Recently, teacher protests from various states have garnered national attention. Starting in West Virginia, educators in Arizona, Oklahoma, Kentucky and many others have marched on their state capitals demanding higher pay and improved working conditions. Some have been successful in receiving a start to a fix while others, for the sake of their students, returned to the classroom continuing the fight to the November elections. As each successive state experienced their own, targeted protest, many people wondered why now? What prompted this wave of discontent, this striving for pay equity and fair treatment of teachers and students? Clearly classrooms across the country feel the need. Something needs to be done.
The common thread amongst the various protests is money, money to outfit classrooms, hire enough teachers, provide salaries high enough to provide a living wage for teachers and so much more. That barely scratches the surface. Teacher salaries need to be high enough to attract people with intellect, passion and skill, people who too often either leave education or do not even consider it because their skills and abilities are more valued elsewhere and many of them have families to care for.
In this essay, I will illustrate the following three points. Teachers are inequitably compensated. districts and states underfund classrooms in terms of both supplies and teacher to student ratios. Various agencies place demands, often unreasonable, on teachers’ job performance. At the end, these points form irrefutable proof that something needs to be done.
First, teachers in my state and in many other states earn both less than their counterparts outside of education, less than what their effort and their own education deserves. Here, I will use myself as an example. As a government employee, my pay scale is published on the internet for the public to access if they choose. If you know how much education the teacher has as well as how much experience, any person in the public can know exactly what an educator earns. I currently have four years experience and have two Masters’ degrees. Thus, I am paid approximately $46k per year for being on step 53 as a Masters +30. I currently live in a unique situation that most of my fellow educators do not share. I have low rent, good health, no debt, no dependents, no pets and minimal expenses. Thus, at this time, I can live off approximately 35% of my income. I, however, am a decided outlier for the following reasons. One, I pay $300 in rent owing to the fact that I have two roommates and a generous mother who does not charge full market value for the rent of her house. Two, I currently have good health which enables me to choose the highest deductible health insurance plan while saving in a HSA. The moment one adds a spouse or dependents or a chronic condition requiring regular doctor visits and medication, the premiums eat up a large share of the semi-monthly paycheck. Three, I have no debt through various beneficial circumstances which I have described before. One of those circumstances was the teacher’s loan which was entirely forgiven after teaching in middle school for one year. This loan forgiveness opportunity has ceased to exist meaning many teachers also have to repay student loans along with any other debt they may have incurred. Four, providing for pets and other dependents adds significantly to other costs from food to power to water and that’s simply the bare necessities of life. I currently save approximately $1k a month. Although the above variables may vary, housing and health insurance could eat up most of the difference to say nothing of student loans, increased food, electricity, fuel, water, clothing and school related expenses.
Additionally, teacher salaries do not accurately reflect equitable per hour compensation. Contract hours are from 8am until 3:30pm. Never in my entire teaching career have I ever worked solely those hours. I typically arrive at school at 7:30 am to prepare the room before students arrive. That adds up to an additional 2.5 hours every week. After school, we are required to stay in our rooms until all of our last period students have been dismissed. With the bus driver shortage in the district, lately that has meant that we have students in our rooms until four. That additional 2.5 hours brings the total to five hours. The vast majority of contract time involves actual class time while excluding most prep time. This means that everything else crucial to decent teaching – planning, creating materials, grading, analyzing assessments, entering grades into the gradebook, and maintaining parent contact logs – the teacher does on non-contract aka uncompensated time. These things just mentioned occupy a minimum of an extra hour a day, not to mention time spent on the weekend, usually a minimum of four hours. That brings the total non-contract hours to sixteen. When combined with contract time, approximately 36 hours, that creates a 50 hour work week, minimum. That minimum I just listed above? That’s for teachers who do as little as they can. Some of them exist but not many. Excluding my commute, I usually work on school related items until eight in the evening on weeknights and sometimes over half of Saturday which brings the more realistic work week approaches 65 hours per week. According to my paystub, that’s more than I work in a two-week pay period. With everything averaged together, I make approximately $15 an hour. That’s with two Masters’ degrees. For the teacher straight out of college, that figure drops to close to $10 an hour. These facts alone prove that many do not value a teacher’s time.
Secondly, districts systematically underfund classrooms. In my four years teaching which span nine years thanks to the five-year gap in the middle, the only classroom supplies with which I have been provided are as follows: paper and pencils for testing, and a few other odds and ends like a package of four highlighters and a box of staples. The rest of the my supplies I purchase with a $275 stipend from the district until that money ran out. The second year I taught at Beck, teachers across the state and even in Greenville County, got no money for supplies due to the economic downturn. Thanks to a well-funded PTA, teachers at Beck received a stipend. The other items teachers need from pencils to lined paper, to sticky notes to tissue, teachers have to buy, most often using their own limited funds. Add classroom supplies to the list of expenses in the previous paragraph. Schools with affluent student bodies can mask the funding gap with PTA donations and student contributions. Title I schools and many schools in between the extremes, cannot. Schools simply do not have the money in their budget to meet the demand. Since schools lack money in their budget to adequately educate the students then funding must be increased. The only way to increase the budget is through legislative action at the local, state, and/or federal level. (I won’t get into that here. That’s a post for another time perhaps.)
Third, an outsized number of people, most of them outside the field of education, place unreasonable demands on teacher’s job performance. Much of the modern pressure stems from the now – in education circles – infamous No Child Left Behind Act. The bill likely originated from good intentions. No child should be left behind. Every school should be held to high standards under the expectation that schools will provide the best possible education for every single student. The lasting unintended consequence of this legislation is the inescapable culture of testing. I have written at length about the shortcomings of this testing so I will not elaborate on that aspect here. Instead, I will delineate what this testing culture has done to the allocation of a teacher’s time.
Since a large portion of outside scrutiny of schools and teachers focuses on test scores, teachers are encouraged to dedicate their entire curriculum to that which will boost test scores. Any new program capitalizes on this emphasis in their marketing, highlighting the tools the program offers for data collection and analysis. Although not stated explicitly, administration implicitly expects teachers to conduct this sort of detailed analysis after every summative assessment, every assessment if possible. In some cases the implicit becomes explicit as it did for all teachers at my school after each benchmark test administered at the end of each quarter.
In addition to the testing requirement, teachers are also expected to communicate frequently with parents, maintain a website, monitor students until parents arrive to pick them up, keep a close eye on the mental health of the students, enforce dress code and other school policies, monitor students while they eat lunch, attend enough professional development – 120 hours every five years – to renew their teaching certificate, attend parent/teacher conferences, update and prepare ELL accommodations suggestions, submit recommendations for classes for student registration, fundraise for any field trip and other celebrations and so much more than I can remember at the moment. Many of these job responsibilities have fallen to the teacher for the same reason that teacher salaries stagnate and classrooms lack funding. State and federal funding fails to provide adequate funding.
Thus, teachers across the country march in protest for more funding. Will more money solve all the problems in education? Such a simple resolution does not exist. However, education cannot even approach restoration while being financially starved. For this reason, I support and will continue to support #redfored.