teacher pay

Snow fell off and on a couple of weeks ago. On the coast we understand a few feet of rain better than a few inches of snow. On a Monday, school was closed.

read “Become a Teacher.”

This happened in 2011 too, but back then it was on a Thursday. I had stayed till 7pm the night before, watching the roads on the internet to ensure the snow didn’t start sticking before I got home. On Wednesday evenings I sat in the school Library (with a math teacher for a few months when we were both paid—I did it for 20 years without pay) to keep the workspace open for kids who needed help, were retaking tests, or who needed computer access. When I packed up for home I lugged the tests I needed to score home but left an eight-inch stack of essays in my room. I would get to them the following weekend and adjust the due date for the other essay that students were supposed to hand in the next day.

The 24th of February 2011 was a snow day, and I was loving it. I had a lot of work to get done but I was taking the day off. This is what I wrote because I could:

I love my job. I say that all the time and it’s true. I’m good at it and I still have a measure of autonomy in my classroom. I can be creative and innovative and my administration actually appreciates me for doing it (I think). I’ve gone gray in this profession. I love my job. I’m proud of the work I do.

Many of my former students have become teachers or are thinking of becoming teachers. And I love them for that too, but it also makes me want to cry, because teachers are not in the same position they were when I was young, or even when I entered the profession.

Ten reasons you don’t want to become a teacher:

The pay is less than you think. I read on Facebook that if you want “abundant wealth” you should choose the private sector.
There is no longer job security. My school lost ten teachers last year.
Your pension isn’t safe—it looks like a pile of money to the public, waiting to be looted.
Parents don’t trust you.
The community thinks you have too much time off. They need to hire a sitter for those stupid planning days.
Even if you teach that kid to read and get him off the streets and are answerable about whether he passes or does not pass all the new tests, you are not heroes like police officers and firefighters—who receive better pay and a sweeter pension package.
If you have a personal blog, watch your words because freedom of speech doesn’t apply to teachers.
Summers you will either be working a second job or going to school or both.
For the same amount of education you could be a nurse with a specialty making twice as much money and no homework on the weekend. You could be a lawyer and work as hard for a lot more money, or a doctor, X-ray technician, plumber, electrician…

The number 10 reason not to become a teacher, the critical reason:

10. Everything is your fault.

You’re a lousy teacher. If students are unmotivated, tired, hungry, sleepy, sick, absent, homeless, or in jail, you should have motivated them to show up to school every day and complete their homework.
You make too much money. Compare your income with seven or more years of university education, Masters degree, and twenty years of experience to the wages of the drop-out pumping gas (who you should have motivated to stay in school) and you are paid way too much. You have all that time off and we don’t want to hear any whining about class planning and scoring papers and all that.
You cause social injustice. If you marry another teacher—surprise! you have an actual middle class income capable of paying for your own children’s college education. But wait! That’s okay for professionals. Everyone understands that if two doctors or lawyers marry they will have a double income. If teachers do that it’s simply unfair. Teachers should be paid less so that if they marry another of their kind they won’t be earning over a hundred thousand dollars between them… after a combined 14 years university education and 30 years of teaching experience. [Seriously, I’ve heard this argument.]
It’s your union’s fault the economy is a mess. That pension and all those great benefits like health coverage—all that stuff your union got for you—is just too much. You may have paid in, but if we could just take that money we promised you’d get back eventually and spend it on other stuff, we wouldn’t have to raise taxes.
And another thing, your union and tenure are allowing lousy teachers to ruin kids’ education. If it weren’t for unions and tenure there would be no bad teachers. Look how well that approach has worked for politicians, plumbers, and physicians.

[Trump just wants a profit and his Secretary of Education wants to entirely dismantle our education system and turn it into a money-making scheme.] Obama wanted the same thing Bush wanted, a better education system without having to pay more for it. “You can’t solve a problem by throwing money at it.” Right? “You get what you pay for” is another cliché. There’s truth in both, but diamonds cost more than glass. A couch from Ethan Allen is going to cost more than one left on the curb, and anyone who thinks they can rely on a junk store couch having the quality of the new custom-built model is deceiving themselves. Try sitting on them. If we want better schools and better teachers, we’re going to have to find a way to make working in schools more attractive. We could start by offering more money and security and respect.

