I don't deny that there are teachers getting shafted all over the US; I'd just want people to know that the deal in many (most? all?) major urban school districts is surprisingly strong.
One suburban school district that you know of. I'm sure there are others. I'm not sure how you're extrapolating to many or all major urban school districts.
I've looked at a bunch of them (I have this argument somewhat frequently). But, sure: let's find some examples. What's a major metro where you think teachers probably get a raw deal? This is easy data to pull up.
I know OPS in Omaha doesn't pay crap. Last year's pay schedule started at $43k with a bachelor's, 47k with a master's, and 51k with a doctorate. Maxes at $71,400 with a doctorate. 2022-23 starts at $44k with a bachelor's and maxes at 75k with a doctorate.
I'm not at all surprised if teachers in Nebraska get a shittier deal than teachers in California or Illinois, but if you click around the financials for the DC West school district, teachers in suburban Omaha are routinely making 85k+. These teachers do not have doctorates. Note that the base salary of a teacher is just the floor on their compensation; they make substantial additional money from extracurriculars and in-school mentoring work.
Valley is not suburban Omaha. They're in the same county, but Valley is distinctly a separate city and not a suburb. Even with how far West Omaha has expanded, there's no one in the area that's going to call it a suburb without laughing a little. Is that the best you could find?
How about you look at the number of teachers employed by OPS vs DC West? They have one elementary school, one middle school, and one high school in that district vs OPS serving an area encompassing hundreds of thousands of residents.
You were excited about 100k/year in California? Please tell me that's not the Bay area where that still leaves them unable to purchase a home anywhere near the area.
You also understand extracurriculars are a lot of extra time and work for a bit of extra pay, right? One of the biggest complaints I've heard is that teachers are being forced into running extracurriculars because they already work way too many hours for the pay and for any kind of work/life balance.
I found DC West by looking at a list of Omaha suburbs, finding Waterloo, and looking up its school district. It's significantly closer to Omaha than Naperville is to Chicago, so yeah, I'm sticking with that being a suburb. If it wasn't a suburb, if it was its own city, that would make my argument stronger, not weaker.
I don't know what "excited" means. By national standards, I've been extraordinarily lucky; a $100k/yr comp package wouldn't excite me right now. But I can compare what teachers make to what other white collar professionals make, and I understand how to account for the rest of the compensation package --- a defined-benefit pension in many major districts (actually, a defined-benefit pension would light me up right now) and an enormous allotment of vacation days.
Speaking only to my local school district, which breaks comp out, extracurriculars are not a "bit" of extra money; it's as much as a 20% pay boost. My real point though is simply that the base salary is where most teacher comp packages start, and there's other things that go into it.
I'm not saying "teacher" is the best deal in the whole economy, but in major metro school districts, it's not a bad deal.
And, just to be ultra clear: obviously there are a lot of school districts, especially rural districts, where this isn't the case at all.
Alright, you pick the data you want to pay attention to and ignore the fact that the majority of teachers in the Omaha Metro are on the first pay scale I showed you. And go ahead and tell me that you know the lay of the land of an area you've never stepped foot in. Nice talking to you.
