120k per year is not unreasonable for teachers if you start counting benefits as wages. The pension plans of most public school teachers are generous, special tax breaks are effectively a form of salary. In California the school teachers are exempt from social security. These don’t show up in the nominal salary, but it is still money paid to them (some of it indirectly).
Around here a PhD holder who's nearing retirement might reach about $120,000 total comp as a teacher, sure, salary around $80-85k. Not $180k (the claimed $1k/day napkin-mathed for 9 months of work, which is actually a bit low on the days-worked-by-teachers-per-year side), but maybe $120k. A starting teacher is closer to, perhaps, $55k-$60k total comp (~$35,000 salary), and someone now around $120k total would have started way lower than that (because it would have been 20+ years ago).
Also, in lots of districts, teachers receive gradual pay cuts if they don't work toward at least a master's (it used to be easy to find districts that'd at least partially pay for education, too, but that's gotten much harder now) because you top out on the years-in scale for a bachelor's really early, the annual "CoL" increases outside that scale are under the rate of inflation (yes, seriously, it's outrageous) plus they freeze wages not-infrequently, then pretty much never make up for those "lost" years of growth.
> In California the school teachers are exempt from social security.
They are in my state, too, because the state pension plan opted out of social security (back when that was still possible) and the money goes there, instead. They don't also get to count that toward social security contributions, though, for calculating their eventual social security payments.
I would love to see exactly how many public school teachers are actually getting 120k. I'm very certain they are at the very high end and very few in number. Most are getting slightly above the national median income.
Depends on your area. Teachers where I'm from (greater Cincinnati) don't get anywhere near 120k even with many years of experience. My brother in northern Kentucky gets $55k after 15 years.
In New York state average pay shoots up to highest-in-the-nation $85k (source: https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/teacher-pay...). Maybe someone with a lot of experience in certain specific areas could make $120k, but it's not going to be common.
In New York, the trick for teachers is to start out in the city and accumulate years. Then the boss move is to get into a high-property tax area in Long Island and teach there. After a decade or so, you make serious money out in those high property tax (way better school districts) suburbs. That’s sort of like their FAANG path. Everyone’s got a game they need to play.
The game changer for teachers is that you really can’t beat their vacation time and pension package, there’s no ageism, and there is no shortage of work. You are good until you retire. There’s no teacher trying to retire at 40 from burnout.
From the above link:
The average elementary school teacher in Nassau and Suffolk counties earned $90,560
90k to teach 5th graders, think about that for a second.
> The game changer for teachers is that you really can’t beat their vacation time and pension package, there’s no ageism, and there is no shortage of work. You are good until you retire.
One of the big deals with teaching is that it's one of the only careers you can have in the US that's really parenthood-friendly—I specify the US because in, say, the EU, most or all jobs are far more parenthood-friendly than the average job in the US, so teaching's advantage isn't nearly so strong. I think that's an under-appreciated factor in why people choose it.
As for the Summers, lots of teachers work then to make ends meet. Financial comfort as a teacher may mean marrying someone who's not a teacher, or having a second job or successful side-hustle—even min-maxing your teaching career to optimize comp, you aren't making anything like those end-of-career figures for your whole career, and at times you're shelling out a lot of money (and spending a lot of time) for advanced degrees to get those final-years numbers so high.
> There’s no teacher trying to retire at 40 from burnout.
No, but only because they don't make enough to retire at 40. They leave before retirement all the time for tons of reasons, though, including, not at all infrequently, burnout. Abusive management, abusive co-workers, abusive parents, abusive students(!), not being able to handle year after year of watching kids with mental health issues hurt themselves and sometimes commit suicide, learning about horrible family situations (there's... so much abuse going on), actually giving-a-shit leading to workaholism for little to no reward or appreciation, and all kinds of other causes. This totally separate from people who decide they just fundamentally don't like teaching at all.
"The average elementary school teacher in Nassau and Suffolk counties earned $90,560, while middle school teachers earned $90,650 and high school teachers earned slightly less on average at $88,390."
But if you think you can apply for and get one of those jobs, that's not how it works! Most openings are filled though nepotism. They'll have a few candidates come in for interviews, but they already know who is getting the job. And it's the niece of a school board member or something like that.
For context, Nassau and Suffolk are the highest paid area in New York at ~100k mean salary. That's below the median household income in Nassau ($115k) and Suffolk ($101k) [0], which are among the richest in the US. NYC and the US are both at ~$63k median income.
For comparison, NYC is ~$80k mean salary, which will include both new hires and tenured teachers. If you read the salary schedule[10] for NYC, you have to have 6-8 years of experience to make $80k (depends on your education level [11]). To reach $120k, they must have 20 years of tenure in the NYC school district.
I made $90k in salary alone as a new CS grad, and $120k in total comp (excl. benefits). This doesn't seem like a huge overpayment to me. It makes sense to me that wealthier areas pay teachers more, and I don't think that teachers getting well paid in one county should demand wage cuts in other counties.
IMO school boards & school district admin generally are a badly under-appreciated source of corruption of many kinds. I'm pretty damn sure it's rampant.
Seriously, my spouse is a teacher, we need to move wherever this is yesterday.
... of course, I'm sure that both of: 1) they'll need to attain a PhD first, to have a shot at those numbers, and 2) this'll turn out to be somewhere with double or more the cost-of-living of where we are now, and probably 5x or more like-for-like housing costs.
