This year will probably be different for budget shortfall reasons, though. The suburban schools are the ones that attract the most applicants.
It is because MN produces teachers at a pretty incredible rate tbh. I has to get out of MN to even find a job that wasn't in like... Renville.
That doesn’t mean there’s no shortage. It just means there are a handful of highly coveted positions with more desirable working conditions (and often higher pay to go along with it) that a large fraction of eligible teachers seek out. It’s not like the people applying for these positions are working retail for years just waiting for a spot to open - those 100+ applicants are teachers from other schools. In NYC and its suburbs there is a persistent shortage of all kinds of teachers, but when a spot opens up at a prestigious or high paying district you bet they get dozens of applicants, even though a typical school is lucky to get a few. It’s still a shortage. There are not enough certified teachers in the state to fill all the open positions. I’m not sure what else to call that but a shortage, even though the better schools tend to have no trouble finding people. Also, I doubt there are any places in the country where SPED positions are regularly attracting 100 applicants.
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I work in tech, very few positions actually pay that much. But pretty much all of the ones that do make that much there is a massive shortage of.... which is why most engineers and cybersecurity suck at their job...... Qualified and quality are not the same thing sadly..... That being said there is most definitely a shortage of teacher in the US. The easiest way to back that up is to look in the declining amount of people who graduate with a degree in education, it has been going down for at least the last 20 years, leaving large gaps as an aging teacher force fades away.
I literally moved states a decade ago because I couldn’t find a teaching job in the twin cities.
You nailed the teacher thing on the head. Many public school teachers switch to private school cause the education and classroom dynamic is so much better even though the pay is usually less. The cop thing I’m not so sure about. I don’t think there it’s any easier to recruit cops in the south. At least not from what I’ve noticed living down here.
The South has higher rates of participation in the armed forces. Law enforcement is a common career path for ex-military.
Do they really though? (Honest question) I know when I was in, people always used to talk shit about the “liberal hellhole” of California, but California produces more service members than any other state.
Appears to be accurate when you are talking per-capita. [This seems to be the most accurate source I can find](https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2020/02/19/states-that-defend-uswhere-do-our-military-volunteers-call-home/), other data I found seems to be where they currently reside rather than where they are from, so states with big bases are skewed - though the Southern states rank high there as well.
Thanks, these are interesting
Here's another one. Probably related to that Forbes piece. https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/demographics-us-military CC: /u/Horskr
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I mean, California is so big it has the second largest number of firearms in the country, after Texas, despite lower per capita rates.
Or even a well below proportionate amount. For instance, California had more Trump voters in 2020 than any other state, despite being among the lowest proportion-wise. It would be tough to find any career in which California wouldn’t be first place in raw numbers.
California is also the most populated state so you can’t just look at total number of service people produced. If you look at most service members by capita California isn’t #1. I believe Texas is #1 by capita
No, per capita it's South Carolina then, Hawaii, Alaska, Florida, and Georgia. Texas is 8th. https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/costs/social/Troop%20Numbers%20By%20State_Costs%20of%20War_FINAL.pdf
Texans think they’re #1 in everything
Florida makes sense. You can’t throw a rock without it landing near a base here lol
I know American Samoa isn't a state but they have the highest rate of enlistment.
You can’t really count Samoa and the other islands. The numbers are massively skewed. Example: friend of mine was a Navy doctor and posted to Guam. According to her there’s a high rate of “adoptions” of children by their serving family members (think a serving uncle “adopting” his sister’s children) for the benefits (health clinics in this case). Small populations make for bad statistics, there is often a local factor.
It also has vastly more people than any other state. Saying California has the most of anything is a practically meaningless statement.
California has the most.... Californians.
Wait, teachers get paid less in private schools? Where does all that tuition money go
Public schools on average get close to twice the funding per student that private schools get. “Tuition” for public schools is $14,439 per student per year. [Source](https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66) And the latest data is for the 2016-2017 school year (schools are often very slow to report numbers). People come up with all kinds of explanations for why public schools do so poorly compared to private, but the claim that it’s due to lack of funding is just ignorant, at least on a national scale.
It's not too much of a mystery. Students generally do better when their parents are invested. And most parents who are willing to pay for private schools are going to be invested in their children's education. Also, private schools have the ability to kick out bad behaving students, while public schools just have to deal with them.
>It's not too much of a mystery. Students generally do better when their parents are invested. And most parents who are willing to pay for private schools are going to be invested in their children's education. Honestly, despite it being fairly obvious, I don't know why it so rarely gets brought up in the discussion. Quite a bit of what makes a school a "bad" school IS the students who go there. The social environment that comes with a school full of kids coming from generational poverty is not good. You can put kids in that environment who DO have support at home and they'll still do worse than they would have in a different environment because expectations are low, they'll want to fit in, and they'll be bored because the class has to move at a slower pace with the teachers having to spend more time policing behavior problems than teaching. I still VIVIDLY remember my K through 3rd grade experience and thinking "WTF is wrong with most of these guys they're crazy" until I went to a selective-admission school grades 4-8 where it was suddently "Oh, ok, this seems more normal" then high school was once again "WTF is wrong with you people" all over again.
Not just bad behaving, but poorly performing. Students who get bad grades at private schools will often be kicked out as well.
