Here in Illinois, it’s so painfully obvious. After all, only five of the top 10 Best Cities for K-12 Teachers are in Illinois, and the teachers in those cities are only making 68% more money than the overall local median salary. And they have to work for nine months every year!
In this new report examining 689 cities, “Analysts ranked cities based on eight metrics that identify places that are affordable and pay teachers well, safe, have jobs available, have a populace that values education, and are nice places to live with abundant amenities.”
So, if, inexplicably, you are a K-12 teacher reading this post on the Glibs, consider moving to one of these lovely Chicago suburbs.
Bonus: You could live next door to OMWC and me. We’ll show you our favorite watering holes, and with your salary, you’re buying!
Top 10 Cities for K-12 Teachers
Butt..but…but they spend 5-6 hrs every night grading papers and reading essays, and they spend half their salary on crayons and construction paper, and the rest they spend on food and clothes for those poor kids who come to school hungry and naked, and if you can read this thank a teacher.
I hate that last slogan with a burning passion.
If you can read it in English, thank a Soldier.
//runs away
My Parents taught me to read.
My Teachers tried to make me hate reading.
Thanks for nothing, Public School English curriculum.
Shakespere is cool stuff, to be sure, but there are few things that are more of a fool’s errand than trying to cram analysis of plays written in middle English down the throat of gearheads and metal shop kids who are just not into it, and then penalising them for poor comprehension. It’s a waste of life.
Shakespeare was the highlight of the curriculum. What almost drove me to quit reading was the utter crap from more modern times they crammed onto the required reading lists.
We actually read The Hobbit in middle school. That was the highlight for me because I had already read it. No homework for a week!
My 12th grade English teacher had us read “Anthem” by Ayn Rand. Now that I think about it, she may have been an undercover libertarian (or at least not a raging “progressive”). It kind of makes me want to see if she still works there so I can apologize for being such a shitheel in her class.
That’s what I think about pretty much all compulsory arts and literature education. By forcing kids to examine prose, poetry, and paintings, you’re more than likely going to turn them off of them for good. I’ve gotten into a lot of literature (namely from Victorian era and some Greek classics) and every time I ask someone if they are familiar with any of those, the response I ALWAYS get is “oh yea, I had to read that crap in school… I hated it!”
I’m thinking it might be better if kids had a totally neutral opinion of these works than if they had been turned off of them forever by being forced to experience them on someone else’s terms.
I had Shakespeare and Crime and Punishment crammed down my throat by a couple of pretty terrible highschool teachers and hated them. These ladies made it their mission to make every one of us fall in love with these works just like they did.
And I hated them. I was reading a shit ton on my own. At the time, it was a lot of shitty fantasy and some ok sci fi. My senior year of high school a burned out old hippie taught novels. He said straight up at the front – you don’t have to like these books, but you will learn how to understand them. They weren’t all my cup of tea for the most part, but they were all the contenders for the ‘great American novel’ like Huck Finn and In Cold Blood. So I dug in and got positive exposure to a bunch of stuff I would never have picked up on my own.
Years later, I think to myself maybe the problem wasn’t the books. Maybe it was the teachers. So I picked up Crime and Punishment and got a good 20 pages in. Nope, I just have no interest in that book. Got an audio performance of Julius Caesar and Othello, and really love them both. (probably helps I read a good bit about Roman history before Julius Caesar though).
Interesting. I love Crime and Punishment, but I also really liked my 11th grade English/12th grade humanities teacher. He was one of the few who taught critical thinking.
My favorite reading class was 8th grade composition class. It was a remedial class, and I was in there solely because I goofed off in 7th grade comp and didn’t even turn in half of the assignments. 8th grade comp was more my speed. The big assignments were essentially to read a book at least 100 pages long and write a 10 page story in the same style (I chose It by Stephen King) and read another book and write a book report on it (I chose Rainbow Six by Tom Clancy).
That was the most fun I had in literature class (except for the mark twain module in 11th grade)
I was apparently reading road signs when I was 2-1/2. And I learned the multiplication tables from my older sister when I was 5.
My parents discovered I could read when I walked around the table announcing the cards everyone had in their hand.
