We got an email from the Washington Policy Center about a new study on the Seattle School District a while back, our minds were boggled, then we all forgot about it.
The boggling part:
• Teachers in Seattle receive an average of $70,850 for a ten-month year, plus $9,855 in benefits. Teachers can earn up to $88,463, or $98,318 including benefits.
• The ten-month work year includes nine paid holidays, and a total of four paid weeks off (not counting summers). District employees receive ten days of paid sick leave and two days of personal leave.
The point of the study did not seem to be who the hell knew teachers made that much money, but this:
• Seniority rules govern most displacements and lay-offs. Younger teachers are let go first.
• Teacher evaluations do not include measures of student progress. District employees can remove a poor annual performance report from their file after four years.
The WPC recommended that the Seattle Public Schools dump seniority as the means of determining layoffs, allow performance pay, etc. Liv Finne, who authored the study, says, “The poor academic showing in Seattle public schools makes it clear that it’s time to look at workplace reforms that reward performance and create incentives for teaching excellence.” Um, YES. Especially if they’re making $70K for nine months of work a year.
UPDATE: The WPC’s Director for Education Liv Finne confirms:
In response to your question about average teacher pay in Seattle being $70,850, this is a true fact. You can verify this fact with Joy Stevens, Sr. Legal Assistant/Public Records Officer at the Seattle School District…
Median pay for Seattle teachers is around $62,000. The average is skewed upwards to $70,850 because such a large percentage of teachers (I don’t have the exact proportion) are older teachers earning well over $80,000, up to the maximum of $88,463.
To respond to some of the comments, everyone in the office was surprised at this average (and the median is higher than you’d think, too), but! Obviously! Good, experienced teachers who work their asses off should be well compensated. That being the case, the school district should be attracting good people—and holding them to high standards. And not having to keep the creaky ones around if they’re no good.
We here at The Stranger are way more church-mousey than teachers, come to find out. Then again, you know what they say: Those who can, teach; those who can’t, make a damn newspaper every week.
Washington Policy Council, eh?
i am a teacher entering the work force and my top salary is $44k with my masters, so i am little confused about where those numbers are coming from. administrators get paid $90k and above but certainly not teachers.
To clarify: The study maintains that “Teachers in Seattle receive an average of $70,850 for a ten-month year”—an average. I absolutely believe that teachers should be well-compensated, but everyone in the office was surprised that this was the case. Teachers here in comments are saying they don’t make that much; good, experienced teachers who work their asses off should, and the school district should be attracting good people (and holding them to high standards!) if that’s the case. I’m contacting the WPC for clarification on the figure.
one last thing from me: SPS budgets for FTE, about 80k including benes, not for how many people are where on the salary schedule. what SPS budgets for an FTE is quite different that what a particular FTE may get. it’s certainly not an average.
for a publication so opposed to credulous hackery…
@48 – in archaic English, the third-person-plural of the verb “to do” is simply “do.” (Yes, I’m that guy.)
You just can’t paint all teachers with one brush this way. And it’s pretty clear most posters do not have children in Seattle Public Schools. The vast majority of SPS teachers are somewhere between good and terrific. It’s the bad ones who can NEVER be gotten rid of who
To be honest, I’m a little surprised that $70k would be the average. That means probably half the teachers make more than than that (unless there’s some teacher out there who makes a million dollars or something). I had always heard that it was a low-paying job, and $70k sounds pretty good to me. It’s more than I make, and I have a master’s degree.
Telling people to STFU when they express their surprise at teacher’s salaries isn’t really a good way to convince people. I’m sure many teachers work very hard, but it seems like jumping down people’s throats in this way has left a lot of teacher’s unions with few friends. It’s counterproductive.
16- math lesson: if a teacher has 6 classes per day, with 30 students in each class, and one planning period, how does that teacher grade 180 papers in that planning period? And maintain lesson plans? How exactly does that work?