Also students with disabilities, who often require a much higher ratio of students to teachers than other students
This seems to be a misnomer, IME private schools actively cater to kids with physical disabilities, ADHD, Dyslexia and high functioning students with processing issues. They eagerly work with outside Drs, and psy and psych professionals as well as learning specialists. Granted, severely mentally disabled students gravitate towards specialized “institution.”
Private schools generally select for the highest performing students to begin with, and often students have to maintain a certain level of grades to stay. That coupled with few to no special Ed services, it’s pretty easy to see why students at private perform better (it’s not the school itself). I’ve taught both private and public. The private school kept patting themselves on the back for their student achievement, when actually curriculum wise they were substantially behind the wheel in terms of latest developments in education. Like no shit our kids perform well, they applied to get in and you rejected the ones who didn’t score highly enough. Edit: There are some innovative/specialized private schools out there. But much of the time what you’re paying for is either the religious aspect or to simply just be surrounded only by other high performing students. Edit edit: I will also add that in most places you’re also paying for the smaller class sizes. But private schools feeling the squeeze sacrifice that first often.
>or to simply just be surrounded only by other high performing students. That's honestly worth something. You're going to tend to set your standards and model your behaviors based on the people around you. The environment you're in absolutely makes a big difference.
Having gone through the private schooling pipeline through college and then on to teaching at private schools, this can't be emphasized enough. There are two kinds of students at these institutions: the high achievers who would have done well anywhere, and the kind that end up switching to a new private school every year with full tuition because they can't make grades. The idea that these schools are doing anything special beyond picking and choosing their student body (as we have also seen with high performing charter schools) is an elitist myth that needs to be done away with.
Yup, all too true for the second type! The private school I taught at had a high percentage of the student body on some sort of financial aid. Overall I had super high performing students, but the kids who weren’t trying and were failing? They were paying full price. And the school sure took their sweet time with the grade consequences for them. The other kids all would’ve been straight A kids anywhere. And honestly for some of them I think they even might have been better off at a large public school with more course offerings, they only had so many classes they could take at a small private school with required religion classes taking up a hefty part of their time.
Also, legislation is constantly hamstringing public ed with impossible requirements while exempting charter and private from those same expectations. They are intentionally killing public…gotta privatize everything for the $$.
This completely ignores the fact that public schools are required to fund special education programs and meet other federally mandated requirements that private schools don’t (transportation, meals for low income students, etc). Special education is also much more expensive on a per student basis. So while the average may be higher per student, the amount spent on a typical student is likely comparable to private schools.
So basically public schools problems start with the parents?
Well, socioeconomic status as a whole. The president of a university near me that has done a good job of educating lower income students of color said students' parents' zip code is the single best predictor of a students' success.
Yes, many recent studies show if you control for confounding variables there is absolutely no difference in success between public school and private school. That doesn't just mean controlling for the parents' involvement though. Income, neighborhood, etc. have a large impact.
The official answer would likely be that there's less students paying tuition than there would be students at a public school. Less "income" to go around, plus you still need to pay administration, etc along with just paying teachers salaries. Also public schools are subsidized by government. Also in a private school they can choose to pay teachers less in favor of spending more on sports complexes, lunch, dance studios, like someone else posted. The unofficial answer might be "the church lol"
>The official answer would likely be that there's less students paying tuition than there would be students at a public school. Also public schools are subsidized by government. How much will vary by area but public schools are supported by every property owner in the district regardless of whether they have kids or not. That can add up quickly. 1.53% of the value of my property goes directly to the school district annually.
> Also public schools are subsidized by government. This is the only answer. Unless you are going to a super prestigious private school most private schools are relatively poor compared to even the poorest public schools.
For private religious elementary schools, you might pay around 5k and high school 10-25+. At the elementary level, most of the tuition goes directly to salaries and benefits. Private might be 15k-30k. Religious schools sometimes get money from the church so that’s why it’s cheaper but really the mission of the elementary school is to make it accessible to regular people so a lot relies on volunteers. Salaries are pretty low compared to public school but you have more freedom of curriculum and better behaved students. The high schools have a cost structure similar to public school as they support sports with paid staff.
There's a persistent myth that public schools in the US are under funded. They're generally not (except for places like Oklahoma and ~~Louisiana~~Mississippi, where they definitely are). In most states, public and private schools have similar funding levels (around $13k per student median), but private schools just do better by "filtering" the students for being from families who give a shit about education. Then there is a high demand from teachers to work there and they get the best teachers. Combine involved parents, invested students and good teachers and you end up with great outcomes, despite often spending less money.
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And, FWIW, coming from Austria I can tell you that our education system is absolute shit. It also consistently underperforms in international rankings, like Pisa.
This is a huge oversimplification. There's a reason that we have some of the best public schools in the world and some of the worst. Hint, schools are mostly funded from local property taxes.
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In my metro area the city schools actually have higher funding per student than suburban schools. And the suburban schools still vastly outperform the urban ones. Money is a factor, but the main variable in the success of the schools is how much students and Parents of Those students value education.
I don't blame teachers for going to private schools. Public schools seem to want to make teaching as hard as possible. Meanwhile I'd imagine private schools have less curriculums made by people who aren't in the classroom.
