I will say that I wish I got paid as much as Drs dentist and Nurses.
Well, here's a reason. How much do you think nurses make in relation to teachers?
This may be part of the eye-roll teachers get. There seems to be an almost cultish attitude that teachers are "underpaid," while other professions are not. I know someone who recently retired as a teacher making 90k a year (yes, she basically had three months off every summer of her working life) who would complain about the things she couldn't afford. I don't personally know any nurses who make that much (not saying they don't exist, but they are going to be specialty nurses for the most part, i.e. nurse anesthesiologist). My cousin is an experienced nurse who recently said she has never surpassed 45k a year.
If you look up the average salaries of nurses and teachers in the US, they are competitive, except teachers work fewer hours per calendar year. In many cases if you calculated by average contact hours, teachers make more. Teachers also tend to have union contracts that include benefits that many other jobs don't have.
You took 1 of 3 jobs I suggested. If you go back you would see the original person said all 3. I still stand by my statement that I wish I got paid like Dr's, Dentist, and Nurses.
What I like about the Nurse payment plan is that if you get another certification your pay goes up. Plus a lot of nurses are hourly. Teachers do not have the option to go hourly. For example I have 6 different teaching certifications and a masters degree and 19 years experience. I make $7000 more then a brand new teacher. You do not find that in nursing. When you pass your test from one level of nursing to another your salary goes up automatically. When you get a masters degree boom another major jump. You would be hard pressed finding a nurse with 15+ years working in a hospital that makes less then 70K. Plus they have the option to work OT.
If I had to do it again I would be a nurse.
Right. I took one of the three jobs you named to ask the question, "How much do you think nurses are paid?" Are you implying that I'm cherry picking information because you named three professions you "wish you were paid like" and I questioned the inclusion of one of them? I didn't name the other two because I agree with you that most doctors and most dentists likely make more than most teachers.
I am confused about this "nurse payment plan" you speak of. In my socialist dream world, we're all on a constantly elevating scheme of payment, but I seriously don't know what you are talking about here. My guess is that it's maybe based on one anecdotal piece of evidence (i.e. you know a well-paid, low-stress nurse). So the follow up questions:
-What do you mean by "another certification"? (Someone else suggested LPN/RN, this would be a completely separate degree and type of nurse. They pay scales you are thinking of strictly apply to RNs and specialized nurses and don't even include most LPNs.) If you're saying that a nurse becomes a nurse practitioner and then makes more money, well yeah. If a teacher becomes the principal they make more money, too. Additionally, you can't conflate RNs with "all nurses" when RNs are less than 5% of the staff in areas like outpatient care, doctors offices, many dialysis centers, etc.
-Yup, a lot of nurses get paid hourly. And often hourly = no benefits. There are many, many nurses in the world who are "relief" or "per diem" and get paid hourly, only when invited to work, and get no benefits. This is similar to substitute teaching, except that my experience is that most subs are not licensed teachers who had their school of employment close down and now have to sub full-time.
-I don't know what you mean by "pay goes up automatically" with more education. I am guessing, again, you know someone who works a)at a hospital, and b)at a hospital that still has a strong union. These are becoming less common. Corporate takeovers of smaller hospital systems are common in many areas, and with that comes loss of jobs for many, and loss of benefits for those who stay. My anecdotal data point is an RN I know who got her BSN after years in the work force, and the response was basically "why would we pay you more to do the same job?" Also of note, only about half of all nurses work in hospitals, so you're purposely selecting the highest paid.
-On the option to work overtime, it's often less of an option than a mandate, especially for--you guessed it!--the non-RN nurses who fill the staff at nursing homes and other places where a single nurse is in charge of a whole hall, unit, or floor by himself. If a co-worker doesn't show up for their shift, you literally can't leave as that would be abandonment. So a last-minute call-in or no call, no show means you get a surprise 16 or 20 hour shift sometimes. (ETA: Imagine if your school had a second night shift, and if the second shift teacher didn't come in, you had to stay and teach that teacher's class until midnight after you'd been there all day. If you didn't you could lose your license and be jailed.)
None of this is to catch you in gotcha moment, but to underscore that if the original question was "why are people down on teachers," a really, really common theme I've noticed with the profession is that teachers always think everyone has it better than them, and bring up their supposed low pay when any evidence to the contrary is brought up. It's not a good look in a world where so many people wish they had the pay, schedule, and job security that many teachers do.
Do I think teachers could be paid more in many areas of the country? Fuck yes! Lots of people should be. It doesn't mean that it's accurate to say "No one makes less than me, I'm a teacher!" (which a person recently loud-announced at my college reunion, while entering a group of people that I can guarantee make less than him, or at least have worse benefits, as the discussion he entered while making that announcement was about buying our own ACA insurance). Another teacher in this thread brought up her 7.5 hour work day. Sounds dreamy to me. Again, my response was to underscore why people already have a bias toward eye-rolling when teachers ask questions like "Do I actually have to use my own sick days if I get sick?" when other people don't even have sick days.
