[buck4roo]

Yes on the current facts, but good luck to any district that thinks it'll be attracting new qualified teachers in that scenario.

Current Los Angeles teachers' wage penalty is 25% vs neighbors with same college degrees. [1]

One only need look at the current starvation in teacher training programs' rosters to see the coming implosion of supply of new teachers.

Paper with methodology and citations: https://utla.net/app/uploads/2022/08/UTLA_ShortageReport.pdf

[yamtaddle]

It's an incredibly shit deal, currently, and the only reason it's not already a crisis (instead, a kind of slow-motion catastrophe) is that many teachers feel like they'd be abandoning the kids if they left the career. They're staying only because they feel morally obligated to—the work environment's mediocre at best (and has been trending worse for years), and the pay's bad and getting worse relative to the alternatives practically by the day.

Wages are falling really far behind even the kinds of careers HN types joke about, the ones that humanities and liberal arts majors end up in if they don't just work at Starbucks—and guess what sorts of jobs the top 20% or so of teachers with some years of experience can walk straight into? Yep, exactly those jobs. Hell, the comp at one gas station chain around here is on par with a mid-career teacher in the area, after you've been there a couple years, and you don't need a degree to get that job. If you're an assistant manager by five years in (and if you're bright enough to be someone we want teaching, you will be) you'll be out-earning local teachers with more experience than that. W. T. F.

So, good for the upcoming crop of students, they shouldn't get a teaching degree, it's an astonishingly horrible deal and unlikely to get better.

[rahimnathwani]

> 25% vs neighbors with same college degrees

Where in the paper is this stated? As far as I can tell, they treat each "bachelor’s degree-holding workers" as equivalent to each other.

There's no reason to expect that someone with a bachelor's degree in computer science from UCLA would earn the same as someone with a bachelor's degree in child development from Cal State LA.

And do the wage comparisons compare total compensation (including the present value of future pensions), or just current salaries? In my local school district, about 30% of total compensation is pensions (i.e. you need to add 43% to base salary to calculate total cash compensation). Also, teachers don't work for the full year; many earn additional income during the summer break.