My father taught high school english for more than 30 years. For the last 20 years of his career, he ran the theater department–directing plays, building sets, setting lights. The extra work netted him an additional $4000 annually. He left for work at 7AM and came home most nights after 9PM. Weekends were for grading papers and calling or visiting parents. He had every summer off, which I think that his more than 2500 hours at the school the remainder of the year (not counting his ‘homework’) more than earned.
I knew by the time I was 10 that I absolutely did not want to be a teacher. Talk about a thankless profession, with people who know nothing of the expectations having the audacity to say that teachers are overpaid for the work that they do.
I’m not sure why everyone is so confused about the $70,850 average salary number. Look at the salary schedule I linked to above. I have no idea what the average level of experience is at Seattle Public, but I’ve seen national average numbers of around 14 years. Given that most teachers with 14 years of experience have a masters degree, if not more, let’s say the “average” teacher is in the 5th lane (column) — so, that would be a salary of $69,443. Plus around a $1,000 for coaching or extra-curriculars, and that’s probably round about that $70,850 number.
Sure, there is going to be a distribution around that number (newer teachers earn less), but it doesn’t surprise me that the average is around $70k.
I don’t want to hear anymore sob stories about teachers not making enough.
I guess I’m a little more than tired of the seeming “you’re with us or against us” , black or white argument that comes up every time teachers, teachers’ pay, or teacher unions are discussed.
Questioning the practices of or trying to figure out how to improve the above subjects does not make you tea party member.
If you attended public school, you must of had at least *one* teacher who really should have been doing something else in life, but nobody could touch them due to the union and/or seniority. Of course, this means that virtually all of your other teachers were excellent professionals, but you mention anything about trying to get rid of bad teachers, and you’re branded a crazy right-winger.
All sides in this debate need to be willing to compromise so we can do our best as a community to produce great students – the folks we all should be thinking about here.
Well I guess we can end the myth that teacher’s in Seattle are underpaid.
How much teachers are paid is not an issue for me. They should be paid more, frankly. (So should librarians.) I do agree that it shouldn’t be nearly impossible to fire bad teachers with just cause — I used to think that was exaggerated, but since then have gotten to know a bunch of (pro-union) teachers and principals in Los Angeles, all of whom have confirmed that it is true. If people believed that those long-time teachers who stuck it out were actually worth their higher salaries, the higher salaries probably wouldn’t bother people. I also agree that tying teacher performance ratings to students performance is extremely problematic, since so much depends on factors outside a teacher’s control.
Where to start? The comments here provide so much misinformation it’s astounding. Mainly people seem to assume that their personal experience with teaching is the ‘average’ experience. They are clearly wrong.
1. accuracy of the average salary: @59 and others have done a good job on this. The referenced study is correct.
2. most teacher union contracts mandate that the employer pay for professional development.
3. while raw test scores might not be a good way to measure teacher performance, *improvement* in test scores certainly would be, right? Isn’t a teacher’s job to get students to advance academically? The Seattle Schools currently have a test that is given 3x/year that measures student progress. The union insists this not be used to evaluate teachers.
4. With all due respect to teachers who work beyond the school day for very little extra pay, they are doing so completely voluntarily. Most volunteers make $0 for volunteering. Don’t volunteer if you don’t want to do the extra work.
5. The research is clear that advanced degrees for teachers do not translate into better student performance. Plus, should you get paid by what degree you have or by how effective you are at your job?
6. Planning periods may be short, but teachers do not have tests and papers due from every student in every class they teach every day. It’s called time management.
The end.
“Then again, you know what they say: Those who can, teach; those who can’t, make a damn newspaper every week.”
Obviously you DON’T know what they say, because they say:
Those who can, do.
Those who can’t do, teach.
Those who can’t teach, teach gym.
Those who can’t teach gym, are guidance counselors.
I’ve been teaching four years now. I have a masters degree and I still make less than fifty thousand dollars a year before taxes. But I guess that’s more common in the poorer districts directly south of Seattle. I those districts (Tukwila, Highline, Federal Way) there’s usually an additional two hours of uncompensated social work each day.
