Earlier this year, my husband was diagnosed with cancer. My worst fears and nightmares were coming true, not only because I love him dearly and can’t imagine life without him, but also because he is the main bread-winner in this house. I’ve often thought in that sinister little voice in the back of my mind, if anything happened to him, my family and I would not be able to survive on my teacher salary.
Last year while employed by a public school to teach a third-grade classroom, I earned roughly $40,000, despite having over 10 years of experience and two master’s degrees. That’s not even my worst compensation package. The worst was with a private school in Chicago where I took the place of three staff members, including the director of the department for which I worked, and was paid $30,000 annually with absolutely no benefits. In the public schools, they rely on your dedication to your students to keep you committed to your job; in the private Christian schools, they count on your commitment to your faith, calling it your “ministry.” In either case, guilt plays a strong role in their retention policies.
In its blog September 5, 2018, Education Week ran an entry titled “Teachers Are Paid Almost 20 Percent Less Than Similar Professionals, Analysis Finds” by Madeline Will. It reported that “teacher wages have been stagnant since the mid-1990s,” which is interesting, because the cost of living certainly has not been stagnant.
Will also refers to the rise in educator protest activity in many states. “Four of the states with teacher activism had the largest wage penalties in the country…North Carolina’s gap stood at 35.5 percent….” I can personally attest to the unrest among teachers in North Carolina, having been one myself. When they finally brought themselves to organize a demonstration in Raleigh, they took a lot of criticism about leaving their students and classrooms for the day (the guilt factor, again). To add insult to injury, the teachers were not allowed the opportunity to speak before the legislators once they arrived.
Not coincidentally, the Economic Policy Institute released its own article that same day, “The Teacher Pay Penalty Has Hit a New High.” The authors, Sylvia Allegretto and Lawrence Michel, define teacher pay penalty as “the percent by which public school teachers are paid less than comparable workers.” They found that this pay discrepancy has been going on even longer. “Relative teacher pay–teacher pay compared with the pay of other career opportunities for potential and current teachers–has been eroding for over half a century.” That makes sense, since I’m not making that much more than my mother at the end of her career, who began teaching in the mid-1950s and continued throughout three decades.
While we’re talking about salary comparisons, I doubt these studies even take into account what I would like to call the “residual cost” of being a teacher. The residual cost of teaching is all of the expenses that teachers incur because of their profession that reduce the size of their salaries even further, eroding their actual take-home pay. These items would include things like the cost of required continuing professional development classes, taking standardized tests to prove competency, even the cost of the license itself and the fingerprinting for security checks.
Then there are the supplies for the classroom. Office supplies like copy paper, staples, paper clips, and the like used to be supplied by the school, but now those items often have to be purchased by the teacher herself, let alone special resources for classroom management and the delivery of the academic content itself. Every place I’ve ever worked, I’ve had to supplement the materials that are given to me by the school district to do my job. They are never enough. Teachers often have to purchase subscriptions to websites they want their students to use, because they know it will benefit their students. Even more, I don’t know of a single teacher, elementary at any rate, who doesn’t buy extra things for her/his students just to be nice, to make the year special, like a gift at the end of the year or craft supplies for a special project.
Then there are the students themselves and their needs: water bottles, crayons, pencils, lunch boxes, food, coats, shoes. Sometimes parents can’t or won’t send the items their child must have for school. I don’t know how many times I’ve reached into my own pocket to buy something for a child in need.
Then there are the recently-added costs of being a teacher, like in North Carolina where I taught for three years. If I got sick and couldn’t make it into school (and I would have to be awfully sick not to go, it’s just not worth the trouble), I would have to pay my substitute teacher’s wages! I’d never heard of that before, but since then, I’ve read about a few other school districts where that is the new policy. Even in my more current situation, the school district figured out a way not to have to pay me unless my body was in the classroom that day. All of those breaks and snow days that the general public think teachers use to collect their paychecks without earning them, let me tell you, I wasn’t paid for them. I’m sure if Allegretto and Michel factored these “residual costs” into their study, they would find the teacher pay penalty to be far greater than they originally reported.
Recently, Jay Senter in an article in the Shawnee Mission Post reported that the local branch of the teachers union (NEA) was negotiating for new funds approved by the state legislature to be used to raise teachers’ salaries. I hope the union is successful. The district I have been working for has actually been finding new and creative ways in which to divert funds from its teachers’ pay in recent past. I’m living proof. I could have used the extra $15,000-20,000 salary I should have earned this year to pay my husband’s medical bills.