Unions don’t protect bad teachers. Neither does tenure, assuming you have it in your state. (It’s long gone for K12 teachers in the State of Oregon.) I watched two teachers pushed out of the profession while we still had tenure and it wasn’t any harder than it would be to get rid of a factory worker management didn’t want, and it was a heck of a lot easier than getting rid of a bad doctor, and doctors technically don’t have a union. What doctors and lawyers have is the ability to command a professional salary and to move to another hospital or firm that offers them a better deal. Teachers can almost never do that.

Teachers are paid on a set scale that compensates their labor based on years of education and years of experience. However, no school district hires the best qualified teacher—they hire the one they can afford. That means they will start any new teacher at the lowest level they can get away with. Fresh out of college, inexperienced teachers are cheap hires and a cheap hire saves the school district money. Those new teachers last, on average four years, because the work is harder than they expected. A strong and experienced teacher, by contrast, would cost more, even though districts can almost never afford to pay them a wage that would coax them away from a current employer—and isn’t that how it’s done in professions? If a firm wants that better lawyer, they offer him or her more money. (The only education people who negotiate their pay is administrators. When my district insisted it was too broke to offer a raise, not even cost of living raises, administrators still received raises.) A great carpenter with a great reputation commands top dollar.

No one in another district would hire me for what I am paid in my current job. If I left for another district, a school in Portland for example, I would be credited with only 7 years of experience rather than the 24 I have and I would be paid less. They can’t afford to start a teacher on my pay. It’s not in their budget. And if I wanted to move, I couldn’t afford the pay cut. It would take me 8 years to recover my current salary. [Or actually something less than 8 years since my rural school district pays a lot less than Portland.]

What this means is that if school districts wanted to hire the best available teachers, they would have to revamp the way teachers are paid. I’m not talking about paying people for raising their students’ test scores—recent research shows this isn’t effective—it means we’d need some way to offer better teachers (“better” by some standard) higher wages. And, most critically, it would mean schools would have to have the extra money lying around to lure those “better teachers” away from their current employer. They don’t.

I am 66, and I’ve taught since completing 3 undergraduate degrees with honors and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Washington. I have a masters degree in my field and enough graduate hours for a masters in education too. Until I retired, I worked at least 50-60 hours a week (and all-too-often 70) and throughout the holidays and I STILL had to listen to complaints about my imaginary 3 months off every summer and how tenure protects bad teachers (remember, we have no tenure in Oregon public schools) and how my pension is breaking the state budget (I paid into my pension). I’m supposed to be better qualified, better trained, work harder, and do it all on less salary and with no guarantee that the terms under which I was hired will be honored. Those terms have not been not honored and what I was expecting upon retirement was halved.

…Speaking only for my frugal self, I had no complaints about my salary, but I would have to work full time through my 70s before my retirement income would come close enough to my salary after working in this profession since 1976. I took time out to stay home with my sons, but I had 25 years teaching in my district before a very bad year of stress-induced illness convinced me to retire. Teacher pensions had already been gutted in my state and the public seemed to want more from me for even less respect and autonomy, not to mention less security in my old age.

People who could barely tolerate being in the same room with their own sons and daughters while they were teenagers blame me when I can’t get them to do their homework. It wears me out.

A post on Facebook from a former teacher turned wealthy self-described “Capitalist” explained that if people want “abundant wealth” they will have to leave teaching. He illustrates this with an analogy: “Should trash collectors be paid more than the avg worker? Th…ink about it….Who would you miss more the garbage man, or some Nuclear Physicist?” [I’m not sure if teachers are the trash collectors or the scientists in this scenario.] “Bottom line is– tax payers pay the bill in the public sector… Therefore, it is expected to be a life of service for those who work in our communities…Not a life of abundant wealth…If one is concerned with earning top dollar, then they need to find a job in the ‘private sector,’ where one because of ‘Capitalism’ can earn as much as they desire. So either one should choose to serve the people, or take their talents elsewhere. Teachers work for the public and have to expect a life of service.”

More and more, the person some people seem to want in their schools is not a teacher, but a nun, someone to work purely out of the goodness of their heart. And it’s true that it takes a lot of heart to teach, but that doesn’t excuse blaming teachers for everything the public thinks is wrong with schools. It does not excuse paying teachers second rate wages just because they work in public schools. Second rate earns second rate.

