I'm not an educator but my mom is a retired school psychologist and my father used to be on my county's school board, so I grew up around teachers/educators.

I will acknowledge that in many parts of the country, teacher pay is atrocious -- especially in high cost of living areas -- but I do think the conventional wisdom that teachers are hideously underpaid for what they do isn't exactly true.

Take my mom for instance. She got a BS in journalism, worked as an editor for a few years and then after getting pregnant with my older sister, was a stay at home mom for 14 years. She went back to work -- initially part-time, then full-time, when I was 8 years old.

Now, her specialty (school counseling -- which then became school psychology), requires a Masters, so she got that when I was in kindergarten and she was like 41. She followed this up by getting her Ed.S a few years later (while working full time) and then got her Ph.D (ditto) -- back then (early 90s), they didn't have the online/paint-by-numbers grad school programs they have now -- so she'd go to class a few nights a week after work and then full-time in the summer. (Side note, I fell in love with college libraries when I was 6 years old and would spend summer afternoons with her at UGA, while she was studying).

So she's 43 when she starts working (Masters), is maybe 45 or 46 when she gets her specialist, and then was like 50 or 51 when she got her Ph.D. I point this out b/c this is relatively late in life for most people to become educators. Many of her peers were in their late 20s or early 30s and those closer to her age had been working for 15+ years. I will add that a key thing here is that she was smart and achieved tenure VERY early. If you don't have tenure, you're fucked.

I think she was probably making close to $100k a year when she retired early in 2013 or 2014. Now, that's probably less than most Ph.Ds make -- and it is certainly less than she could make in private practice -- but considering the fact that she worked 9 months a year and lived in the suburbs, that's not bad.

Moreover, even though she retired 22 or 23 years in -- meaning she didn't do the "minimum" for full retirement -- she still got a really good retirement package from both the state and the county.

My mom loves retirement -- but what lots of teachers/counselors/educators do, is they retire after they do 25 or 30 years (so if you start teaching at 22, you're like 50 when you reach full retirement), get their full retirement, and then get hired back either part-time or three-quarter time (and in some cases, full-time), at a salaried rate. They can do this and still earn their retirement. (You don't get dual retirements after the fact, I don't think -- unless you were in multiple counties/states)

So my mom has friends who "retired" at 48 -- then went right back to work and essentially get double their pay, plus benefits.

I would also add that benefits are one of the areas where being a teacher is really valuable. With the price of health care, having high-quality insurance that is free or very inexpensive, is a reason many people (especially women) are in education.

That was part of my mom's impetus -- my dad is an entrepreneur (real estate) and shit got bad and she needed to make sure we'd have good insurance and other protections as a family. She loved what she did (and was fantastic at it), but part of the reason she became a counselor (and later school psychologist) was because it would allow her to be off during the summer's when I was home -- and allow her to be home in the evenings (when she wasn't doing the grad school years) for the family.

I'm not a parent -- but I can't discount the value of having that kind of flexibility -- even if it means you make less than what you could. Because my dad primarily worked for himself, my mom having summers off meant we had a lot more flexibility as a family for things like summer vacations or cruises over spring break.

And not to say that education isn't stressful -- but there is also more flexibility in the job itself than in something like say, tech. She was always able to take me to my doctor appointments growing up and handle other issues that might come up. When my grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimers and had to go into assisted living and later a nursing home -- my mom had flexibility in her benefits to take time off to travel to Florida to help her elderly parents (and a sister who lived there and did much of the work). There was a "pool" her county offered employees to donate some of their sick leave into that would act as insurance for other employees in that pool if they needed to exceed their own sick leave/personal days in the event of an emergency or personal event that didn't rise to the level of going on temporary disability.

So yes -- part of me fully acknowledges that teachers/educators are often paid less than what their skills might get in a different sector. And I fully acknowledge that not all parts of the country are as good as the county where my mom worked. But when you look beyond just the pay and you include the time off, the benefits, the retirement (I mean, I'll never have a pension at my six figure job), and the flexibility -- it's not quite as bad as it appears either.