I don’t find that as an average to be very high, and considering the upper limit for the most experienced, it’s still only a modest way to make a living. Yes, maybe its better pay than most of you at the Stranger but I guarantee there are several there within your ranks who make nice coin, and if you averaged it all out, hmmm. . .
As for incentive pay, studies show again and again that pay for performance schemes don’t work with roles that require creativity and innovation. Pay for performance works best (and only, apparently) in jobs requiring rote physicality and repetition. Here’s a citation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFj…
When they say the average teacher pay is $70,850, I’d have to wonder about a couple of things. First of all, is this number including all certificated employees? If so, then it is skewed to the high side because principals and other district administrators are often included in the “certificated employees” category, and they make significantly more than classroom teachers. The median is less susceptible to those outliers, thus it is probably the more accurate number.
Secondly, could this be the average number that represents how much it costs the district to employee a teacher – i.e. the one that includes salary and benefits – that they use when setting up a budget? None of my roommates who teach – and some have been teaching their 10-12 hours days for quite a while – bring home this amount of money as take-home pay. Even if they did though, it certainly wouldn’t allow them to buy a house on their own in the Seattle area. Cost of living here is way too high.
Also, past roomie, who taught HS math went to work for Boeing a few years ago. While teaching, he completed his PhD and saw his salary increase maybe $2000. When he went to Boeing, his salary nearly doubled within 2 years, and he says he works much less than he did when teacher.
And as for performance pay – would you rather have a teacher who is intrinsically motivated, or extrinsically motivated? If your child is struggling in school, do you really want them in a system where they are viewed as the commodity that determines whether or not a teacher gets extra pay or not? What about all the special populations out there – the children with severe disabilities who are being forced to take tests that have no meaning to their life – should those teachers be subject to the same performance-pay schemes? Who will want to teach ELL kids, special ed kids, low-income etc. if they know they can move to a school with higher incomes and better test scores, hence they will have an easier time getting merit pay? To me, the incentive pay scheme is just scary – market-based ideologies have no place in certain human services – among them health care and education.
And because it’s always good to know about the source of the information…
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?tit…
Awful lot of business people. Wonder if any of them are educators? (outside of the research advisory board)
@67: yes, add up the Stranger staff salaries, including Savage’s, divide, and tell us the average salary of the Stranger staff. Unpaid interns do not count as zeroes since schools have volunteers, too.
IMHO, even the worst public school teacher is probably underpaid.
When you consider that a contract worker at Microsoft with B.A. degree (or in some cases no degree at all) can probably earn close to $70k a year working 35-40 hours a week, I don’t think that average teacher’s salary is particularly outrageous, especially when most of the people making $70k a year probably have an advanced degree.
I know that many of these folks at MS work incredibly hard. But anecdotal evidence suggests that some of them seem to have plenty of time to sit around surfing the web 2-3 hours a day and yet their contracts keep getting renewed. All that is just to say that in any organization you’re going to find a range of performance, and poor performers are not always let go, even when managers seemingly have more latitude to do it.
I also raise it to underscore that if you are reasonably smart and well educated, there are so many easier ways to earn $70k a year than teaching K-12. Even if you extrapolate that amount over 12 months, it’s still what, a little over $93k a year (incidentally, has anyone checked whether principals get paid over 9 months or 12? If it’s 12? It would make a difference in how you look at that salary).
Also, as others have already said, average salaries are always going to skew towards the higher side of the range even if less people are making top dollar). So it might be more useful to find out what the Median salary is for Seattle teachers. This number will undoubtedly be lower and give a better picture of reality.
First year associates at large law firms start at what, $70k-120k a year now (depending on the city). Don’t get me wrong, those people work their asses off (in some cases 80 hours a week), but it still seems a little perverse to me that a 26 year old kid right out of law school earns as much or more than the most experienced secondary school teach (who probably has at least an M.A. degree) and probably what, 3 to 3.5 times more than a beginning teacher.
I suspect that if you were to go back to the mid 1960s, you would find that this gap was not nearly as wide, which is one of the problems we face. Thanks to Reagan/Bush, the gap between private and public sector salaries has widened significantly (and this isn’t just true of teachers, it’s true for govt lawyers, engineers, etc). But to do that we’d have to raise taxes (or spend a little less on the military).