If we are willing to settle for second rate teachers, we’ll have to expect second rate in all public sector jobs. And I do not want second rate air traffic controllers or safety inspectors or police officers or teachers. I don’t think we can expect anyone to work out of the goodness of their heart, as the Facebook poster above seems to expect. When I was a girl I had fantastic teachers… because they were women with limited opportunities and men on the GI bill and the first generation to climb out of hard blue collar jobs.

Today those people find work in other fields that pay better. I think we’re going to have to pay for what we get or we’re going to get what we pay for. That’s true whoever is doing the hiring.

If we want to improve teaching and teachers, it only makes sense that we expect to pay for it.

And it’s likely why excellent public school teachers are in short supply just now.

It is the last of August, and this ending could not come too soon. It’s been a memorable month.

There are great things about August: my wedding anniversary, the birthday of my older son, and surely something else.

In the old days, August is the month I began playing solitaire compulsively—with cards, not on the computers. Wikipedia suggests that about 79% of games are winnable, but I am fortunate to win a tiny fraction of that number. I have no idea what I am doing wrong. I can play a dozen hands of the game without winning.

That’s how August feels to me.

And too many tourists, preparing for company, cleaning up after company, completed projects.

The real reason August is a depressing month is that I am eager to start my teaching year. Until I retired, August simply stood between me and a new school year. Now I only teach one class each in Winter and Spring terms. The end of August means I still have 12 weeks to go.

I need a project.

When I finally checked my class list, I discovered 36 students listed in my Writing 121 class. No college or university I know would inflict that many students on a writing instructor. It is likely a few will drop, but I am thinking about how to fit that many into a classroom. I am mentally adding hours each week to my grading time. They have moved my students into two different rooms, new to me since last year and the year before, and years before that. No one contacted me about any of this, I was unable to schedule a meeting with my department, I did not receive the schedule letter from the school, and the principal was briskly friendly when I stopped by earlier this week. This is merely to say that my high school, like all public schools, is struggling.

I just read a pair of articles about pay at public school districts, one about the highest starting pay, and the other about pay scales that dip into six figures. One reality of teaching is that schools generally hire as cheaply as possible. You might observe that this is true for any business, but you might be missing a key difference about hiring teachers. A public school seeking a new principal (or a law firm seeking a contract lawyer) can find the candidate they want to hire and then negotiate a salary commensurate with desired skills and experience. That is, they know what they want and hire the best person for that job.

Public education doesn’t work that way. The districts with the highest starting pay, offer more money to beginning teachers for two reasons: they are building a stellar school system or no one wants to move to Wyoming. School districts with exceptionally high pay can do that because their tax base is exceptionally high, cost of living is high, and because they are building exceptional schools. They are throwing their money down to hire the best teachers. If you are tempted at this moment to repeat that old saw, “You can’t solve a problem by throwing money at it,” you are both right and wrong. Throwing money around is pretty pointless. But having money to spend can allow a school to hire the best and brightest teachers.

Almost no district can afford the best and brightest teachers. They have limited funds and overfilled classrooms. They hire the best teacher that they judge they can afford. Whether 80 or only 12 apply for the job, districts hire first-year teachers because they are cheaper. They might hire a teacher with 3-5 years of experience, but they can’t afford more years, or anyway, they do not afford more years of experience. Each year of experience means additional pay, and they do not budget for that extra pay.

Districts offering the highest starting pay assume that this is one way to find and keep teachers. If they can keep them for a few years, those straight-out-of-college teachers who chose to go somewhere for the high starting pay will find they are not desirable candidates anywhere else. The longer a teacher stays in a position, the less likely another district will spend the money to hire them away.

Compare that to most other industries where experience not only costs employers more, but is actually valued more. In schools, this only seems to work for administrators.

And yet. And yet, I am eager to begin. I will visit classrooms and volunteer my time in the school library on Wednesdays, and I am eager to begin teaching. In the mean time, I am piecing a quilt and playing solitaire.

“There are four types of hands [playing American Solitaire, or Klondike]: winnable games, theoretically winnable lost games (the player made a selection that resulted in a lost game, but could not know what the correct selection was because the relevant cards were hidden), unwinnable games (there is no selection that leads to a winning result), and unplayable games.”—Wikipedia

I am playing blind.