Well, I guess that is a form of reading.
Me too. I was reading before I started school.
I was the weird kid who really liked reading pretty much everything.
There were precisely 2 books I “had” to read that I hated and could not get through in school…
1) 10 Little Indians – Sorry never was a fan of murder mysteries and I hated the writing style, couldn’t get more than a third of the way through it.
2) The Red Badge of Courage – OMFG I hated that book, I did actually finish reading it (albeit after the test on it) just to see if the author managed to pull something interesting out of the story but nope he couldn’t even come up with an interesting observation on the human condition or the evils of war or anything like that.
The other one that really stood out as being utterly inappropriate for the grade level (10th) where we had to read it is I Am the Cheese. I didn’t hate the book but it was really confusing and almost psychedelic to follow with it’s constant shifts in time and perspective.
The last one was The Stranger by Albert Camus, I didn’t hate the book but god damn it made me hate the French, and anything even remotely resembling existentialist philosophy. Also, having a bunch of emotionally fragile 17 year olds reading nihilist existential novels is probably not the best idea for keeping suicide rates down.
Fuck you Bentonville. Just raised my property taxes, too.
OT: yesterday on the highway I was stuck behind a completely brand new Lotus going 50mph, 10 below the speed limit, and totally clogging up traffic as a result. Finally had to pass. Vermont plates. WTF.
Talk about wrong person wrong car.
Bernie got a Lotus?
Some people still ascribe to the ‘keep it under 60mph for the first 500 miles’ line of thought.
I’m going to have to curb my tendency to drive just a little over – I can’t afford a speeding ticket in the middle of nowhere. (Cash wise, I don’t want the fine)
A Lotus. In Vermont. Even the hardiest vehicles have a hard time surviving the road salt and potholes of even one VT winter.
I have no issues with paying teachers a good salary. They are teaching our kids after all. But I want value for my money and were definitely not getting that with most (to be nice) public schools. There are far too many schools with well paid teachers and extraordinarily poor results in producing students who add value to the community.
They are paid well, and I wouldn’t mind either if not for the constant whinging, it’s almost as annoying as when lawyers complain that everyone wants free legal advice. Yeah, no other professional has to deal with friends and neighbors asking for advice, good god get over yourselves.
I dated an English teacher for 4 years, and all I would have to comment is that based on my experience of attending a lot of parties/gatherings saturated with teachers, the whining I’ve heard is pretty much comparable with any other extracurricular letting off of steam or bitching.
What gets my hackles up big-time recently is the raging arrogant hostility to the school choice movement. It’s my fucking property tax money, assholes.
No it is not. Progressives believe money belongs to the community/village (them) and that you should cry tears of happiness when they let you keep any of it.
Stealing from PJ O’Rourke:
You can’t understand what is wrong with education until you have fucked an El-Ed major.
Yeah it’s the fact that they’re lining their pockets with no say on my part that rankles the most.
Now this is what I’m talking about. One of you mammals finally crawled out of your cave and shit out an early morning thread.
Would you mammals like me to start providing an early morning topic on a more consistent basis?
You’ll have to set the timer to go off 1 hour earlier on your heat lamp.
If you want to produce content, you’re free to submit it.
Whether you can convince them to give it an early morning time slot is between you and the Glib Editors.
OT: This outrage! is so delightfully stupid I had to share it.
Make Crown Heights Crow Hill again!
Didn’t they also want to rebrand Hell’s Kitchen? (Did they succeed at that travesty of an idea?)
“Clinton”. No, that hasn’t caught on.
Harlem, named after Haarlem, was originally a Dutch settlement. The Dutch were the preeminent pioneers in jumpstarting the American slave trade from Africa. Therefore, because White Supremacy, Harlem should be completely renamed. SoHa doesn’t go far enough.
West Rhodesia.
Harlem is not a brand realtors own. They can’t rebrand it anymore than I can rebrand the south flyover country.
‘They say changing the name bulldozes Harlem’s history as the capital of black America.’
Oh? Strange, I lived in a predominantly black neighborhood for 5 plus years and I don’t recall ever hearing anybody even mentioning Harlem, much less equate it to Black DC.
