Michael Bromley, a teacher in Washington, DC, writes:

My colleagues groan when I say it, and then tell me to shut up: teachers are over-paid. Truly, we are.

Maybe it’s the fact that I’m sitting in the basement studio apartment (I use that term loosely) of another couple’s house in Brooklyn and admiring my expansive collection of insecticides, an air-conditioner that sounds like a steam engine (and produces about as much cool air), and bought last coffee with some coins I found under my second-hand couch—but I’m having a hard time following the logic here.¹

I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, Mike. Let’s see where you take this:

Okay, I’m not a career teacher, and having built a business from scratch, I know what it’s like to not know what next month’s pay is going to look like. Most of my colleagues have studied and done nothing but teaching. It’s all they know. Their only thought on teacher pay is that it’s never enough.

Since you didn’t divulge any details about the business you built from scratch or how it’s doing today, I’m going to make a few assumptions about you, Mike. Normally, I’d feel bad about making assumptions since they typically make a synonym for a donkey out of you and me, but you’ve already made plenty of assumptions about me and you’re already an jerk—so there doesn’t seem to be much harm in doing so. I’m going to assume that you built your business through hard work and determination, not by way of a college major or graduate degree. In addition, you had to take some classes to get certified to teach. If that’s the case, how does that make you any different?

Are you suggesting that career teachers don’t have any interests, passions, or side projects outside of teaching? That doesn’t seem to add up.

Scraping by in education without a speciality in your subject area and the credits to back it up is only an option in elementary school and is becoming increasingly rare as budget cuts usually take out the common branch teachers first. As a result, most teachers today have degrees in subjects such as chemistry, mathematics, and literature and many of those are graduate degrees and advanced certificates.

In addition, programs like Teacher for America and the New Teacher Project, regardless of what you think about them, heavily weigh experience outside of the classroom and seek out career-changers—such as yourself—to take on teaching positions in high-need schools.

Most of the teachers I know who are my age are pretty smart cookies and went to some first-rate undergraduate schools. Many of us considered becoming lawyers or going into finance, but we ultimately chose to spend our twenties teaching in special education in high-need schools in New York City because of the money. That must be why the majority of us leave the profession in less than five years: The money gets to our heads. Next thing you know, we’re partying up like rockstars (e.g. ordering a third round before the only Saturday happy hour in town ends and we have to go home because $6 a beer is a bit too steep—even for our expensive tastes).

But you’ve gotten off-topic, Mike. You’re not complaining that teachers want more money, you’re saying we’re already overpaid.

To that, Liz Dwyer of GOOD Magazine, responds:

Nevermind that according to PayScale, first-year teachers are only earning a median salary of $34,635. Once you take out deductions for taxes and benefits, you’re not making much. In my last job as a teacher, my net pay was around $1,800 per month—and I bought supplies and materials for my students out of my check.

As my wife so eloquently puts it, “Teaching is one of the few occupations where you have to spend hours outside of work planning for what you’re going to do at work.” If you factor in the time it takes to plan lessons, grade assignments, and call parents; teachers make about $6 more an hour than a shift manager at McDonald’s and the shift manager probably doesn’t have both undergraduate and graduate student loans to pay off. But, no, we’re overpaid.²

But let’s get back to our good friend, Mikey B, who not only has strong opinions about teachers’ salaries, but also their love lives:

My advice to young teachers is never to marry another teacher: go for investment bankers, physicians, lawyers, you know, people who actually work for a living.

Shh, don’t tell my wife. Ironically, my advice to young people is never to marry a pompous nutcase. So I guess we’ve reached an impasse here. Here’s the rub, Mike: young teachers can’t meet people with “real jobs”,³ because people with “real jobs” some how manage to stay awake past seven o’clock in the evening and lead relatively normal social lives, unlike their peers in education—who having left the house at 5:30 in the morning, stood on their feet for the large majority of the day, and are mentally exhausted from having to keep on top of 32 rambunctious middle-schoolers—have fallen asleep in their lesson plan books.

How about this: let’s correlate teacher pay to economic function directly. It’d require banning public schooling, but the downside is that all schools and all teachers would have to compete for their jobs—and for paying clients.

This sounds like a terrific use of instructional time, excuse me for a moment while I go get my mug for that tea you’re brewing.

If I were running a school, I’d line up my teaching staff, introduce them to the clients, and see who wins. We could charge our clients per teacher, thus letting them choose the type, quality, or experience they want and according to an actual value: want Mr. Bromley, that’ll cost ya an extra five hundred bucks. Too much?

Really? Do you think that would work?

Imagine the results—it’d be phenomenal: parents and students would choose the type of education they want, and pricing would set itself accordingly. (Supposedly we do this for college, paying those serious dollars for the “better” schools. Ouch. I’m gonna think this one over real carefully as I drop my daughter off at that little liberal arts college in Boston this Fall.) Finally, we’d have a real connection between service and price, and teacher pay would be comparable, measurable, and performance-based. Dream on.

You know what, Mike? You’re absolutely correct. It would be phenomenal—phenomenally unjust. See, I’m not sure what rock you’ve been living under (although, it sounds delightfully blissful and much nicer than my basement studio), but those of us—who don’t exclusively breathe with our mouthes and, on occasion, lift our knuckles from the ground—are familiar with this little thing called the achievement gap. As it turns out those with more money do, in fact, get a better education and have an exponentially greater chance of earning a living wage when they graduate (or graduate at all, as the case may be).

If I’m understanding you correctly, Mike, you’re proposing a socio-economic apartheid. Those with the means get the right to a quality education and those without are screwed? Considering the amount of thought you’ve given that argument, I’m not sure if I’d be willing to pony up an extra $500 for the privilege of having my children exposed to that sort of reasoned and carefully considered thinking. Can you get some sort of discount if the teacher has recently suffered a head injury and has actually gone on record saying something that asinine? It would be kind of like getting them to lower the price of a can of soup if it’s dented.

Why This Matters

I’ll level with you, Mike. Some teachers are overpaid. I’ve met teachers who checked out a long time ago and pass the time reading the newspaper while they’re students fill out worksheets. Overall, however, that’s a pretty small minority and one that I think is worth you taking a moment of your time and considering if you’re one of them. Reading your little piece, it sounds like things are a walk in the park for you and that’s fantastic, but myself and my friends have been cursed out, threatened, attacked, and otherwise had our sense of safety violated. We deal with administrators who are frantic, scared, and typically run their schools with a culture of fear instead of banding together with their teachers to achieve a common good. It’s okay though, I suppose, because we’re just in it for the money. You know, we’re not personally invested in the well-being of our students.

Normally, I don’t respond to crap like this. I figure, whatever poor parenting or other traumatic experience in your life led you write up some link-baity, hand-wavy, and otherwise over-dramatic garbage like this to garner a few, fleeting moments of Internet attention is beyond the scope of what I’m able to correct with my own admittedly hand-wavy rundown of why I think you’re full of it.

Perhaps, you’re piece is satire and I missed the joke. That’s a possibility, but ultimately, it doesn’t really matter to me.

You’ll have to excuse me if I’m a little tired of your particular brand of toxicity. I think it might be that I’ve gotten a little over-sensitive to “business men” and bureaucrats sauntering in, pretending that they have the faintest idea what’s going on, whipping out their checkbooks, and dictating policy.

(via Koralatov)