Teachers are changing professions, in large numbers, and have been for a while. TFA discusses that and how districts are resorting to desperate measures to get bodies to teach, like drafting in college kids, cutting school hours, and importing them.

You don’t have one student. You have easily dozens, maybe hundreds. There isn’t enough time to actively teach, and grade all their stuff, and figure out the next lesson plan in the eight hour day.

FWIW: as a high school English teacher in a wealthy Minneapolis suburb, I had approx. 120-150 students on my roster (depending on what classes I was teaching at the time).

My SO works in schools and she seems to work 60 hour weeks 10 months of the year for total compensation circa $60k, which is above the teacher pay scale for her years of experience. Schools seem to be undergoing a slow-motion collapse because every year the needs for specialized professionals go up, and the number of folks willing to do it goes down. Severe mental, social emotional, and behavior problems get worse every year, and even in K-5 schools people start to feel like they're just getting paid to get bit, spat on, and disrespected because there's no systemic solution to bad and crazy parents or neglected kids, let alone the fact that because nobody is willing to work in the conditions the average quality of those left is going down.

I've been working as a software dev for 20+ years,the only time I actually truly worked 60+ hours a week was when I was attempting to get my own startup off the ground.

Other than that, it's usually been 10-15 of actual work work.

Really not trying to brag, but to bring context to the conversation,I make 10 times what a teacher makes.

I think it's a real problem teachers are underpaid and undervalued. IMO schools should have very basic facilities/luxuries, and awesome very well paid teachers (150-200k) who we expect a lot out of, give a lot of liberties to. This way there will always be competition and prestige involved with being a teacher.

Might sound expensive, but I truly think it's an investment that will more than pay for itself in ~1 generation

I just did the math. Paying every teacher $150k would cost more than my entire local district gets in total funding every year.

That's a lot of new property taxes.

Did you deduct the current average pay and take into account federal and state funding which may even exceed local funding?

Or... maybe reduce our defense budget nationally. We have endless funds for wars and bailing out large corporations. We don't need to raise taxes to accomplish this.

>Really not trying to brag, but to bring context to the conversation,I make 10 times what a teacher makes.

no, that lines up with my experience. I was making 60k/yr as a software engineer when I was working Part Time. That was fine for me since I had an extra 20 hours a week to do whatever I wanted and they let me work remote. I could not imagine going through that job while dealing witch a laughably disrespectful salary.

>IMO schools should have very basic facilities/luxuries, and awesome very well paid teachers (150-200k)

Parents and taxpayers want fancy new football fields, and they want teachers to be poorly paid because they want to look down on them.

The evil American empire is controlled by very rich tyrants who train people to be corrupt dumbasses everywhere. That's why you have a mob of loud-mouthed people who care about sports more than teachers. That mob of people are not perfect for a civilization. They are perfect for making civilization collapse. Civilization is built by making education more important than sports. Teachers being looked down upon is a symptom of civilization collapsing while entertainment like a football game distracts sheep from that ugly reality. Those parents who look down on teachers are sheep. I would keep my imaginary children away from those sheep. Those sheep only care about themselves in a short-sighted way based on instant gratification bullshit.

I'm a software dev as well, coming from a family of educators (dad, mom, brother, all three have taught at some point during their career or for an extended part of their career).

The problem I think is that you're examining 'working more' in the context of 'work output'. As a developer, it is very much about 'work output', however as a teacher it is often not.

In my moms example, she had roughly 6x50 minute classes a day, with a 10 minute break between each one. So, roughly 6 hours of 'meetings', since those 10 minutes in between were really just prepping for the next class, and oftentimes speaking to students in between too. That in and of itself is draining. This is the schedule of a manager, more or less - 6 hours of meetings where you need to be "on" and can't zone out.

The problem is that teachers don't just operate on a manager schedule. They also operate on a maker schedule: designing lesson plans. My mom's other 2x50 minute blocks were designated for a 50 minute lunch break and 50 minutes of planning. But 50 minutes of planning is not nearly enough time to plan two classes that my mom teaches every day. So, no actual lunch break, the lunch break is actually eating while planning. And that's still not really enough time, so my mom would get there an hour early and stay an hour late. She worked 7am-530pm M-F, and since getting behind on lesson plans means you need to put on a movie which puts your kids behind, she often worked 3-4 hours on Sunday to prepare for the week ahead. This is not my mom being an overachiever, or being dedicated to her work, this is her being dedicated to ensuring that she is just doing her job. This is what the job requires. Sure, it does get easier over time as you get to reuse lesson plans.

