Quote Originally Posted by Bostondevil View Post
As a resident statistician, I'll comment. The old joke about averages, of course, comes to mind. Paraphrasing here - you're at your local bar wondering what the average worth of the people around you might be, then Bill Gates walks in.

Salary distributions are notoriously skewed data. A much, much, better measure of the middle value in salary data is, of course, the median. But even with your average salary of $58,000 (with benefits taking you to $70,000), we'd need to know the range. Typically with teacher salaries, you start very low, you work your way and get tenured, if you can afford to stay in the profession that long, then you hit the ceiling and your salary doesn't go up any more unless you switch to being a specialty teacher or administrator. But let's also compare teachers to a Joe average office worker. If Joe average office worker runs out of printer ink or needs a pad of paper or even a new box of red pens, he asks the office manager to order some. Teachers have to go to Staples and buy their own. If every teacher stopped supplying their own classrooms tomorrow, many of our children would suddenly not have paper or pencils or crayons or art supplies or a host of other things we take for granted. I'm sure these expenses are tax deductible but still, it ain't right.

The median teacher salary in NJ is $60,119. There is no district in NJ that has a starting salary less than $40K. Around half the districts have starting salaries of $50K+. To this you have to add benefits.