Are you sure? This link:

http://www.worldsalaries.org/teacher.shtml

is a couple of years old but says that average teacher wages were $2,600 Euros for Finland vs. US$5,200 for the US. That doesn't seem like Finland's teachers are paid like doctors and lawyers, unless Finnish doctors and lawyers get paid much less than American doctors and lawyers.

Edit: Actually, from same website:

http://www.worldsalaries.org/finland.shtml

Doctors make about double teachers pre-tax, although that gap closes considerably after tax. Still think the notion that Finland pays it's teachers very high amounts and therefore gets very good education results is out of line with reality.

Yea but that's because you're homogeneous. If you had minorities were heterogeneous then it wouldn't work. Also SOCIALISM

Jah, I agree completely that parents are the most important pat. But there is NOTHING we can do to bring back traditional family values. Still, the school makes an impact. I understand that an abused kid from a broken home isn't usually going to wind up as a rhodes scholar. But maybe he learns enough to get an apprenticeship instead of working as a trash collector. Or a good teacher could get him reading at a 4th grade le el instead of third.

Yes there are unemployed engineers. Like 2%? (Not going to find the report again). there are a lot of technical jobs where there are more openings then seekers, even in this economy.

Getting fired because a parent complains to the board...you think nobody else has to worry about being unfairly fired because a customer was unhappy? The only real difference I see between being a teacher and any other service job is that a lot of your customers don't actually want your service

Jj, you don't need a rigid system to evaluate them. What is a principles job if not to monitor his employees? I simply cannot imagine that between periodic observation, and talking to students, and other teachers, and reviewing some of the work the students hand in, that it would be impossible to rank your teachers roughly in the order that you would want to keep them, and compensate them accordingly.

Do you realize all of the other responsibilities a Principal has and what the ratio of Principals:Teachers is? Your solution is expensive since it requires a significant increase in workload on the Principal - and in the end it's also not a very good system of evaluating teachers.

But whatever, I know you're going to keep on thinking that this is a really easy problem to solve despite having little to no experience in the field.

This is not a fair comparison. Any teacher will tell you that they have to deal with parent issues literally all the time. Parents never want to admit that the reason their kid might be struggling is because they're unintelligent, or undisciplined, or worst of all, that it might be their own fault, they alwaysblame the teacher. Hell, even the kids who are doing well will have parents who blame the teacher because they're not doing well enough.

Teachers in the US aren't as well paid per hour, though. http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ed...after-15-years

obv, they aren't going to make as much as doctors and lawyers, that a clear exaggeration.

lol, books are SOOOOOOOOO overrated. this isn't 1850 anymore. I LOL pretty hard at anyone who thinks they are smarter than other people just because they read. I used to live in Portland OR and reading is like a religion there, I just couldn't believe how many people I'd see on public transit burying their noses in a thick book just to make themselves look cool & so they didn't have to actually socially interact w/anyone.

Anyway w/respect to OP, I'll go out on a limb and say that corporate CEOs are clearly overpaid -- not teachers. I would also argue that many women are overpaid -- the law requires that they make the same money as men for equal work, but they are a much higher liability to their employers due to potential sexual harassment suits, also they miss much more time than men do due to personal illness & to take care of their kids. Plus they can go on maternity leave whenever, and a lot of times when they have kids they quit their jobs or reduce their hours, placing the burden on their employer to replace them. Women just do not, on average, provide the same value as an otherwise equivalent penis-wielder in the work place.

It is true that most teachers suck but the government (both federal and state) has all these ridiculous testing & curriculum requirements now that teachers have very little time or energy on top of meeting those requirements to do anything interesting or original. Ask anyone who teaches at a public school. Plus now you have guns in school, can't even feel safe at work -- that wasn't there even 15 years ago when I was in HS. It's just a ****ty ****ty job and it has become more and more ****ty over the past 10-20 years.