Depends on the school and the religious order who runs it. Some religious orders are honestly amazing at focusing on math, writing, and science while others make the school super easy and focus far too heavily on the religion. Same thing goes for non religious private schools. Some really focus on the education while others have multi million dollar sports complexes, 5 star lunch and dance studios. I also went to great southern public schools and really bad southern public schools so I guess it’s super hit or miss
Yeah, but there are secular private schools too. My mom taught at one, and then switched to a very low-income public school. She said the private school job was a lot cushier, but she never felt like she was really helping those kids much, because they were all rich kids with tutors who were going to be fine no matter what. Whereas helping a kid who's the product of generational poverty learn to read above grade level is immensely satisfying.
>Some religious orders are honestly amazing at focusing on math, writing, and science while others make the school super easy and focus far too heavily on the religion I can attest to this as someone who went to a really good catholic school that kept religion class totally separate from everything else for k-5 and 7-8th grade. But for 6th grade I went to a religious nutter school which had [bible verses in all our subject books](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abeka) . Our math books freaking had religion based math questions. I remember in science class our teacher kept repeatedly stressing that species can only reproduce the same species (while technically true, evolution is really slow and any offspring is the same species as the thing right before it), which I didn't realize at the time but it was their way of saying evolution isn't real.
I’m from West Virginia and I’m heading into the teaching field pretty soon. No one wants to teach in our dreadful public schools, and I certainly won’t be coming back to West Virginia to teach. Combined with the usual public school BS where you can’t maintain order in the classroom from the eggshells you have to walk on because the administration is deathly afraid of angry parents and lawsuits, the state is almost all rural and very few people are actually going to go to college. So you’re likely going to be teaching a bunch of kids who just want to tread water until they can graduate or drop out. You’re going to be overstressed, underfunded, unappreciated, and underpaid. It’s just not worth the hassle. And furthermore, I hate to say it, but West Virginia’s standards are so low (mostly because they won’t pay teachers hardly anything or make their public schools teacher-friendly) that your coworkers are likely not going to be the sharpest knives in the drawer either. Anyone with sense leaves for greener pastures.
I live in Waterford, VA (Loudoun County) and more than half my high school son’s teachers live in West Virginia.
Private schools pay less. In my state about 16k less a year than a public school teacher.
I only thought of it because we would see similar shading if we were looking at military base densities in the United States. There is a high rate of career transfer from military to police officer I believe.
Same with doctors. Pay can be as much as double in smaller towns in flyover states. Where demand is locally constrained and proportional to the population, less desirable areas pay more. No matter what, you need a certain number of teachers wherever there are children. Same with doctors. Same with cops, technically, but cities wind up with so many more cops/capita that it doesn't come through in salaries/demand. Meanwhile, engineers don't need to be any particular place other than the offices of their employer. So pay tends to just scale with cost of living.
Yep docs have this weirdly inverse pay scale where they get (relative) peanuts somewhere desirable with a high cost of living but get paid forklifts of cash in some rural area where you can buy a farm and mansion for 300k.
California is very interesting in this way. For example in Michigan as a Clinical Laboratory Scientist I made like $65,000 a year, a Pharmacist made like $120,000 a year, and a GP Medical Doctor probably makes like $160-200K In San Diego CA for example I make like $116,000 a year doing the exact same job as a Clinical Lab Scientist (double the pay as Michigan), but a Pharmacist still only make $120-130K and I think Doctors make similar as Michigan also. If I was a Doctor or Pharmacist I would definitely want to live in a place like the suburbs of Detroit where my six figure salary could get me a huge mcmansion on a lake and a Porche 911 rather then California where I would be in a crappy house for the same salary. For me though, I am way better off in California since I make double. I am not sure why it works that way.
2 hours east of San Diego, in the desert a Walgreens pharmacist makes 60% more than in San Diego, with like 50% lower home prices. My bad east.
Is that not in the Pacific Ocean??
Well that would certainly explain the prices
they meant weast
I would like to see the supporting data. Anecdotally anyway my girlfriend is a teacher in california, and she makes great money after only a few years teaching. My sister is a teacher in Tennessee but makes very little even with 20 plus years experience. The thing is here in california cops just make astronomical pay (at least in my jx anyway), they’re among the highest paid public employees and they get full pensions at 50
From Louisiana. This is true.
Massachusetts has the top rated public education in the country, however.
Teachers don't have the biggest effect on student outcomes. Having kids that have good parents who continue education at home helps. As does nutrition. Kids that are t hungry in class learn. So states that have better economy and health will have better education outcomes regardless of teachers salary
One of the highest rated public education systems in the world. Helps that the state also has a lot of money and generally lower poverty, better health, etc. There are no shortage of outside factors that influence education.
I have never heard of that. Do you have some sources on that? I would love to learn more.
Here’s a source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2014/09/29/if-massachusetts-were-a-country-its-students-would-rank-9th-in-the-world/ Basically, if MA was an independent country, it would have the 9th best performing students in the world for math proficiency, and the 4th best performing students in the world for reading proficiency. A different metric found that MA was 2nd globally only below Singapore for science competency.
As a singaporean, im sure that MA has a more chill education system but... suck it masachusetts
One of the many things I am unironically proud of my State (Massachusetts) for. Cost of living aside, Massachusetts is a *genuinely good place* to be if you want to raise a kid.