I lived in Boston for a few years and visited NY many times in that span; and what always killed me was the common assumption by their residents that the rest of the nation keeps an eye steadily fixed on the goings-on and cultural evolution of those cities.
Most of us don’t give a fuck.
Not a jab at you, Rhy.
Fun Fact – While searching for new digs to accommodate our expanding family, I found a listing for a place down the block from us (Eastern Parkway and Bedford Ave., very much Crown Heights) listed as “Park Slope adjacent”.
Jesus… that’s stretching it so thin it’s going to snap. I’ve seen “Sunset Park” called “South Park Slope” a few times (in real estate ads, natch).
I should lobby for “Bay Ridge” to return to the original “Yellow Hook”.
Even if it’s adjacent to a lot of slopes I don’t think they should say it.
Hey, the Park family has been living there for ages. They’re a fixture of the community.
There is a wee grocery in Park Slope named Slope Foods that always makes me giggle when I see the sign.
They do that in jersey too. Ie union city jersey city heights are “steps” from Hoboken.
Union city and jersey city heights
Though to be fair, you can literally take an elevator down the side of a cliff from jersey city heights to hoboken.
Teacher pay should be based on the price that attracts enough teachers just like other pays. If they’re overwhelmed in qualified applicants the price is too high.
“Qualified”, no.
“Credentialed”, yes.
People that want the summer off…
We started homeschooling a few years ago. Teaching is remarkably easy for grade school. Teaching pre-6th grade is basically common knowledge anyone can do. Even after that refreshing your memory on algebra isn’t all that difficult.
The credentials seem to exist to ensure teachers are dumber and properly brainwashed in Marxism and social sciences. I find the credentials to teach to be equivalent as the people that want politicians to have “experience.” Or journalists who have a degree from Colombia.
Yup, one of the major reason for the resistance to any kind of change, other than the cushy job with lots of time off, is the belief that they can indoctrinate/brainwash the young into the pedantically stupid shit the left peddles.
My wife is a teacher (so was her mother). They get paid very well and she never complains. Her health plan on the other hand is pure garbage. And like in most industries/services the union stinks.
One thing I’ll add, having been around this group now for basically 17 years is we severely under estimate how difficult it is to deal with children sometimes. And then there are the parents. They can be, erm, special from time to time.
Whenever I do hear them complain about salary I kindly point out they’re way about the North American average.
People don’t measure themselves against the average – they measure themselves against the best. It does tend to leave them griping for more.
I though healthcare in Canada was *free*?
Free and you get what “free” can pay for.
Not for stuff like MRI’s, dentistry, whatever else not covered by the ‘free’ system.
Actually I’m wrong. MRI’s are covered. If you want to wait three months for an appointment on the public side; with all those icky people. if you want to go private, a good health plan can cover up to 80% of it. Hers is 50%.
I ran the numbers for Chicago, who helpfully put all salaries on line. Average 9 month salary is about $70k, with $28k in benefits. Full pension by age 50. And it’s almost impossible to be fired.
I excluded teaching assistants and first year trainees and only included actual teachers. Just to explain why my number might be higher than other reported numbers.
Excel comes through yet again!
Wifey has been a NYC teacher for 11 years. The pay is decent, a little over $81K, and the benefits are fantastic (particularly the health insurance). She has worked at several different schools, some better than others, but the common trait they all share is a bloated administration that ranges from blitheringly incompetent to criminally corrupt. Also, the comment about the difficulties of dealing with children and parents is spot on. Two weeks ago, she extended her hand to accept a students folder and he stabbed her with a pencil, ran out of the room, kicked a dean in the testicles, bit a safety agent (NYPD school cop), and bolted out of the building. He is 13 years old. Once apprehended, he was sent for psych eval. and has been locked in the hospital ever since. A week before this, one of her students (a 12 year old) was shot in the hip across the street from school but he refuses to say anything to police about why or who. She has two Syrian refugees in her classes; one is 12 but seems much closer to 16 and his older brother is 14 but he if actually younger than 18 I’ll eat my hat. The older boy speaks pidgin English and is the most dedicated, helpful student one could imagine. His younger brother speaks no English whatsoever and has to have a para-professional escort at all times because left on his own, he starts fires. As soon as she retires, we are moving back to Florida; FUCK NYC!
has to have a para-professional escort at all times because left on his own, he starts fires.