Teachers aren't unpaid volunteers. You can wish you got paid as much as a doctor, and I can wish I got paid as much as the teachers I know, and hopefully one day that will happen for both of us. American voters don't seem to be on board with income inequality (or really any other kind) being a thing, or the "liberal choice" for our upcoming election wouldn't be to vote for Biden, which to paraphrase Nina Turner, is like eating a half bowl of shit.
That said, if you really wish you could do it over again, can you? Nursing is a 2-year program, usually with pretty low cost of tuition, and if you're sure the pay, benefits, and lifestyle would work out better for you, wouldn't it be worth making the switch now? Or are you close enough to FIRE that it wouldn't make sense?
Comments like this makes me feel bad for teachers, because it shows how much people devalue their credentials. It should be obvious that an LPN is in no way remotely similar to a teacher’s level of education and not what people are talking about when comparing nurses to teachers. (Not to mention LPNs are being phased out, my rural hometown hospital system won’t hire them and the local tech college doesn’t even offer an LPN program anymore. Same hospital system will also only let you be an ADN for x many years, they require BSNs.) A BSN RN = entry level teacher.
RN pay system, I believe, refers to them being paid hourly and thus eligible for overtime and drastically increase their take home pay. Like massive amounts of overtime. Or they can work part-time and still have benefits. Hourly is not benefit-less in the medical field. A vast majority of RNs have benefits. In 2018, BLS reported that 88% of RNs have access to health care benefits and 91% had access to retirement benefits. Or they can earn more degrees to significantly bump their pay. A Nurse Practitioner is a nurse with a masters degree and the median pay difference between RN and NP is over 40k (BLS stat) A teachers with a masters degree, as noted, doesn’t see that pay difference. And no an NP is not the equivalent of a teacher becoming a principal. Again, way to devalue their credentials. Someone in the teacher field has to become the manager of an entire school to be the equivalent of a nurse with a masters? What? And also, unionization in health care is growing not becoming less common.
Personally, whenever I hear folks start complaining about teachers and their pay and benefits and summers off, I ask them why they don’t become a teacher if the job is so cushy. The response is never something like it’s too late in my career to pay for more schooling or switch careers. The response is oh I wouldn’t have the patience for that or I don’t like kids or I wouldn’t want to deal with all those brats. Seems to me like a good reason the profession should be paid well, irrespective of what nurses are making.
What you're getting out of my comment is that you feel bad for how much people devalue teachers
credentials?
To clarify, here is the order of events that led to my comment:
1. A poster at some point in the byzantine thread made a comment along the lines of (paraphrasing here) "If doctors and nurses can go to work and have a much greater risk of getting sick, why can't teachers?"
2. O.P. said "I wish I got paid as much as them."
3. I replied to that comment questioning if they understood average nurse salary compared to average teacher salary. I followed that up with the text block you copied.
4. What you and some others got out of that is that I am devaluing teachers credentials because I super incorrectly placed their value as humans on the same plane as icky trash people with an associates degree, who should be compared to paraprofessionals at best.
It sure does sound like the argument has become that different people have different amounts of worth based on how many years of tuition they could wrangle up. I mean, really, let's follow this thread... a teacher thinks their life should not be at risk at the same rate as nurses because, according to them, nurses make more. When this is challenged, the takeaway is that I am not referring to the *right kind* of nurse, and this devalues teachers somehow. Why not focus on the fact that if someone truly believes LPNs aren't "real" nurses for the sake of this wage vs. value of life argument, that is the real fucking problem here? It is agreed nurses lives are at risk, and they somehow signed up for that by being high paid nurses, but the low paid ones can fucking die because they don't have enough education to be valid as part of this argument.
So, again, according to the original logic I was responding to, nurses can, I guess, afford to get sick due to their higher rate of pay. When I say not all nurses, it's a smirking "Well, the poor ones don't count. Quit insulting teachers by comparing them with people who don't have the right credentials."
Turning this into a dick measuring contest about education levels and whether someone "deserves" their title or pay or whatever is beside the point. My answer to the question of why some people have a distaste for some teachers remains that the vocal ones seem to think they are more important than other people and are beside themselves that society doesn't hold their lives on high due to the fact that their pay rate is not where they believe it should be for their level of education.
Oh, and the main PCP at my health center is an NP, who has two MS degrees and is also an RD, but I'm devaluing
teachers by comparing them to someone who works essentially as a lead physician? Oh, Ok.