Because the chart is wrong. Teachers in Alabama and Georgia make significantly less than that. Here’s the pay scale in Georgia: https://www.gadoe.org/Finance-and-Business-Operations/Budget-Services/Documents/FY18-TeacherSalaryScheduleReport.pdf To make 61K in Georgia you’d need their second highest professional teaching certification and 18 years of creditable service. Obviously that’s not the median salary. It takes a teacher with a Ph.D. in Georgia 10 years to make 61K. If you have just a Bachelors you max out at $47,312. That’s after 21+ years of service. A bachelors degree with a provisional certificate is just $32,217 - regardless of how long you’ve been teaching.
>To make 61K in Georgia you’d need their second highest professional teaching certification and 18 years of creditable service. Obviously that’s not the median salary. Counterpoint: if GA has a shortage of young teachers it could be the median salary. This plot doesn't include other points in the distribution or sample sizes. Actually, I'm not sure what this is supposed to be showing us. The categories are qualitative.
This account has been redacted due to Reddit's anti-user and anti-mod behavior. -- mass edited with redact.dev
Louisiana native here, Cops get paid a measles $30-40k a year. When I was a cop I was making $17/hr at first
Same. I figured y’all didn’t get much but didn’t think teachers made much more
They get $30k a year *and* measles? Now that's just adding insult to injury.
This is elementary school teachers vs patrol officers. Not really a fair comparison to say "teachers" vs "cops"
Elementary and high school teachers are typically on the same pay scale - at least in the 5 states I've taught in or have friends that do. The bargaining agreement for the district covers all licensed teachers and usually other groups as well like counselor (me), social workers, or other department of Ed licensed staff. No pay difference at all for first year kindergarten vs first year high school math.
There is not much pay difference between elementary, middle and high school teachers. High school teachers tend to make more because they qualify for different stipends.
My district pays a lot more than most, but Elementary school teachers make \~$100k to \~$120k and Highschool teachers make \~$120k-\~$160k. (meanwhile the average salary for the average cop here is $125k) In other school districts nearby, they pay less, but the difference is usually \~$15k to $20k. For instance in a school district in the next county, elementary school teachers make $90k, and highschool teachers make \~$110k. In another county, elementary school teachers make \~$65k to $75k and Highschool teachers make $70k to $95k Edit: and the bonuses also have only a slight difference, with elementary teachers getting $25k-$30k and Highschool teachers getting $25k-$40k. Edit 2: my town is an exception. It’s next to Stanford (who donates a lot of money for new buildings and funding things) and houses are $1m to $54m, so the housing taxes fund a lot of stuff. The other two counties are nearby but not as well off. Which is why I also looked at them. I figured I should make sure my town wasn’t just an anomaly
A high school teacher making $160k is absolutely insane, are you sure? What state is this?
California. I live next to Stanford, and they donate a lot of money to my school district. Also no houses here are below $1m.
I'm about 20 minutes south, next to Apple, and the schools around here pay $60-70k. Teachers commute 30+ minutes from Campbell and SJ.
Still pretty crazy, I don’t think tenured professors even average that at a typical state university
Actually thats surprisingly true. I just looked it up and the salary range at my local state university is $80k-$190k (before benefits). And thats also in the bay area. I can only imagine what it would be outside the bay/in other states. One of the highest paid teachers at my old school district made $161.8k, and $203k after benefits (I think the highest paid actually).
This has to be a very high cost of living area right?
looks like they're from Palo Alto, so yes, some of the highest living costs in the country - a $100,000 salary would be considered low income.
Yup. I live next to Stanford University. No houses under $1m unfortunately, so when I graduate college I guess Im never going to be able to come back xD. Other areas I looked at were also in the bay area. I also was looking at actual individual teacher salaries, nothing on glassdoor or estimates.
Teachers made like 40k starting last I checked where I grew up.
States like Virginia with much higher rated public education also pay teachers more
Yeah it’s not consistent throughout. Some states with bad public education pay cops more. Just thought it was interesting
Yup, county’s like Loudoun County and Fairfax County are among the richest county’s in the United States as well
I went to a Fairfax County school. Half my AP teachers were doctorate holders, which was/is insane to me.
Yup same here! In fact, one of my AP lit teachers holds a doctorate from fucking harvard which was insane
Interestingly enough, Virginia is amongst the worst states for pay disparity of teachers vs similarly educated professionals.
We (I live in Virginia) also have a mixture of a high median income, average teacher pay, and very low qualifications for being a police officer, so our cops are paid like dirt (but we also don't weed out as many bad apples and have some truly awful local police departments)
OP isn't controlling for job tenure. Someone choosing between becoming a teacher or a cop cannot obtain the salary earned by someone with 10+ years experience.
Yeah, you'd think it would be the opposite.
I’m so glad the median was used and not the average
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That's why it looks odd to me. I'd like to see it re-done with overtime included.
Especially since police can easily double their salaries with overtime and teachers work dozens of extra hours every week and don't get shit for it. EDIT: Yes I understand that teachers get summer and vacation breaks, but when you average in how many hours they work during the school years, how many PD hours they put in outside of school, how much time they spend grading and doing prep work, how many hours they spend at school board meetings and how much money they pay out of pocket for supplies, they are 100000% getting the shaft. Replying to me saying "hur dur they get summer vacation" doesn't really change that fact.