Dafuq
Heh heheh heh fire fire heh heh heheh.
My wife taught 4th grade for ten years in Montgomery County. Not the nice part. She made decent money, but, yes, she did spend a lot of her own money on supplies. Most of the parents didn’t speak English, and many of the ones who did were not what you’d call “involved” or “positive role models”. Each year she had at least one child with anger issues, including one who tried to stab her with a pair of scissors. It got to the point where staff were trained on how to physically restrain a berserk child until police or parents could arrive.
But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst parts were dealing with other teachers and, above all, administrators. It’s a union gig, see, so once you’ve got the job, you’ve pretty much got it. Talent, dedication, skill, etc., are pretty much irrelevant to your promotion; it’s about time served coupled with kissing the ass of the administration, who basically run the school with an iron fist and have virtually no oversight whatsoever.
So, the thing is, teacher’s get paid plenty. The job is a nightmare because of everything surrounding it, which is primarily a decadent bureaucratic culture infested with cronyism and perpetuated by the teacher’s unions.
Don’t forget to correct those salaries to a full FTE equivalent. Teachers are more like a 0.8 FTE.
.8?
Nah, with 3 months off that’s .75 right there. Plus they work 7 hour days, including lunch. Plus every holiday off.
I haven’t looked it up recently but in the past I did and at that time the average Full time worker in the US worked~19xx hours a year and the average teacher worked ~17xx hours a year so it really was only about a 10% – 15% difference. Sure the teacher might not work the same number of days but working days is probably not the best measure
For calculating FTEs for compensation analysis, if they are salaried, you count days. You only count hours if they are hourly.
My friend is in her 15th year as a jersey public school teacher and grosses about 90k a year. Though this includes teaching a few weeks of summer school for half a day.
It’s a nice gig if you like kids, which I don’t.
I always love when proggies and Teachers Unions make the argument that the problem with our schools is that teachers are underpaid.
The discussion then goes like this…
Me) So raising teachers pay will improve the quality of eduction?
Prog) Yes of course it would, isn’t that obvious.
Me) How?
Prog) By attracting the best and brightest to become teachers.
Me) So what you are saying is that current teachers are less than fully competent?
Prog) No of course not, Current Teachers are all highly qualified dedicated individuals
Me) So you are saying that they are just as competent as these “best and brightest” we need to attract?
Prog) Yes of course they are
Me) If that is the case why are they not already achieving the same results that hypothetical best and brightest we need to attract could?
Prog) Duh because they are underpaid
Me) So you’re saying that current teachers are evil manipulative bastards intentionally denying children educations because they are unhappy with their pay?
Prog) I never said any such thing
Me) Yes you did, you claimed that higher teachers pay would lead to better educational outcomes for students, you claimed that it would do this by attracting a more competent class of teachers and then claimed that existing teachers were in reality just as competent as that new class you wish to attract but were not teaching at that higher level because of low pay. Only one of these three statements can be true
1) Higher teacher pay will not improve education
2) Higher Teacher Pay will improve education by replacing less than competent teachers with higher quality ones meaning that on average current teachers are incompetent at their jobs
3) Higher Teacher Pay will improve education by motivating teachers to do a better job meaning they are allowing kids to suffer life long negative impacts from poor education just because the teachers are not happy with their paychecks
Which is it?
Prog) Racist!
(Personally I actually think #2 is probably the most true although #1 and #3 have elements of truth to them as well)
In no way was I saying all teachers are awful. I had a couple very smart, dedicated public school teachers, who had a lasting impact on my life. However, the fact that in 13 years of public schooling, switching classes and teachers all day for most of those years (even in elementary school), I only had the two speaks volumes. And I was in one of the “best” schools in my state.
Fast forward to my own kids. Webdominatrix (of this site) was repeatedly in trouble for calling out her third grade teacher for feeding the kids blatantly factually incorrect information. I finally yanked her out of the clutches of idiots and homeschooled her and her younger brother.