News of the day

Fascinating.

 

Obviously I'm not conversant with USA salary scales so I fed my job description into this site: www.indeed.com for various locations around the USA and got a rough idea that if pay-scales in the USA are comparable with the UK , ie there is a variation in pay across the country (here it's a "north-south" divide, I guess you have something similar, a teacher can also earn more in an inner city because the cost of living is higher) then the site is pretty reliable as it gives a fair indication of what I earn as an annual salary. A quick check on the UK DoE website gives a typical (not average) annual salary of $50K for Main pay-scale teacher ($58K in London), so I would expect indeed.com to give comparable figures across the USA.

 

So.... I put in Chicago, Il, searched for "Teacher" and got an average of $59K, and then did the same for Sioux Falls, SD ($40K), Austin, TX ($48K), Raeford, NC ($49K), Orlando, Fl ($49K), Baltimore, MD ($55K), Los Angeles, CA ($58K), Washington, DC ($64K), New York ($70K). [sorry if these aren't representative cities - I was pulling names at random using my limited geography of the USA]

 

To double-check that I found another employment site and they quoted similar figures: www.employmentspot.com/employment-articles/teacher-salaries-by-state/ 

 

[It does seem that Teacher pay in the USA is similar to the UK and for both big metropolitan cities and for "the rest of the country", though there is a greater disparity across the USA, and that doesn't surprise me much.]

 

So, based on those numbers the Chicago teachers don't appear to be that greedy because I would expect that living in Chicago isn't as cheap as living in other parts of the country but cheaper than NY or Washington and I would expect pay to reflect that. Of course that's all based upon those web-sites calculations for average teacher salaries and not the $76K quoted by the Mayor of Chicago.