I guess I really have no understanding of the mindset of someone who is really dedicated to teaching at anything below the college level -- anyone of reasonable intelligence ought to be able to find a job that sucks less relative to the pay.

Bus drivers have to work for 12 months a year. The extra 11 weeks paid vacation is the problem.

The IL teachers union keeps running ads on how they pay "almost 10%" (8%),into their pension fund, and how they don't qualify for SS. Well, they don't pay PAYROLL taxes. They pay 1/2 of 1% net more, and get to retire 12 years sooner with 2 to 3 times the anual benefit. Plus way better health plan.

Good point. In a very general (and stupid, and meaningless) sense, "market failures" arent real things, or as you put it, everything bad is a "market failure."

But when someone uses a gun to rob another person, it seems SOMEWHAT disingenuous to consider this merely a market failure, and yet another example that freedom and liberty and markets lead to bad outcomes.

Someone should have paid your economics teacher better so you'd understand what a market failure is

In this case I'm not making any claims on whether people are well paid, I just think maybe we should stop falling all over ourselves congratulating Finland for an education system that appears to be a figment of one poster's imagination.

No I don't and that's a classic strawman. What I think is unique to the teaching profession is you're dealing with irrational adolescents in for long periods of time and your "customers" (parents) are constantly upset with the way you are doing your job for a myriad of reasons. Comparing the "customers" of teachers ability to gang up and go after someone is completely different than what MOST people would see in most other professions and the comparison is frankly laughable.

Again most of the "oh that **** happens in the private sector" or "this is what would happen if it was the private sector" are largely worthless and I'm not really sure why people make them when they just don't apply. If it was the private sector most teachers would kick out the learning disabled, abused, mentally ill, etc kids....the "products" that might not always be on pace to be "profitable." But this isn't the private sector, kids aren't products, and as a society we decided to at least attempt to educate all of them. If people want to argue we shouldn't then by all means make that argument, but the treating it like a business comparisons are mostly full of fail.

If every bus driver were fired, they can all be replaced for $30K a year within 3 months. You wouldn't be able the replace the teachers that quickly. Because of unions bad teachers can't be fired.

A strawman? I don't think I made up an false position to argue against... the idea of a parent getting a teacher fired was something you brought up? Besides, I was thinking of the kids as the customers and the education as the product... and I DID make the argument that maybe we shouldn't be trying to educate every child, specifically whatever percentage it is that cause the most disruptions to the other children.

Go back and read the educators posts in this thread. Notice how condescending they are. Now, I don't at any point think I claimed to know more then a teacher. I am clearly not in a position to make public policy, and I agree that I would need far more information were I to find myself in that situation. This is an internet discusssion board, specifically for discussing oppinions about issues. Mine may be wrong, and you obviously know more about it then I do. Your contribution though is to tell me to shut up about what I know nothing about, and make arguments about how teaching is a completely unique profession that has completely different problems from every other.

On your specific point that parents can gang up and go after teachers...does this actually happen often for "unfair" reasons? Honest question. We hear about protests because of teachers posting stuff on facebook and whatnot, but that seems fairly justified to me. I was just wondering what actual situations you've heard about that lead to needing to protect teachers from parents ire.

I love learning more about stuff, and would truly enjoy hearing your opinion. Or I guess you could just point out that I'm stupid and uninformed

Well I'm getting ready for bed so will try and get to this tomorrow, but I just want you to know I wasn't telling "you" to shut up or anything so sorry if I came off that way.

I was saying that in the many of these threads we've had people often compare everything to the private sector and most of that doesn't jive well for various reasons many people have already pointed out. I said strawman because I never said other people can't get fired unfairly.

It was not my intention for you to read that as directed only at you, it was more at the thread (and the others we've had like it, I've been on here a while ) and I certainly don't want anyone to shut up about the topic. Like you said that's what the board is for and it's a breathe of fresh air on here to have someone as open minded as you seem to be.

Oh Lord,

Please don't say that if education was in the private sectore they would kick out the learning disabled and ******ed. Private educators take care of the previously mentioned far better than the public sector does.

