2) Very few companies do 5% match these days. 3) Good between that and your pension you will pretty much replace your income. 4) I pay over 750 a month for health insurance. My company pays a similar amount. It is good insurance but not great (I have like 5k deductible and 25 dollar office visits)5) Umm what degrees to you consider "Equivalent"? Last I checked teachers make about the same or more as people with masters in english, pyschology, and socialogy. Yeah they make less than lawyers and engineers. Those are also much harder programs. 6) Happens in every job. And it sucks.7) How many of those 6k had tenure (worked over 4 years)? I have no idea of about NC teachers but I can tell you in NY and CA, you get tenure and your set. Other than raping or killing a student, it is hard to get fired. And in NC a quick goole says that .03% of teachers with tenure were fired. 8) Yep. But guess what between family situations and job unhappiness most people switch careers several times in their life,9) Yep. Teacher quality (on average) these days is a lot worse than it was 30 years ago. The smart woman who used to be pigeon holed into being teachers can not be doctors and lawyers so a lot less of them become teachers. Might be better for society but sucks for average teacher quality.The average teacher pay isn't bad. The starting pay is. As far as not getting bonuses, pretty much every teachers union is against them. The whole point of unions is to not reward good performance.That same level of education only works if you consider a masters in education to be the same as a law degree and you ignore hours worked (Last I check teachers public teachers averaged about 1600 hours a year. Other professionals were about 1900).If public life is so bad, how come all of these people choose to live it? How come they don't go work in private sector jobs? Because the pay is good (depending on the job it is +-10% for most of them) and the job security is great.And in most costal areas, getting a teaching job is hard. There is a lot of competition for those slots. That whole teacher shortage thing is pretty much a myth. There are certain specialities and locations that have shortages, but their is a big surplus of k-5 teachers. If we dropped pay some more we could hire more teachers and get rid of that surplus.And finally, you might have just picked the wrong state to live in.:)
teacher #1234 wrote:
I think a lot of you have very wrong misperceptions of some public jobs.
I work as a teacher in NC.
1. I don't have a UNION. A lot of states don't have teachers Unions.
2. My pension is only 54 percent of my salary. I contribute 5.5 percent of my salary and the state contributes 5 percent. I would probably do better with a 401k than with my states pension plan. I contribute another 5 percent to a Roth IRA to cover what my pension want cover in retirement.
3. I still pay fully into Social Security. I didn't even know that some states teachers didn't have to pay into Social Security.
4. I have a state insurance plan, however, it only covers emergency room visits and I have to pay the first 500 dollars of any visit. IT does cover a few basic check up type visits but nothing major. It does not cover dental, eye, cancer, or any other extra benefits that some of you think is in every public employees insurance plan. In order for me to be fully funded by the state insurance I would have to fork over about 450 dollars a month. I’m willing to bet that most private company’s employees insurance plan is way better than mine.
5. I have a masters and I make about 25,000 less than the average person in the private sector would make with my education level.
6. I'm also told what to do by politicians who have never set foot in a classroom and have no clue what goes into running a classroom or a school.
7. It’s a myth in most states that teachers have guaranteed jobs even if they are bad. My state fired over 6000 teachers last year. They are probably going to have to fire another 1000 this year. Having tenure means nothing in my state. All it means is that in order to fire a tenured teacher you have to do more paper work, you can still fire them for almost no reason at all.
8. 50 percent of all teachers quite after the first six years of teaching. That’s huge turn over. There are always a lot of willing young teachers who want to try out teaching thinking they can change the world but very few make it to retirement because they find teaching isn’t what they thought it would be.
9. Low pay means crappy teachers. People will still take the jobs the education level will drop though. You get what you pay for after all. You can fix virtually all of America’s education problems by paying teachers more and then holding them accountable for the success of their students. If you pay teachers more then the brighter and more creative college students will want to become teachers. Right now the pay is such across the country that most teachers were your B-C students in college not you’re A-B students. But increasing teacher pay across the country will not happen. Tax payers want teachers to do more with less money.
I AM NOT COMPLAINING. I love my job, I love what I do. I just can't stand when people try to paint public employees as this entitled group of people who just suck off the tax payers while doing nothing. I'd like to think I work just as hard as my private sector counterparts except that I am not compensated for working harder. I never get a 10% bonus for performing well above the state average. Matter of fact in my state even though we improved our scores as a school by 10% we got a pay cut across the board.
People point to the top paying states as examples of public employees cheating the tax payers. However, the majority of the states around the country pay their public employees well below the average salary of private sector employees with the same level of education.
If public employees have it so good then quit your job and get one of the cushiony jobs that you complain so much about. But I have a feeling you want because you realize that you will make way more money in the private sector and if you invest right you can retire just as soon as us public employees can.