Happy Teacher Appreciation Week! If you believe that teachers are important and that they change lives, become an advocate for higher pay for teachers.
The Economic Policy Institute is one of the very few think tanks in D.C. (maybe the only think tank) that is not funded by billionaires. It focuses on economic issues affecting working people and issues of economic justice.
In this post, Sylvia Allegretto and Lawrence Mishel document the wage gap between teachers and their peers with similar education.
Teachers are not paid equitably. They have good reason to strike for higher wages. In most states, teachers are unlikely to get higher wages unless they strike.
Providing teachers with a decent middle-class living commensurate with other professionals with similar education is not simply a matter of fairness. Effective teachers are the most important school-based determinant of student educational performance.1 To promote children’s success in school, schools must retain credentialed teachers and ensure that teaching remains an attractive career option for college-bound students. Pay is an important component of retention and recruitment.
The deepening teacher wage and compensation penalty over the recovery parallels a growing shortage of teachers. Every state headed into the 2017–2018 school year facing a teacher shortage (Strauss 2017). New research by García and Weiss (2019) indicates the persistence and magnitude of the teacher shortage nationwide:
The teacher shortage is real, large and growing, and worse than we thought. When indicators of teacher quality (certification, relevant training, experience, etc.) are taken into account, the shortage is even more acute than currently estimated, with high-poverty schools suffering the most from the shortage of credentialed teachers. (1)
García and Weiss explain why the teacher shortage matters:
A shortage of teachers harms students, teachers, and the public education system as a whole. Lack of sufficient, qualified teachers and staff instability threaten students’ ability to learn and reduce teachers’ effectiveness, and high teacher turnover consumes economic resources that could be better deployed elsewhere. The teacher shortage makes it more difficult to build a solid reputation for teaching and to professionalize it, which further contributes to perpetuating the shortage. In addition, the fact that the shortage is distributed so unevenly among students of different socioeconomic backgrounds challenges the U.S. education system’s goal of providing a sound education equitably to all children…
Teacher wage and compensation penalties grew over the recovery since 2010
- The public school teacher weekly wage penalty grew from 13.5 percent to 21.4 percent between 2010 and 2018.
- Teacher benefits improved relative to benefits for other professionals from 2010 to 2018, boosting the teacher benefits advantage from 4.8 percent to 8.4 percent. Despite this improvement, the total compensation (wage and benefit) penalty for public school teachers grew from 8.7 percent in 2010 to 13.1 percent in 2018.
The wage penalty is a result of state policy, not the recession of 2008. Legislators cut taxes and revenues.
Teacher weekly wage penalties vary across the states
- We report teacher weekly wage penalties for each state for the period 2014–2018. State wage penalties are based on regression-adjusted analyses using a sample of college graduates in each state. Teacher penalties range from 0.2 percent to 32.6 percent.
- Four of the seven states with the largest teacher wage penalties—Arizona, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Colorado—were, unsurprisingly, ground zero for the 2018 teacher protests, helping to draw national attention to the erosion of teacher pay. In these states, teachers earned at least 26 percent less than comparable college graduates.
- In 21 states and D.C., the teacher wage penalties are greater than 20 percent.
Governor Pritzker is the new governor and hopefully he will do something to fix the pension funding problem in Illinois. Twenty five cents on the dollar goes to the pensions of the members of the five Illinois state pension funds while seventy-five cents on the dollar goes to pay the interest on the debt.
This comes from IRTA, Illinois Retired Teachers Association.
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GREAT NEWS!! Governor Pritzker announced Tuesday that he will not seek to extend the pension payment schedule resulting in underfunding the retirement systems. The Governor’s administration said the state collected $1.5 billion more in income taxes in April than expected therefore, the administration has revised its estimates for how much revenue the state will collect next year. The letter to the legislative leaders went on to say due to the increase in revenue projections the state will be able to meet the current funding commitment to the retirement systems without extending the ramp.
This change removes a major stumbling block to the to Fiscal Year 2020 budget negotiations which is currently being crafted in the General Assembly.