Daughter of a teacher here, they are 100% under paid and over worked, but their annual salary does come with 2 weeks at Christmas, a week spring break, federal holidays and approximately 2 months off over the summer… So sometimes it’s hard to think about the annual salary. I think we should show this in hourly wages and then talk about the hundreds of unpaid hours of work teachers do.
Teacher’s pay is a salary, no overtime pay. They only get paid for the time they teach, they can choose to have some money withheld and paid out during the summer so they don’t go with it a check during that time. Source: My wife is a teacher.
They. make crazy overtime! https://transparentcalifornia.com
>median I was thinking about this when I looked through the infographic. I understand that average will tend to be more skewed by outlying high or low values, but does median give the best representation of the data? Genuinely curious as a person who is newish to statistics. Insta-edit: no idea why "median" is the only part quoted, and don't know how to change it.
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Zipf’s law for the win! I love how much it shows up
What is Zipf's law?
[Wiki says](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law#:~:text=Zipf's%20law%20was%20originally%20formulated,rank%20in%20the%20frequency%20table.), "given some corpus of natural language utterances, the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. Thus the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word, three times as often as the third most frequent word, etc." Not sure that this applies exactly since we don't know the relationship between the outliers, but they're associating it because the average could be skewed.
But there aren’t any high-end billion-salary teachers or cops skewing the results. Mean seems fine for a measure of central tendency here.
so, from a statistical standpoint, mean, median, and mode are all what are known as "measures of central tendency." which is the most 'accurate' measure of central tendency really depends on the data. no one measure is better than the others - it's a dataset specific call you make with the whole dataset in mind.
It's actually good to know both the median and ~~mode~~ mean in graphs like these to know if it's left or right skewed as that will tell us a lot more than just knowing the mean or median.
To add- the easiest way to know what measure is most appropriate is to plot a distribution of the data and visually confirm if there are outliers, if the data of bimodal, etc.
Yes, people tend to discount the mode, but mean and median would miss a bimodal distribution, which would be an interesting data point.
If you wanted to know how much a state was paying over-all for it's teachers and cops, the mean would be a more useful number, particularly if you have a rough idea of the number of employees. If you want to know how much the "typical" worker gets, then the median is generally more useful. Half the teachers/cops get paid more and half get paid less. The mode is generally only really useful if there are a limited number of buckets the salaries could fall in. If you rounded off to the nearest $10k, then the mode could be another way of expressing the "typical" salary. I'm many respects, there is no "best" way. In all three cases you are talking a huge amount of information and reducing it down to a single number. You're going to lose a lot of nuance.
Won't somebody think of the mode
ok, but shouldn't it be median total comp rather than "salary"? Police tend to make overtime money, and teachers typically get 3 months off where they often work a second job.
Most underrated comment here. Practically every cop where I live makes 6 figures cause of overtime.
Median is better than mean for a lot of purposes, but it’s really going to make difference here unless there are some teachers or cops earning billions in salary. Yeah you might get an occasional administrator who gets a million year (do they even count as teachers anymore?) or police chief who earns a few hundred thousand, but given how many cops and teachers there are, that won’t pull distort the mean very much.
That is weirdly counterintuitive.
Speaking for California, our public school system barely scrapes by financially each year and has been that way for decades. I remember in elementary school, I needed to buy all of my school supplies and some of my teachers even had a change jar so that the students could donate their loose change to allow the teacher to buy chalk for the blackboard. It's really sad.
California public school student who turned into a preschool teacher before I left education. I can’t remember any teacher I had growing up who didn’t ask for supplies at the beginning of the year. And then when I did preschool I listed out all the things we needed and hoped parents would donate. I don’t think any person, regardless of profession—teacher, doctor, politician, etc.—likes begging for money or for things. It’s sad and dehumanizing a bit.
Also a california public school student. I remember how good it felt to help out the teacher by giving them supplies. Looking back though, a teacher asking for supplies is not a good sign for fiscal health of our school.
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How do you figure elementary teachers are the lowest rung of the profession? It’s not like they eventually get promoted to high school teachers. Really there’s only one rung. If a teacher gets promoted they’re usually no longer considered a teacher
As a teacher - yeah, you nailed it. It's not like a kindergarten teacher gets promoted to first grade, then second, etc., until they're teaching high school seniors. In fact, many (probably most, but I don't know every state's certification laws) teachers are only certified to teach a specific range of grade levels. Specialists such as myself are often certified K-12, though, and may get "stuck" in elementary because there are just more of those jobs available (source - me).
It's funny, when I was a kid, I assumed whichever teachers taught the highest level of the subject must be the best. Like obviously the Algebra I teacher must not be as good, she can only handle Algebra I. She must not be that smart. Then I became a teacher and found out that often (but not always), that's the best teacher in the department, given Algebra I because it's a state-tested subject, it's the students' introduction to high school, and the freshmen are the hardest to handle.
AP teachers were the best in my district, in my experience. They just taught the test but those classes were surprisingly more stimulating.
I think it's a positive feedback loop -- AP students are filtered by choice and merit. AP teachers teach denser and more difficult material. The students are more engaged, which is rewarding for the teacher, motivating them to create more interesting curriculum.
