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.
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.