<story><title>The myth of the teacher pay gap?</title><url>https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-truth-about-teacher-pay</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>crumpets</author><text>&amp;gt;how society decides salaries. It seems pretty arbitrary from my perspective.&lt;p&gt;Society doesn&amp;#x27;t &amp;quot;decide&amp;quot;. It&amp;#x27;s a decided by the labor market. Nobody &lt;i&gt;wants&lt;/i&gt; to pay programmers six figures.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a myth that we think teachers are less important than programmers because they make less on average. There is just a larger supply of qualified teachers willing to work at lower prices.&lt;p&gt;Wait until you find out how little art history masters holders make. Amount of training is irrelevant to how much money you get.</text></item><item><author>Someone1234</author><text>This seems to use private education as a benchmark for the entire argument. From quit rates, to pay, to conditions, and beyond, but ignores the obvious which is that private pay and private conditions are largely pinned to be just above public salaries and conditions (meaning private education cannot be used as a benchmark for when someone is under-paid, over-qualified, or has too high of a quit rate because they are related).&lt;p&gt;Personally I think someone required to have a degree (master&amp;#x27;s for quoted salary), continued education requirements, and licensing earning under $50K&amp;#x2F;year starting is too low. Plus no teacher is working 8-3, you&amp;#x27;d have no opportunity for lesson planning, grading, and all those extra curriculars they are essentially guilted into organizing.&lt;p&gt;The fact that I could walk out of college with zero experience and only a degree, and earn $20K more than that working only 9-5 in the same city seems unfair (as a programmer). But I have no idea how society decides salaries. It seems pretty arbitrary from my perspective.&lt;p&gt;But it is great that at the end of a long career a few unicorn teachers can earn $100K, a salary I earned within 5 years and still no master&amp;#x27;s or licencing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>praxulus</author><text>The word &amp;quot;qualified&amp;quot; is pulling a lot of weight in your argument.&lt;p&gt;You can absolutely hire a programmer for $70k if you&amp;#x27;re willing to significantly relax your standards. On the other hand, you probably wouldn&amp;#x27;t be able to hire enough teachers at existing teacher salaries if you significantly raised your standards for what counts as &amp;quot;qualified&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Tech companies have to use a relatively high bar, because bad developers will drive them out of business, but such market forces don&amp;#x27;t apply to schools. Unless you want to completely privatize education (which has its own set of issues) we have to use the political process to drive schools to raise their both their salaries and hiring standards.</text></comment>
<story><title>The myth of the teacher pay gap?</title><url>https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-truth-about-teacher-pay</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>crumpets</author><text>&amp;gt;how society decides salaries. It seems pretty arbitrary from my perspective.&lt;p&gt;Society doesn&amp;#x27;t &amp;quot;decide&amp;quot;. It&amp;#x27;s a decided by the labor market. Nobody &lt;i&gt;wants&lt;/i&gt; to pay programmers six figures.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a myth that we think teachers are less important than programmers because they make less on average. There is just a larger supply of qualified teachers willing to work at lower prices.&lt;p&gt;Wait until you find out how little art history masters holders make. Amount of training is irrelevant to how much money you get.</text></item><item><author>Someone1234</author><text>This seems to use private education as a benchmark for the entire argument. From quit rates, to pay, to conditions, and beyond, but ignores the obvious which is that private pay and private conditions are largely pinned to be just above public salaries and conditions (meaning private education cannot be used as a benchmark for when someone is under-paid, over-qualified, or has too high of a quit rate because they are related).&lt;p&gt;Personally I think someone required to have a degree (master&amp;#x27;s for quoted salary), continued education requirements, and licensing earning under $50K&amp;#x2F;year starting is too low. Plus no teacher is working 8-3, you&amp;#x27;d have no opportunity for lesson planning, grading, and all those extra curriculars they are essentially guilted into organizing.&lt;p&gt;The fact that I could walk out of college with zero experience and only a degree, and earn $20K more than that working only 9-5 in the same city seems unfair (as a programmer). But I have no idea how society decides salaries. It seems pretty arbitrary from my perspective.&lt;p&gt;But it is great that at the end of a long career a few unicorn teachers can earn $100K, a salary I earned within 5 years and still no master&amp;#x27;s or licencing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>crdoconnor</author><text>The labor market is a tool of society. It&amp;#x27;s like any other tool: it can be fixed or supplemented or even swapped out with something else if it doesn&amp;#x27;t perform its function effectively.</text></comment>