Today’s Columbus Dispatch features an article entitled “Teacher Salaries Raising Eyebrows.” As the child of two public school teachers, I had to wonder what could cause such eyebrow twitching. According to the Dispatch, teachers in “some districts” (note the weasel word “some”) aren’t bearing their share of the state’s fiscal pain. They’re still getting pay hikes for experience and continuing education even if their base pay has been frozen. The article quotes State Superintendent Deborah Delisle as saying it’s time for “a reality check in every single community to see what we are able to sustain.”
Nowhere does the article offer even a single figure to illustrate average salaries either statewide or in a given district.
Now, I agree that when times are tough, everyone needs to share in the burden. But last I knew, schoolteachers weren’t being overpaid. Many of them are struggling to raise their families. I’m not suggesting they struggle harder than, say, the librarians here in Athens, who have seen real cuts. However, they’re surely struggling harder than upper-level university administrators, who haven’t come under criticism from high-ranking state officials.
But schoolteachers are such a soft target! The reasons for this say a lot about our culture, and the reflection isn’t pretty. Teachers are commonly seen as having a cushy job since “they have their summers off.” That’s definitely one nice thing about teaching. In their petty envy, though, people conveniently forget that during the schoolyear, most teachers take their work home with them every night. Grading is a relentless grind, and it’s not terribly rewarding.
Then there’s anti-intellectualism. Here, we elected a president whose weak grades at Yale apparently served as a qualification for office – and we did it twice. Obama represents a departure from this. But voters’ suspicion of eggheads goes all the way back to Adlai Stevenson, and beyond. Having lived in Germany, I’ve seen the correlation between a culture’s general respect for ideas and thinkers, and the way it treats its schoolteachers. German public schools pay their teachers more generously than American schools. By the time students arrive at university, they’re far more independent as learners, and their critical thinking skills outstrip those of college-bound American kids. I’ve observed this as both a student and an instructor. My (German) husband, who has years of teaching experience in both countries’ public universities, concurs.
Then again, some of this just goes back to how often school sucks. Some people have never gotten over their personal scars from their school days. I don’t believe in nurturing grudges – they’re a stupid energy suck – but if I’m honest, I have to admit I still hold a grudge against my sadistic P.E. teacher, to the point where I’m tempted to exact revenge by using his real name here. (I’m mature enough not to – but just barely.) And I was one of those students who always had it easy, academically. I had great relationships with most of my teachers, the other exceptions being a few who were truly incompetent and one who was a creepy lech.
So I can understand why people who struggled in school don’t have much sympathy for teachers. To them I would say: You don’t have to care about the teachers. You do need to care about the kids. Where teaching is poorly paid, you’ll see a lot more lemons with a teaching certificate. This was sadly the case in the North Dakota schools where I spent my early years; I had some excellent teachers but also too many who should have changed careers but lacked other options. In 1975, 5eachers’ annual pay in my little district ranged between about $7000 and $10,000. (I know, because my mom kept the books for the school board, to supplement her salary!) I then finished high school in California just as it was dismantling its formerly great school system in the wake of passing Proposition 13. Today, California’s system is in crisis. (As is the whole state, but that’s another story.)
My kids go to a very good public school that’s less than a block from our house. It’s not perfect, but there’s really only one teacher we’ve felt a need to steer clear of. I know how lucky we are. We pay for it with a 1% income tax, which takes a big bite since it comes out of our gross income. I grouse about it a little. But I also know this: Public education is not so different from the rest of the economy. Most of the time, you get what you pay for.
Patron cat of Kittywampus (1985-2001)
If people think teachers are overpaid, perhaps they should retrain as teachers. The fact is, teaching is an almighty slog, and no one in their right mind would do it without the vacation time. You really need it to recover from the exhaustion of teaching.
“No sex during term time” a teaching friend of mine used to say.
What other sort of career would lead you to be celibate for 40 weeks of the year, and yet still have the public complain that you had it cushy?!?
Ha. I’m not sure your friend was *exactly* right, but (as a post-secondary teacher) I have noticed a tendency for lots of things to warm up in the summer!
Lots of us burn the midnight oil grading. And when you’re marking up student papers until the wee hours, there’s not much chance of going to bed at the same time as your partner, unless you’ve built your syllabus around it.
Hmm, since I’m working on syllabi right now, maybe I’d better talk to my partner about it!
Well, as a kıd 1 never encountered one sıngle teacher 1 thought knew jacksh1t about anythıng. And people 1 have s1nce met who are teachers strıke me as med1ocr1tıes of the worst sort. And ugh the NFT and NEA turn my stomach w1th the1r wh1ngıng. 1 would shut down most schools, colleges and unıvers1t1es tomorrow, unless they can demonstrate some soc1al and econoıc value. Look1t – 1f some k1d wants to learn, g1ve h1m a lıbrary card. 1 am amazed how l1ttle Amerı1cans of all classes read, except for some crazy batsh1t nonsense that appeals to the1r parach1al l1ttle worldv1ew.
Folks, here’s Exhibit A for hating on teachers!
Well, to be prefectly honest, 1f 1t were up to me, all teachers would be rounded up ınto l1ttle camps, w1th barbed w1re and bar1kng dogs, and gıven ‘reducatıon,’ wıth mandatory r1ce tw1ce a day.
Oh 1n pr1nc1ple teachers should be decent people, but 1 have never met any such ones.
