The wages of teaching
No school administrator
should ever receive a percentage raise greater than the raise
teachers get. Neither should state legislators.
| Missouri
falls almost $9,000 short of nation’s average teacher
salary Missouri’s
average teacher salary ranks 43rd in the nation, according
to a state-by-state report released recently by the
National Education Association. The 2004–05 average
Missouri teacher salary of $38,971 falls more than $8,800
below the national average, according to NEA research
based on data through August 2005.
Teachers
in 41 states and the District of Columbia earn average
salaries above those of Missouri teachers. Oklahoma
is the only neighboring state with a lower average teacher
salary. Teachers in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi,
North and South Dakota, Montana and West Virginia also
earn less, on average, than do Missouri teachers.
In
terms of constant dollars, Missouri teacher salaries
actually lost ground over the last 10 years, according
to the NEA report. Nationwide, the average teacher salary
increased 2.9 percent over the past decade when adjusted
for inflation. However, Missouri’s average teacher
salary did not keep up with inflation and shows a decline
of 1.4 percent in constant dollars.
Only
17 out of 524 school districts in Missouri have an average
teacher salary above the national average. Of those
districts, 14 have an MNEA membership of more than 50
percent. All have local NEA affiliates.
“Every
student in every classroom deserves a highly qualified
teacher. In order to attract such teachers, we need
to compete with school districts in neighboring states
and with other professions. That requires a competitive
salary and supportive work environment,” says
Jung, a fifth grade teacher in the Ritenour School District.
“Salaries that rank 43rd in the nation are simply
not good enough to attract and retain the teachers we
need.”
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A couple of years ago I spent the day at an elementary school
in New Jersey. It was a nice average school, a square and
solid building with that patented classroom aroma of disinfectant
and chalk, chock-full of reasonably well-behaved kids from
middle-class families. I handled three classes, and by the
time I staggered out the door I wanted to lie down for the
rest of the day.
Teaching’s the toughest job there is. In his new memoir,
“Teacher Man,” Frank McCourt recalls telling his
students, “Teaching is harder than working on docks
and warehouses.” Not to mention writing a column. I
can stare off into the middle distance with my chin in my
hand any time. But you go mentally south for five minutes
in front of a class of fifth graders, and you are sunk.
The average new teacher today makes just under $30,000 a
year, which may not look too bad for a twentysomething with
no mortgage and no kids. But soon enough the newbies realize
that they can make more money and not work anywhere near as
hard elsewhere. After a lifetime of hearing the old legends
about cushy hours and summer vacations, they figure out that
early mornings are for students who need extra help, evenings
are for test corrections and lesson plans, and weekends and
summers are for second and even third jobs to try to pay the
bills.
According to the Department of Education, one in every five
teachers leaves after the first year, and almost twice as
many leave within three. If any business had that rate of
turnover, someone would do something smart and strategic to
fix it. This isn’t any business. It’s the most
important business around, the gardeners of the landscape
of the human race.
Unfortunately, the current fashionable fixes for education
take a page directly from the business playbook, and it’s
a terrible fit. Instead of simply acknowledging that starting
salaries are woefully low and committing to increasing them
and finding the money for reasonable recurring raises, pols
have wasted decades obsessing about something called merit
pay. It’s a concept that works fine if you’re
making widgets, but kids aren’t widgets, and good teaching
isn’t an assembly line.
McCourt’s book is instructive. Early in his 30-year
career, he’s teaching at a vocational high school and
realizes that his English students are never more inspired
than when forging excuse notes from their parents. So McCourt
assigns the class to write excuse notes, the results ranging
“from a family epidemic of diarrhea to a sixteen-wheeler
truck crashing into the house.” Pens fly with extravagant
lies. You can almost feel the imaginations kick in.
The point about tying teaching salaries to widget standards
is that it’s hard to figure out a useful way to measure
the merit of what a really good teacher does. You can imagine
the principal who would see McCourt’s gambit as the
work of a gifted teacher, and just as easily imagine the one
who would find it unseemly. Tying raises to pass rates is
a flagrant invitation to inflate student achievement. Tying
them to standardized tests makes rote regurgitation the centerpiece
of schools. Both are blind to the merit of teachers who shoulder
the challenging work of educating those less able, more troubled,
from homes where there are no pencils, no books, even no parents.
A teacher whose Advanced Placement class sends everyone on
to top-tier colleges; a teacher whose remedial-reading class
finally gets through to some, but not all, of a student group
that is failing. There is merit in both.
The National Education Association has been pushing for a
minimum starting salary of $40,000 for all teachers. Why not?
If these people can teach 6-year-olds to add and get adolescents
to attend to algebra, surely we can do the math to get them
a decent wage. Since the corporate world is the greatest,
and richest, beneficiary of well-educated workers, maybe a
national brain trust might be set up that would turn a tax
on corporate profits into an endowment to raise teacher salaries.
Maybe states and communities could also pass regulations
with this simple proviso: no school administrator should ever
receive a percentage raise greater than the raise teachers
get. Neither should state legislators.
In recent years teacher salaries have grown, if they’ve
grown at all, at a far slower rate than those of other professionals,
often lagging behind inflation. Yet teachers should have the
most powerful group of advocates in the nation: not their
union, but we the people, their former students. I am a writer
because of the encouragement of teachers.
Surely most Americans must feel the same, that there were
women and men who helped them levitate just a little above
the commonplace expectations they had for themselves.
At the end of his book, McCourt, who is preparing to leave
teaching with the idea of living off his pension and maybe
writing—and whose maiden effort, “Angela’s
Ashes,” will win the Pulitzer—is giving advice
to a young substitute. “You’ll never know what
you’ve done to, or for, the hundreds coming and going,”
he says. Yeah, but the hundreds know, the hundreds who are
millions who are us. They made us. We owe them.
by Anna Quindlen
(Reprinted with permission from Newsweek—Nov. 28, 2005
issue)
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