Some anti-public education governors deliberately manipulate a deficit in order to try to renegotiate the terms of pensions and/or benefits. That’s what Chris Christie in New Jersey did.
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/trump-launches-new-assault-on-the-working-poor/
Trump’s war on the poor.
I hope he “Eats —- and chokes.”
Quality schools require quality teachers. If states care about their future, they will try to attract and retain professional teachers.
Many red states led by right wing extremists are undermining public schools in every way possible. Not only are wages low in these states, but teachers have already had benefits slashed and pensions retooled so they can barely afford to retire. Some teachers in these states are getting food stamps in order to put food on the table for their families. Some months they have to decide between buying shoes for their children and medicine for themselves. Professional teachers with college degrees should not have to make those decisions. If teaching were a male dominated profession, wages and working conditions would likely be better. All teachers should join a union and work to make that union work for them.
The shortsightedness of the higher ed faction in ed reform amazes me:
“Our system of higher education has also been, in a sense, gigafied, and it has yielded similar results. College teaching, once a middle-class profession, increasingly leaves its practitioners in poverty. Hidden behind glossy brochures with photos of Frisbee games on the college lawn and students at work in the library are the underpaid and overworked adjunct faculty who teach most of America’s undergraduates.”
How did think this was going to go? They thought they would be immune? Wage a 20 year war on K-12 public school teachers and there will be collateral damage.
DeVos wants to replace all of them with “platforms” too, and 15 dollar an hour “guides”.
We’re going to end up with 50 lavishly funded elite colleges and universities and the rest of us get the Uber model.
https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/april-may-june-2019/how-college-professors-turned-into-uber-drivers/
The public school teachers are correct to strike right now, BTW. They will never get the funding back they lost between 2008 and 2019 unless they demand it when the economy is good. It’s now or never.
and very worrisome that the “good” economy we keep hearing about is actually based upon a growing sand foundation: every day more and more money which should be in middle class hands is being sucked up into the top 20%
Privatization is part of the plot to move public assets out of the hands of the middle class and poor and send them to private pockets.
Chiara,
I think the way to reduce the percentage of non tenure stream faculty in the academy is to close marginal graduate programs. In the short run, this will transfer the teaching efforts of tenure stream faculty from graduate courses to undergraduate courses, allowing the institution to cover the teaching needs with fewer non tenure stream faculty. Without a graduate program, it may even be possible to increase the teaching load of tenure stream faculty from the increasingly standard 3 classes a year in my discipline to 4 or 5 classes a year, further reducing the number of non tenure stream faculty. In the long run this will generate many fewer people qualified to become non tenure stream faculty.
Real teachers, those that ‘profess’ and respond to an inner calling, understand that following their inner voice involves material sacrifice. I’m sure this is equally true in Finland. In the United States, however, our culture has been taken over by ‘con artists’, people that provide no real value but, instead, extract value by exploiting competitive human nature. To do that, these self-centered centers of exploitation must demean anyone that follows their inner feelings and, instead, make such people invisible. After all, their house of cards rests upon generating insecurity.
Good for them. More teachers should strike…and not during the ‘adult time’ that DeVos says they should do.
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Oregon Teachers Walk Out in Red to Press for School Funding
ASSOCIATED PRESS [Snopes]
PUBLISHED 8 MAY 2019
SALEM, Ore. (AP) — Tens of thousands of teachers across Oregon walked off the job Wednesday to demand more money for schools, holding signs and wearing red shirts that have become synonymous with a nationwide movement pushing lawmakers to better fund education.
Schools around the state, including Oregon’s largest district, Portland Public Schools, closed for at least part of the day. Most offered day care and free lunch programs.
An estimated 25,000 people massed in a downtown Portland park for a rally before marching through the city. The mix of teachers, parents and students wore red to support the “Red for Ed” campaign that’s taken hold nationwide and chanted that slogan.
It was one of many protests statewide that called on lawmakers to expand school funding in Oregon, which has some of the largest class sizes and lowest graduation rates in the United States…
https://www.snopes.com/ap/2019/05/08/oregon-teachers-walk-out-in-red-to-press-for-school-funding/