I honestly do think that paying people more at the start would eliminate a lot of the problems. Why? Because idealism only goes so far. Most people with other options will leave a shitty situation once they figure out just how shitty it is (like the Boeing dude in @68).
People without as many options (for whatever reason) will figure out how to survive. So what are you left with? The super diligent idealists (who are probably the best senior teachers–but not necessarily) and the survivors (who in some cases are either burnt out idealists now phoning it in, or people who aren’t great teachers but are good at surviving in the system).
So what happens if we change things up and some of the senior laggards can be fired? Room for more young idealists. But what happens when those young idealists start quitting, because it’s been fun, but it’s still a shitty situation, they are getting burned out, they can make more money doing something else, and the new performance metrics set impossible goals for them that don’t track the reality of what it is to teach kids? Not nearly as much fun as I thought it would be when I graduated from Yale or Stanford wanting to make a difference.
So then we have constant churn of young idealists through the system, with far fewer experienced people. Maybe that’s better in the end. But I’m not convinced it is. Sometimes being experienced is realizing that less is more (and that what you do or don’t do may affect things less than everyone wants to believe).
So to me, reform is still just code for trying to spend the same amount (or probably a diminishing amount) of money and get a better output. But if public education was better back in the day, I bet you it was because they spent more money per kid in inflation adjusted dollars.
And that’s the sad bottom line: We like to kick and scream about public education and its problems, but we don’t really want to have to pay what it costs to do it well (or at least not what it would cost to do it well for poor people).
Most people with any coin, move to a town with good public schools, send their kids to private school, or are engaged and smart enough to figure out how to get their kids into the good public school programs in their city (including moving to different neighborhood in the city if need be). If they can’t do that, they move to the suburbs or send their kids to private school. And I can’t blame anyone for doing that.
1. Use student teachers as unpaid assistants.
2. Scantron!
That’s how it worked when I was student teaching in the 90’s.
so, “church-mousey” means doesn’t make that much money?
@64:
You are wrong about every thing you said.
Test scores are a measure of how well the student knows the test. Not the material, not ow that material may have anything to do with their life, not with why the material is important. Just that it is on the test, and according to the test there is one correct answer about it.
Does the student have a cold? Forget lunch? Had a fight with a friend or parent? All will affect performance. None are the teacher’s fault or under the teacher’s control.
Teaching to the test is just about the worst possible way to teach any complex subject.
The professional development paid for by some school districts (obviously NOT the ones where teachers have to by many of their own supplies, like lined paper and pens and chalk or markers and crayons) is the stuff done on those in-service days where classes get out early. NOT summer classes in the teacher’s field.
The work done at home consists of grading those papers-most years teachers at my HS, where my mom taught for 32 years, had about 120-130 students. Even only having half of them work on research projects at a time meant having 60 sets of information to check at every step of the process and then the 60 10 page papers to read and evaluate. While those projects were being worked on the students also had to read some literature and take tests on it and do grammar and vocabulary work and so on. All that had be at least looked at and entered into the record. This isn’t coaching for an hour and a half after school-which in itself requires a fair amount of prep and attention, this is a good 4 hours a day just to keep up. Sure, mom could have assigned less work. Then she would have ended up as one of those lazy incompetent teachers people love to revile. And her students would have learned less. She could have used the same materials from year to year-not adjusting what she did to better instruct her pupils. THAT’S time management.
Teachers with advanced degrees are presumed to have a better knowledge of their fields and thus be better prepared to explaining things to stupid or confused students. With luck they may get to deal with a smart kid or two who actually pushes for more learning. Plenty of HS teachers are required to have higher degrees to even get a job.