The point I want to drive home is not that working 7am-530pm is "more [time] than most professionals", but rather the quality of work is so much different, and so much harder. Managing a classroom of 25-30 children, middle schoolers in her case, is draining, so much more draining than coding. It is more draining than being a manager, because your team is often 3x as big and significantly less behaved (they're children after all).

The cherry on top is that my first job out of college as a developer I was already making $30k more than my mom a year. She had a masters and 10yrs of experience at the time. I am not under the illusion that I am smarter or more qualified.

To answer your statement of "I also need to do trainings, mentorings, networking", teachers regularly need to do trainings too. For my mom, these trainings are required - she was required to do something like 20 hours of professional development a year. And they often mentor students as well, as you absolutely experienced during your own education whenever you went to a teacher during their lunch break for help. I don't think tutoring versus mentoring is that hard. Having someone come to you with questions is an easy way of educating someone. The hard part is lesson plans, to think through a year of "how can I distill this knowledge down and transfer it?", which I personally have never needed to do as a tutor.

To answer your question of "why don't they change professions?", I think that's rather naive. Not everyone is on the path of trying to optimize financial independence and minimize time spent working. Why do folks go into journalism? Or art, or music? Are those people stupid, because they aren't in software engineering where work is more lucrative and easier?

> teachers work more in 9 months than most professionals work in a year

I do think this is an overstatement, maybe a little. Maybe not. It depends on the teacher and the subject. I hope these explanations help, growing up I definitely did not realize how hard my "good" teachers worked to provide me a solid education.

> To answer your question of "why don't they change professions?", I think that's rather naive. Not everyone is on the path of trying to optimize financial independence and minimize time spent working. Why do folks go into journalism? Or art, or music? Are those people stupid, because they aren't in software engineering where work is more lucrative and easier?

You're hanging out on a website where people regularly talk about how college should be abolished/de-emphasized because it's not needed to get a good job. Yea unfortunately, a lot of people here really DO think those people who go into journalism/art/music are stupid because they're not working in more lucrative fields.

Of course they do that while listening to music and probably enjoying art. Of course.

> a lot of people here really DO think those people who go into journalism/art/music are stupid because they're not working in more lucrative fields.

I don’t think they are stupid as people have interests and there’s many reasons to pursue a career other than money.

I just think they are stupid when they complain about how they don’t make a higher income in these fields. The income potential of these fields is known, so complaining about this, once in the field, is really just an irrational thing.

> The income potential of these fields is known, so complaining about this, once in the field, is really just an irrational thing.

Are we not allowed to complain about known things? If you get a speeding ticket do you complain about it? Under that same philosophy, complaining about your ticket is irrational and stupid. Someone complaining about a hangover is irrational and stupid. Someone complaining about having back problems because you sit all day and don't exercise is irrational and stupid. I just don't think this line of reasoning makes sense at all. Our priorities change and maybe a teacher wants to do something good for the world but after 10 years they see they're not paid/respected well, and they have a family to take care of and a mortgage to pay and they're tired because they work 60 hour works. IMO that's a very rational place to start complaining.

I have the exact same experience: watching family members work in teaching, seeing them do overtime, getting a software job and beating their salary after 2 years in the job.

It's disgraceful.

Teachers are, to the best of my knowledge, universally paid salary, not hourly.

The other reasons this hasn't changed are

a) This is just "how things are". It's more or less considered the "normal" way of doing education.

b) Changing it would require increasing education budgets by a fairly significant amount, and since those are all local, and based on local property taxes, they are much more likely to have a bunch of entitled rich people coming in to say "I shouldn't have to pay any taxes to support those damn kids" and voting for budget cuts. (Because the people who aren't rich don't have the time and energy to be coming in to these meetings on a regular basis.)

My guess is that this hasn't changed due to union action or lawsuits because (1) teachers are salaried, and tend to be over the limit where overtime pay is legally required; and (2) union organizers don't think they can get any more money without giving something else up.

Also, in the states where this problem is the worst, there’s usually “right to work” legislation and other rules that do their best to defang collective bargaining power.

Actual time teachers spend working has, of course, been measured.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf https://www.bls.gov/mlr/1999/04/art4full.pdf

The first study assumes they don't work on weekends - which they very often do.