> Brown often works from 5 a.m. to 4 p.m. at her school in Versailles, Ky., then goes to a second job manning the metal detectors and wrangling rowdy guests at Lexington’s Rupp Arena to supplement her $55,000 annual salary. With her husband, she also runs a historical tour company for extra money.
So, basically, in her teacher job, she already makes more than 60% of Versailles, KY households. If her husband makes anywhere close to what she does, their household makes more than 85% of households in Versailles, KY, and that's not even counting her moonlighting.
Maybe they have some special needs, like e.g. disabled children, that make them need six figures income, then certainly I'm sympathetic to their plight, but if the argument here is that a household in Versailles, KY needs a six figure income just to survive, then well, I'm stunned.
The argument here is the teachers aren't well-paid in the US, especially given the importance of their profession and the level of education a teacher typically gets.
I can't speak for KY, but if you want to go into specific numbers, let's start here:
>In 2016, for instance, the average teacher’s starting salary was $38,617
Make that $45K in California[1].
In San Jose, where I currently live, median elementary school teacher salary is about $50K[2].
With this kind of salary, the median teacher will not be able to rent a one-bedroom apartment in decent San Jose, which typically go for well over $2K/month (about $2500 for 1B)[3], since landlords usually want to see monthly incomes of 3X rent (source: I'm renting).
That's barely double the minimum wage ($12/hr in SJ) for a median teacher salary.
Again: this means half the elementary school teachers in San Jose make under 2X minimum wage and most literally can't afford to rent a 1B apartment on their own.
That's before you add in student loans (education isn't free!), car payment/maintenance/insurance (we don't have a usable public transportation system here), etc - and that's assuming no kids.
You can always find an example of a teacher that's well paid, but there's a reason why the teachers were protesting in several states - and the reason isn't that they have too much money thrown at them.
If the teachers make $24/hr, that means they're working 11.25 hours per day, assuming a 185 day work year. Since a school day is just around 6.5 hours, that seems like a lot of after hours work.
If we assume they make all their salary in 8 hours/day, that's more than $34/hour. In a non-school work year that translates to about $70,000/year.
An annual salary of $50,000 translates to an annual salary of $50,000. It's fun to play with numbers and try to figure out hourly equivalents, but the pay is what it is. We can have all sorts of arguments about how much time teachers "really" work, how hard the job is, what fair compensation is, and so on, but they're different questions than "is an average Silicon Valley teacher's salary sufficient to cover average housing costs in Silicon Valley in 2018," which seemed to be the original question. The answer is: "no."
(For the record, the average salary for a public school teacher in Santa Clara County is $68K as of July 2018. The average rent for an apartment in Santa Clara County as of September 2018 is $2730, or 48% of that income; for a 1BR only, it's $2471, or 44%, still well over the 2.5x rent-to-income guideline that many rental companies use as a minimum. The median home price in Santa Clara County as of July 2018 is $1.3M, so I'm gonna say we don't really need to look at mortgages, okay? Okay.)
>If the teachers make $24/hr, that means they're working 11.25 hours per day, assuming a 185 day work year.
My apologies, but you have no idea how much work a teacher actually does. A lot of it is indeed done after hours, and yes, 11-hour work day is not atypical. There's lesson planning, endless grading, paperwork, and that's just to start.
But, as the other commenter here said - it all doesn't matter. $50K is $50K, and after all the juggling, a teacher in SV can't even rent an apartment in SV.
All that is to say that the US is really not solving its education problems by throwing money at it, as suggested by a parent comment, when a full-time teacher can't even rent an apartment with their salary in one of the richest and biggest metro areas.
Yeah right, which school are you looking at?
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the US: teachers have to hold several jobs just to survive[1].
(That story was on HN several days ago as well)
[1]http://time.com/longform/teaching-in-america/