I am a high school teacher north of Stanwood, south of Bellingham. I make about $50,000 and have 2 Master’s degrees. For this extended education, I racked up $100,000 in student loans so that I could be the best educated teacher I could be. Yes, I accept my choice of continuing my education and I don’t expect to be compensated entirely for the expenditure. If I were an engineer, my beginning pay would have been much higher. However: I have 180 very needy students. They have stories to tell me, personal problems to consider, and a culture that encourages them to not display their intelligence. I do not work 9-5. My contract starts at 7:00 and ends at 2:30. Rarely do I make it out before 5:00 or later. When you ask for quality work from 180 students, you need to comment and reflect on it. My week-ends are spent finding new and technological-enhanced ways to share my knowledge. I do this work off-the-clock. This extra work provides many benefits including engaged students and exciting curriculum. I calculate about 65+hours per week. I am NOT complaining because I LOVE the job, the students, and the personal challenge. During the summer, when you might think we are taking a break, I go to trainings, conferences, and classes. I am required to pay for 150 clock hours (15 credits) every 5 years. I enjoy learning new approaches to teaching and better methodologies. However, I am not “compensated” for this extra time and I pay for the credit hours. Again, I LOVE what I do, I do NOT complain! However, when I see reports that teachers “only” work 9 months and receive $70,000 (at the top of the pay scale…), I cringe. It will take me about 20 more years (I have been teaching for 8) to even come close to that level. Most of you assume that the pay is based on a 7.5 hour day for 180 days of work. This equals 1350 hours of “on-the-clock” time. $51/hour. That would be great. Except that most teachers work beyond that 7.5 hour time period. Myself for example: About 9.5/day, which is 1710 hours for 180 days of work. That brings me to about $29.00 an hour for a regular work week. But what about the week-ends? I agree, I have gone on too long. My major (and last) point is:
Please don’t assume that these teachers are making $70,000 for the average 40-hour/week job. There is a larger story behind that figure. Teaching is an amazing profession. I don’t know if I will be able to last 20 years before I reach that “$70,000” scale, but until then, my students know that I care for each and every one of them and that I put in the extra time every day to make sure that they are receiving the best possible education.
End of comment. Thanks!
@75 Thanks for being a teacher and loving it but I am guessing you are not an English teacher. That wall of text gives me a headache to look at.
You do realize that teachers working 10 months out of the year is completely disingenuous. Teachers TEACH 10 months out of the year. They work IN SCHOOLS for 7-8 hours a day, and then go home and work on lesson plans and grading papers and tests for most of their evenings. They spend the summer working on lesson plans. They buy their own goddamned classroom supplies most of the time, including pencils and paper and chalk. Why don’t we look at school administrators’ salaries for once? They don’t teach our next generation of citizens, and for the most part do fuck-all to benefit the educational system.
1. Ship anti-tax Cut Teacher Pay activists to Idaho and let them rot.
2. Repeat 1 as needed.
You just can’t paint all teachers with one brush this way. I’m guessing not many of the posters have kids in Seattle Public Schools. While the majority of SPS teachers are good to terrific, there are some who really should be doing something else–who can make an entire year a rotten waste of time, or worse–but it’s almost impossible to get rid of them. Unless the teachers and principals unions begin to work constructively on some kind of link between performance and tenure (and not using test scores as a sole or even primary indicator), I believe our public school system will collapse, taking the decent salaries and benefits (which teachers deserve!) with it. I’m so glad my family is almost out.
I applaud Bethany Jean Clement for writing June 7 article:
http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archive…
I will here attempt to summarize the responses. As “The point of the study did not seem to be (that) teachers made that much money…” but that seniority played such a large role and performance so little. As the WPC’s paper suggested, “…it’s time to look at workplace reforms that reward performance and create incentives for teaching excellence.” Agreed? Bethany Jean wrote “um, YES”. It kinda looks like the bloggers concur but are wary of performance-evaluation criteria. To summarize the 80 responses to the article I scanned the for the words “seniority” and “performance” and found 21. (One had both words. The other 60 typically responded to the WPC’s report on compensation amount but that wasn’t the point, right?)
The “seniority” term referenced 3 comments of which:
#8 agreed “seniority should not rule” for compensation,
#45 agreed “…the…’seniority rules’ … mindset is stale and needs serious overhaul” and
#61 seemed to agree (but is not easily paraphrased).