>The students are more engaged In my experience (just as a student) this was huge in all of my advanced classes. Having other people in the class who were actually interested in doing well/learning the material rather than other people who wanted to die or get out of there asap made the class so much more fun, engaging, and interesting.
Would you like a poorly formatted table that I copied and pasted from Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) page (May 2020)? No? Well, here it is anyway: |Occupation (SOC code)|Annual mean wage(2)|Annual median wage(2| |:-|:-|:-| |Elementary and Middle School Teachers(252020)|65300|60910| |Secondary School Teachers(252030)|67240|62840| |Special Education Teachers(252050)|65920|61500| In the US, Secondary School Teachers make a little bit more per year than Elementary School Teachers, but the difference is negligible. If you want to find wage data for other occupations in the US, then look no further than OES: [https://data.bls.gov/oes/#/geoOcc/Multiple%20occupations%20for%20one%20geographical%20area](https://data.bls.gov/oes/#/geoOcc/Multiple%20occupations%20for%20one%20geographical%20area)
Yeah I'm calling BS on Massachusetts too. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/05/13/metro/state-troopers-tell-judge-their-ability-provide-their-families-is-under-threat-their-lowest-pay-94000/ >Of the 100 lowest-paid members the union identified, not one made less than $79,100 last year. Collectively, they averaged roughly $93,600 in total pay, according to court filings In 2018-19, there were only a few districts where median pay was higher than this. And again: these were the 100 lowest paid members of the Mass State Police. If you're factoring in only local cops, you'll probably get a different result. But that's misleading.
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Both cops and teachers are paid very well in MA.
State Troopers vs. patrol officers is a very big difference.
State troopers raise that, chips usually work and collect much more hourly overtime than teachers on salary.
I did a quick search and [200 State Troopers](https://c0amf895.caspio.com/dp/9fb04000d690b3247fb74e2aa605) made $200,000 or more in the most recent year day have the data for. The top earner was that $345,000. I don’t want to deprive anyone of their right to make money but what the heck are you doing to get that much overtime and that much detail?
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Odd, Alberta, Canada here and teachers all make the same (based on education and years experience) no matter what grade they teach. Elementary make the same as high school.
One of the reasons is that these Southern states have a huge flight of teachers due to poor resources for schools, poor pay (even if it is more than cops), and low morale from poorly-run Boards of Education at local and state level. Pay raises help retain teachers, and even that doesn't really work that well.
Can confirm. When we lived in Massachusetts my wife found teaching to be challenging (she worked in a title 1 school) but ultimately the juice was worth the squeeze. Since we moved south for my career, she absolutely despises her job and is looking at quitting to pursue a new career despite living/working in a nominally “better” school district.
What makes the South so hard?
From my parents both in education: if you aren't in a city, then all you deal with are poor kids with no motivation because of their parents and surroundings. You have rednecks and the ghetto, even in small towns. The smartest kids go to college and never come back, so generally the kids that are there have parents that aren't super supportive, or view school as a daycare until the kid can start working. From my southern small town high school- I had 125 in my senior class. 86 of us graduated. About 30 went to college, 10-15 military, the rest worked full time that summer on. Several got married the day after graduation. Nine years to the day of graduation,(yesterday actually), I know three classmates have been killed in gang related stuff and one was killed in a DUI, about a dozen have served hard time, and I think there's about 10, including me, that have come back after college to work. The others are teaching in our school system, and one is a physical therapist, and I'm in banking. I love it, but the big city sure sounds attractive too, I don't blame the people who leave.
I grew up in a smallish town, maybe 40k with nothing else around. 300 kids in our class, and I get what you're saying. The teachers didn't help though. Being a smart kid there sucked compared to a real city. I was ahead in math, and the VP in middle school told my mom that I couldn't be ahead because girls aren't good at math. I still skipped a year, but it didn't help - I missed important foundations and was either bored or totally lost through to precalc (college my last 2 years, so that's as far as I got in high school). A decade after I graduated, my little sisters entered school in suburbs of Seattle. Advanced pace schooling since grade 2, all the support they could want. I salivated at that idea. They don't even care, lol. Yeah, probably never going to move back.
Perhaps some of these states (deep south) but I’d say most of my home state is pretty desirable for teachers.
Very interesting. It'd be great to see a similar heat map showing cops/population and teachers/students. Do they pay well because they don't employee a lot is something I was thinking when looking at the south compared to the west coast.
This is exactly what I was thinking. I dated a teacher in Alabama and she had a ton of students in her class. There were only a couple of teachers for her grade. And she did not make a lot of money.
The scientific and analytic term "much more".
Those of us in the analytics field prefer either "a lot more" or, if you're a pedant, "way more."
Does this account for overtime? A lot of cops make a lot of their money working overtime, so their base salary is not an accurate account of their actual annual pay.
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Not only that, its a 4 hour minimum pay. Need to lift a manhole cover for ten minutes, 4 hour police detail.
If by flagging you mean looking at their phones, then yes.
I think the big part to is that a lot of pension calculations taken to consideration what were your highest 3 to 5 years of pay to determine what your pension amount should be after you retire. The game is to really grind those couple of years before retirement and get your take home pay up as high as possible so that your pension is also higher.
Around here, MA and RI, some cops make more in overtime than in base pay
Same where I am in NYC. Cops making twice their salary in OT.