I have a friend that makes $60.00 an hour plus the massive benies and when I say you make to much, he whines about everything.

He couldn't make $30 an hour doing anything else, but feels totally intitled to the $60 he gets.

A lot of private schools don't take those kids!

Anyways, I don't know what your friend does or what he's in, but he's CLEARLY (see what I did there) a poor example to use. The vast majority of educators don't make anywhere near that and it's laughable to say so.

Anti-education people are always trying to find the one school district with high pay or something along those lines and then use it to describe the entire system. I'm probably making 2.00 an hour for the time I put in. I work about 65 hours a week, (I coach as well). My private sector friends do much less than me (they will be the first to admit it) and almost all of them make much more than me.

Tons of people leave education for better opportunities all the time. This idea that it's some gravy train where you can retire early and go buy an island is insane and makes me wonder about the fantasy world some posters are living in. Methinks a lot of anti public anything people are posting to be anti public anything because it isn't the "private sector" which works oh so well for everything

Plenty of education jobs are out there people, go get one and report back. A lot could be fixed with the system I'll be the first to admit.

Personally, my anti-public sentiment blossomed during the Wisconsin fiasco. It was rough seeing a bunch of adults being carried out looking like the children about which they complain...and over benefits I've never had. In my experience so far, if a person isn't/hasn't been on the public dime, they understand the sentiment. The only people that are blown away by the concept are those trying to justify their own gains.

And that's a solution I hadn't thought of. If you don't like em...join em. I'll try for congress first, though...better pay and less rug-rats.

Shhh, don't mention all the hours a lot of teachers put in organising and running after school activities. That does not fit in with the me myself and f*** everyone else ethos a lot of posters here seem to subscribe to.

Is it really altruism if you're using it as justification for benefits?

What? The poster is saying there are more hours that are unaccounted for when calculating salary per hour . Altruism or not is inconsequential.

I am not in the US

Here a teacher get slightly more the average national income around 60K / year and i guess its slightly to much exspecially bad and good ones get the same here. We have the problem thats there less differrence in payments.

Thats in relation like an average qualified technican in the industry.
A Busdriver at sample get around 25-30K
Security arround 20 K
Hair cutter arround 15K

It was implied that teachers put these extra hours in because they don't ascribe to the "me myself and f*** everyone else ethos a lot of posters here seem to subscribe to." I agree with you that it should be inconsequential, but the argument from public workers that the rest of us are 'meanies' comes up often.

It's not that you're meanies it's that you get frothy mad at hearing someone gets something you may not and look at numbers and assume omg 3 months off so easy people would do that for almost nothing rather than look at the whole picture.

BEFORE PENSION AND BENEFITS BEFORE PENSION AND BENEFITS BEFORE PENSION AND BENEFITS BEFORE PENSION AND BENEFITS BEFORE PENSION AND BENEFITS BEFORE PENSION AND BENEFITS BEFORE PENSION AND BENEFITS BEFORE PENSION AND BENEFITS BEFORE PENSION AND BENEFITS BEFORE PENSION AND BENEFITS BEFORE PENSION AND BENEFITS BEFORE PENSION AND BENEFITS BEFORE PENSION AND BENEFITS BEFORE PENSION AND BENEFITS BEFORE PENSION AND BENEFITS BEFORE PENSION AND BENEFITS BEFORE PENSION AND BENEFITS BEFORE PENSION AND BENEFITS BEFORE PENSION AND BENEFITS BEFORE PENSION AND BENEFITS BEFORE PENSION AND BENEFITS BEFORE PENSION AND BENEFITS BEFORE PENSION AND BENEFITS BEFORE PENSION AND BENEFITS BEFORE PENSION AND BENEFITS

It just boggles the mind that anyone bothers to come in to a thread like this about public sector compensation and misses the number one biggest most important crucial item that one has to understand to have any grasp whatsoever on the topic at hand.