The “performance” referenced comments numbered 18 of which 6 were unambiguous:
#12 implies that performance ought to make /some/ difference.
#15 “after (4 years), increases should be based on performance, not just adding another year of experience”
#27 “We should find some way to reward good teachers…”
#37 “for…knowledge-based professionals … differentiating pay based on performance is pretty commonplace.”
#63 questioned seemingly tenure-related retention practices.
#79 criticized tenure-related retention practices.
Three didn’t disagree,
#36 responds to #12 that it doesn’t always work.
#51 suggested that we look at administrators’ performance first.
#64 part 5 favors effective teaching.
Three were mixed, as
#35 didn’t think the compensation part would work, but implied agreement with the retention part suggesting more Administrator decision power.
#67 argues about P and /compensation/ but not specifically about P and /retention/.
#68 Intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation for work were compared.
(For me as a teacher, the answer to this question follows the compensation of various private schools compared to public. The intrinsic joy of teaching at a private school is not diluted by the classroom management challenges more frequently found in public schools and the pay rates generally reflect this).
Some mentioned “performance” but didn’t have clear recommendations:
#1 & #2 were skeptical about performance-based compensation but didn’t mention retention.
#26 “As far as “performance” goes, it all depends on who you ask.”
#41 used the P word once, the F word thrice.
#71 had a lotta words and “performance” got in there someplace.
#74 generally disagreed with #64.
Disclaimer: This attempt at a summary isn’t perfect and it shouldn’t be given the final word–it’s an overview that can help a reader toss these questions around and possibly gain perspective–if it shows this blogger didn’t understand your post, this gives you an excuse to restate it even more clearly.
Postscriptum:
The general conclusion that it kinda looked like the bloggers concur but are wary of performance-evaluation criteria could be sharpened up a little–there was general agreement on the seniority/retention question and wary agreement on the performance/compensation question. This is the way I’ve felt, and I’m glad to see that the consensus was as concordant as it was. (As I went digging through all these posts for this affirmation, an experience that motivated me was the thought of the recent near-layoff of an insanely great Math teacher at West Seattle HS. No one could be expected to put in the incredible preparation that she did before class, but we all ought to appreciate it. I didn’t just take the word of a fellow-teacher friend, I sat in and observed for an hour). To lose a particularly great teacher to an arbitrary ReductionInForce would not sit right with me–I’m pleased to hear that this was averted. Thank you for your concordant consensus, fellow bloggers.
After reviewing the new teacher’s contract for Seattle, I think it gives principals too much discretion. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. If teacher evaluations are based on one persons opinion there’s a lot of room for favoritism and for getting rid of people they just personally don’t like. I think 2 people should evaluate teachers and that if a teacher has students with high test scores the teacher shouldn’t receive a bad evaluation.
PRINCIPAL SALARIES START AT $100K??! you people are idiots if you actually believe that.
my mother, who had a master’s degree and was a teacher for over thirty-five years (high-achieving teacher, mind you) decided to go back and get her principal’s certification. now, she’s been a principal several years and has helped to drag her school’s achievement scores up from an abysmal rate, despite being in a high-poverty area and having to fight the teacher’s union tooth and nail to get rid of a crappy-a$$ed teacher along the way. she is one of the smartest, most dedicated and truly passionate professionals i will ever know. we were FAR from well-off for those thirty-five years of her being a public school teacher. and you know what? her principal salary is more than deserved. she works far more than she did even as a teacher (which was still more like 55 hours a week) and is stressed out beyond belief by some ridiculous parents and an ungrateful public. yet, she sticks at it. she’s a public servant and this article’s outrage at a $70K senior teacher salary (in one of the most expensive cost of living cities in the country, mind you) makes me f-ing SICK.
shame on you, bethany jean clement. you suck. and i bet you will make $70K in just a few short years of writing crappy hipster a$$hole drivel without an ounce of the effort of the majority of teachers put into their life’s work. what is your life’s work again? writing useless crap. congrats on your life.