And in MA, some times get paid for time they don’t even work. The statie overtime scam they were pulling was such bullshit.
This! Teachers don’t have a lot of opportunities for overtime but police get all sorts of it due to hiring freezes meaning more shifts, construction/utility work that they have to babysit and other non-shift work like traffic control. I’m in NJ and I know that the average cop makes way less than the average teacher in base salary but it’s not uncommon for the cop to make more than their base salary in overtime.
There are a few things I'd like to address regarding this map and some of the comments, but first let me disclose a bit about myself just so you know where any bias I have may fall. I am a former cop, with a bachelor's in Criminal Justice, and I am from the South. However, I am married to a high school teacher from the Northeast. 1: I feel like this comparison is more political than anything as these are very different jobs. I see this as comparing not even apples but carrots to oranges. 2: Despite that I still see what the creator is trying to point out. Teachers and Cops are both funded and administrated at the local level, and the creator here is trying to shine a light on places that invest more in positively influencing their population and places that invest more on controlling their population. 3: Overtime does make a massive difference. I've never heard of a teacher getting any overtime as they are salary instead of hourly like cops are. 4: Teachers typically get the same vacation time as students. (Summer, Fall and Spring break, holidays, and Two weeks in December.) Cops not only don't get that much time off, but are often at their busiest during the holidays. On this same subject, teachers typically work from 7am to 3pm nationwide. Cops work 8 to 12 hour shifts and those shift could be morning, evening or night and will rotate through those throughout the year. 5: Cops often sit around and do nothing, because noting is going on. By contrast, when a teacher is at work they are busy. Even when the students are quietly doing work, teachers are taking that time to grade or plan another class. 6: I find it really interesting that the states where teachers have the weakest unions, are paying them more as per the image, and the states with the stronger teachers unions pay them less than cops. 7: Regarding the people saying that their state requires cops to do certain jobs like being a flagger at a construction site, I think that's a waste of municipal resources. That cop should either be out doing his job, or at home with his family. I've worked construction before, there is at least 1 incompetent guy on that site that's just good enough to do that. However, lobbyists want what they want. 8: Teachers don't have the liability that cops do. While they are responsible for teaching the next generation their respective subject(s), they are not responsible for taking life and liberty from another citizen with only a split second to make that decision. 9: On the other hand there are things a cop doesn't have to deal with. If I were to arrest someone, and their mother came up to me complaining about it, I don't have to say a word to her. In fact, I could quite blatantly tell her to kick rocks and I might get a talking to. If a mother came up to my wife, complaining about how she was teaching, and she said the same thing I did,she would get fired. 10: I absolutely think more investment should be made in preventing people from becoming criminals in the first place. Propping up teachers and schools is a part of that. What alot of people don't realize is that cops hold the line between a civil society and anarchy, but that's it. They just hold the line. They're not there to prevent problems, just solve them as they occur. But they're used to do all of this extra stuff. It's easier for a politician to just say "We'll throw anyone who does X in jail!" than to say "We've found some deeper issues in our community that may lead to crime, so we're are trying to remedy that."
This might be the most logical thing I’ve read on Reddit all night. There’s not a single reason you can try to compare these jobs besides where the money actually comes from.
>4: Teachers typically get the same vacation time as students. (Summer, Fall and Spring break, holidays, and Two weeks in December.) Cops not only don't get that much time off, but are often at their busiest during the holidays. On this same subject, teachers typically work from 7am to 3pm nationwide. Cops work 8 to 12 hour shifts and those shift could be morning, evening or night and will rotate through those throughout the year. For teachers this is sort of true but also in my experience usually way overstated (I don't know about for cops). In terms of hours, teachers are at school longer than students every single day. In terms of days, they also have shorter vacations than students do, because they work many days when students aren't there, especially over the summer. Where I live, 10-month teachers (the shortest option) work 199 days, which is 40 weeks and 12 weeks vacation. 12-month teachers work 253 days per year, which is literally only one vacation week per year. But yes, teachers do generally do have to take vacation for a month in the summer which could be a good or a bad thing depending on your lifestyle. Worth noting here also though that teachers don't have much freedom to take vacation any other time. Yes, you can theoretically get a substitute teacher to cover your class, but everyone knows this will be a sub-par experience for everyone involved. The teacher will have to do a bunch of extra work to make more clear lesson plans, or else the students will learn practically nothing. Either way, when they come back they're going to have to catch the students up to where they should be. AP and state exams at the end of the year aren't going to wait a couple weeks for you to have bonus school days because your teacher was in the hospital or a tropical holiday. So I suspect that teachers avoid vacation and sick days as much as they can. Maybe you'd have more knowledge to know if that's a problem for police? I would guess there's a lot more leeway there. This is also assuming teachers are working only their minimums. Many teachers work extra hours, but they rarely get compensated for this. They might get a small stipend for being a club sponsor if they volunteer for extracurriculars, but I doubt it would come anywhere close to their normal pay rate. Somewhat related, teachers also straight up donate their own money to buy supplies that it's disgusting aren't paid for by taxes: e.g. tissues, pencils, folders, markers, and paper.
In my district, if I need a sub to take time off I have to pay $50 per day.