[...] in my response to my post on how teachers are disrespected, he leaves this gem of a comment: Well, to be prefectly honest, 1f 1t were up to me, all teachers [...]
I agree that good teachers are deserving of respect, but I’m not really a fan of the “teachers are underpaid” whine. Until recently, I lived in Atlanta. Teachers there generally start around $40,000 per year with no experience and an MEd degree for a mere 190 days of work. That doesn’t strike me as excessive compensation, but neither does it seem that teachers are underpaid. It’s significantly more than the minister at my church was paid for working much more than 190 days a year. It’s also significantly more than public defenders in Atlanta are paid, and they have both college and law degrees (3 years of graduate school for the JD versus 1 for the MEd). Yes, teachers work hard, but so do many other professionals who are paid a lot less. The thing that I think distinguishes teachers is their entitlement mentality, which results in this incessant whining about compensation that I am sick of hearing and reading about. Frankly, if you make a career of teaching, the compensation is more than decent (check out the raises of teachers some time, based solely on experience), particularly given the job security and the lengthy vacations. And yes, I often think about switching careers, and maybe one of these days I will. Teaching is not a bad gig at all, assuming that one likes the work.
All of your points of comparison are highly educated professionals who are presumed to be in it for altruistic reasons. My response would be that ministers and most certainly public defenders ought to be paid better!
I know a lot of teachers, and I don’t hear the entitlement mentality. I don’t hear incessant whining. Instead, I saw how my older son’s third-grade teacher raced back and forth between her dying mother (four hours away) and her classroom, trying to do right by everybody. The previous year, his second-grade teacher taught right up to the end of the school year as she was waiting for a kidney transplant and getting progressively sicker. I’m not seeing *any* entitlement in my kids’ teachers; I see dedication and altruism.
If you’d like to teach and have the aptitude, I say go for it. The profession needs good people who care about the kids.
How 1s 1t that Amer1can k1ds perform *far* below the1r peers 1n other developed countr1es? One reason sı culture – Amer1cans are a proudly 1gnorant people. But 1 do not th1nk these stats shold make Amer1can teachers part1cularly proud e1ther.
And teachıng, perversely, 1s cons1dered a h1gh prest1ge job, so these deadbeats do get someth1ng more than f1lthy lucre.
High prestige? Wow, that makes me feel much better.
The reason, Brinkmanship, that teachers whine about their pay is that that is the only way they have to change it. I was once one of those whining teachers, and I didn’t like whining any more than you like hearing it. If a lawyer or a doctor wants to get paid more, s/he can just put up her or his prices. But a teacher has to go cap-in-hand to the local tax payers and ask. Naturally, no one wants to pay more taxes, so the answer is generally “no”. So the teacher has to ask more forcefully — i.e., to whine.
A lawyer can go to another firm, can charge more, can change specialties. If an associate lawyer doesn’t like her salary, she can lobby the partners. This lobbying is not played out on the public stage, so there is no perception of “whining”.
But what if everyone in the world who wanted a pay raise had to ask for it publicly, and had to do it not individually, but collectively? What if all the doctors, lawyers, plumbers, ministers and retailers of a city had to, every couple of years, re-negotiate their pay scale in a public forum, with everyone able to scrutinize the debate, look at their terms and conditions, and pass judgment on them?
Wouldn’t we all be whiners then?
Where I used to teach, we had four ten week terms, each followed by a “holiday”. I would inevitably spend the first week of each of those holidays as a brain-dead vegetable. I would spend the second week preparing for classes and catching up (inevitably unsuccessfully) on the thousands of things I had put off during term time because I simply didn’t have the chance to do them while school was in session.
I never got through a fraction of the things I hoped to do during the holidays. I had too much school work to do, and too little energy left to do much more.
Summer holidays where I taught were six weeks long (the other three sets of “holidays” being only two weeks each).
That was the one time when I could, after a few weeks, finally relax. Of the six weeks, I had a good two or three weeks of well and truly recharging my batteries, before the baptism-by-fire began again.
If it weren’t for the summer holidays, i can’t imagine that anyone could sustain teaching for more than a year or two.
Just before I began teaching, an old teacher friend of mine told me, “it’s a black hole of a job — it will suck everything out of you that you allow it to. And then some.” The same man told me about a friend of his who left teaching to open a book store. They chatted once about the lack of holidays for someone in the retail sector. “True” the shopkeeper said, “I can’t take much time at all off. But then, I don’t need to any more.”
Another senior teacher friend of mine observed, “If you don’t want to quit at least once a term, you’re not doing it right.”
I must have been doing something right, because I did want to quit at least once a term.
I was told I was principal material, but when the chance came for me to get out, I didn’t have to think twice.
I am glad I taught. I learned a lot from it, and hopefully I gave a lot back. But I could certainly never argue that I was either under worked or over paid. If either were the case, I would be back in a heartbeat.
Mark Faulkner, you are making me feel tired before the term even starts! (Or is that just the beer I foolishly had with dinner on this hot muggy evening?)
You make a really good point about the *public* nature of teachers’ bargaining. Districts around Columbus have had needed levies fail, with major cutbacks to the schools as a result. The teachers are feeling the pinch, but so are the students. Parents are furious. But voters don’t like taxes, and too many of them feel disinvested in the school system. I’m grateful I live in a district where education is valued, though the outlying areas are quite poor. I feel sorry for everyone caught in those hopelessly underfunded districts.