125K

This is not meant to depress you. It is food for thought:

Well-Paid Teachers? I’m on Board by Christine Graslow explores
The Equity Project Charter School (TEP) which will open this September.


Moral of the story? Teachers should be paid for their real hours, not their fabled hours. And, it's possible. I would love to see this school's budget, simply to find out if these types of salaries are sustainable.

I'm concerned for colleagues who will become addicted to this level of pay and then find the school shuttering after a few years. Call it the wrought-iron handcuffs.*

Also, the cost of living in NYC is extremely high, the hours demanded are "greater," the length of the school year is longer, and teachers perform administrative functions (which we do anyway). When Dan is not too lazy, he will figure out the level of pay in terms of cost of living.

However, bear in mind: more hours = rather than sitting in your classroom grading papers until 5 pm, you are required to be there and are compensated for that. The days are long, but so are lawyers' days....doctor's days....see where we're headed? So, in order to make a professional wage, we may need to be willing to trade off the perceived flexibility of the teaching day (which is bogus and will be explored later), or at least the ability to occasionally get out of work to meet one's own children after school, run errands, hit the bank before it closes.

In essence, we may need to stop conceiving of teaching as The Mommy Job.

Or, we may need to demand more flexibility. That is in the next post.

***

A new paradigm has been born. I hope this school is an astonishing success. It needs to be in order for us to have a model of much higher teacher pay resulting in benefits to students.

So, it's not all bad news!!


* Couldn't think of an alternative to the "golden handcuffs" syndrome super rich lawyers complain about, which entails becoming so used to the money that it seems impossible to leave the job, no matter how odious, time-consuming or soul-draining. On 125 K a year in New York, the handcuffs wouldn't be golden, but...something not quite that good.