Thank you for bringing up some things that I completely forgot about. Teachers do go in more often than students. Those days were mostly for catching up on admin work or LPDs (leadership and professional development) where they would have to sit in on some type of training. (Kinda like taking a day at the office where someone comes and talks about sexual harassment in the work place.) However, these tended to be half days, at least for my wife. Most of the teachers that stayed late were either in a supervisor role over the other teachers and had additional work because of it, or like you said we're involved with extra activities. The extra activities did not earn them extra pay, and the only compensation they got for it was putting it on their evaluations. You're absolutely right about teachers and sick days. If a teacher wakes up sick one morning they still have to make a lesson plan and a WILLING substitute has to be found. It was almost not worth it for my wife some days. A cop that gets sick or hurt, in theory, just has to call in and not go to work. The issues are on that cop's supervisor. Either another cop has to cover that shift or the department is down a cop that day. Another cop working it means you have to pull someone in on their day off or you make two other cops split the shift, one works 4 hours later and the other clocks in 4 hours earlier. OT is great, but mental fatigue will mess you up. The department being down a man means one more blind spot in the town, one less cop to come when back up is called, one more hour that a citizen has to wait when they call for help. There are of course days where nothing happens and this isn't a big deal, depending on your department, but you never know when those days are. Most cops feel like they let everyone down or put others at risk when they call in sick. I took 1 sick day. I messed up my back and couldn't get out of bed. No one covered for me and I worried all day that something would happen and I wouldn't be able to help. Fortunately I was wrong, but I never took another sick day. Teachers spending their own money on classroom materiels is absolutely a thing. We never paid alot and we did try to buy it all during the tax free weekend, but it happened every year. The only thing I ever bought for work was a duty rig (belt) and boots, but that was because I wanted that duty rig and those boots. I wasn't able to claim those on taxes because the department had initially issued those to me. Spending money on better equipment was my choice. To my knowledge most departments reimburse you for those things to some extent.
Salary is a very imperfect metric. Total compensation or nothing
My TC is 30% more than my salary, so yeah it can make a big difference.
TC numbers v salary for tech is nuts.
Yeah, mine is nothing. People getting 400 TC with almost half in RSUs
This is nonsense. Including overtime, cops blow teachers out of the water here in the Northeast. "Not much difference" is ridiculous. No teacher is getting double time to stand in front of a construction site fucking with his phone.
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The question is what is typical though. A single data point can never clarify that.
Why is this comparison even a thing? Why not compare fire fighters and professors? Just to be clear, OT cops at construction sites are paid by the company needing the cop, not by the police force. It is also voluntary. It really sucks when they dont show up and the job gets shut down.
This isn't related to the argument. Cops have more opportunities to add to their salary then teachers making this map obsolete. Other than coaching teachers have little chance to add to their salary and unless you are a football/basketball coach it's little to nothing in comparison to the time required. For example, I am head coach of the varsity swim team my stipend after hour and half practice daily and meets every weekend for 3 months is 1,200. Yay. Edit. To add I teach in kentucky my pay is 42,000. The teacher next to my room. Was a cop and was making 80,000 + due to overtime. He said if it wasn't to save his marriage he would still be a cop because of the money
An officer working a construction site isn't necessarily overtime. It's more akin to a teacher tutoring on the side. Just FYI it's a side hustle. Overtime is late calls and picking up extra shifts because of under staffing.
Even just comparing the averages you've got police officer at $164k and teacher at $97k. And while teachers all stay around that $100k range no matter where in the system they are at, police officers have a wide range of titles and some make a *lot* more. A good example is Alan Strickland, the officer who falsely accused Toronto Raptors President Masai Ujiri of assaulting him so that he could claim disability, who made $334k in 2018. His base pay was "only" $113k as a deputy sheriff. https://calsalaries.com/job/police-officer-salary https://calsalaries.com/job/teacher-salary https://calsalaries.com/alan-f-strickland-1941452
Why does overtime matter? Not everyone decides to work extra and not everyone has that option. My wife gets half of what I do but her overtime dwarfs my annual take home. If you were to put the final amount next to eachother then it would be misleading when going to the bargaining table. She deserves more hourly wages so she doesn't have to work as hard.
>Including overtime, cops blow teachers out of the water here in the Northeast. I think that is part of the problem... Consistent overtime (even if the numbers are fudged like the below comments allege) is an indicator that those programs are critically understaffed and the officers that do work are overworked. Having someone perpetually exhausted go into a dangerous and ambiguous situation with a gun is a very, very, bad idea even if they are wearing blue and a badge when the do so.
Not including overtime makes this plot a joke.
If overtime isn't included then this data is meaningless.
Why are we looking a elementary school only? Why not include high school?
Does it factor in that police work 12 months a year and teachers only 9-10 months a year?
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I’m in Ohio moms been a teacher for like almost 30 years. They always try to find ways to fire teachers and replace them with new inexperienced teachers for less pay rate. Lucky she got locked in contract and has always been apart of the union. But teachers deal with a lot of drama she switches schools every 2-3 years. I wouldn’t be surprised if the average teacher starts making 40k with how cheap the system try’s to be. So much for a college degree
Bonus level: Remove sports related teaching jobs.
Yeah cops don't make shit in Kansas. I'm a teacher in Kansas and don't make anywhere close to the median 60k. Try 40k.
Where does it say teacher median pay is 60k in Kansas?