Teachers are receiving apples, donuts, and lovely notes to thank them for their service. But that’s not enough. Many states are reporting severe shortages of teachers and support staff. This means larger class sizes and curtailed curricula. This means denial of a good education to millions of children.
The Economic Policy Institute lays out the problems and the solution in this post: Raise wages.
It begins:
A 2022 report reviews EPI research on teacher pay and presents the evidence showing that K–12 schools are facing a staffing crisis. The pandemic made clear that our economy cannot function if schools don’t have the staff they need to operate safely and effectively.
Policymakers need to invest in K–12 education now, the report’s authors emphasize. They can start by tapping into hundreds of billions of dollars of available federal COVID relief funds. Read the report.
Key takeaways
- Since the beginning of the pandemic, state and local public education employment fell by nearly 5% overall, with much larger declines in some states, according to establishment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Household survey data indicate that the number of employed public K–12 teachers fell by 6.8%, school bus drivers by 14.7%, school custodians by 6.0%, and teaching assistants by 2.6%.
- COVID concerns are likely a factor in nonteacher staff shortages. Education support staff tend to be older—and thus more at risk of severe COVID—than the average U.S. worker. Less than a third (31.6%) of U.S. workers overall are age 50 or older, compared with 66.2% of bus drivers, 55.4% of custodians, and 50.4% of food service workers in the K–12 public education workforce.
- Low pay is a long-standing issue for support staff. From 2014 to 2019, the median weekly wage (in 2020$) for food service workers in K–12 education was $331, while school bus drivers received $493 and teaching assistants $507. In contrast, the median U.S. worker earned $790 per week.
- Inadequate pay is a long-standing issue for teachers. Past EPI research shows that public K–12 school teachers are paid 19.2% less than similar workers in other occupations.
- Policymakers should tap into the hundreds of billions of dollars in federal COVID relief funds available now to raise pay for education staff, enact strong COVID protections, invest in teacher development programs, and experiment with ways to support part-time and part-year staff when school is not in session. They also need to plan for sustainable long-term investments in the K–12 public education workforce.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Here’s to teachers, sitting in the lunchroom during their twenty-minute lunch hour, eating the Teacher Appreciation Day free meal while thinking about whether they can afford to buy a box of photocopy paper and pay their rent, which just went up $250 a month.
Ha, I became a vegan in 1982 and stopped eating the crap food (donuts, really not healthy) that was offered to teachers on those Appreciation Days.
The stress from being a K-12 teacher in the US means living a healthier lifestyle to help combat hopefully reverse the damage caused by that stress.
I also spend the 20 minute lunch in my room with the student chess club enjoying a fast game of chess and/or with the journalism students that worked at lunch to publish the monthly highs school student paper.
You’re a better man than I am, Lloyd. I desperately needed that 20 minutes.
In my last teaching job, at the beginning of the year, admin would put our free supplies for the year into our mailboxes. One whiteboard marker, a little box of paper clips, one small pad of Post-It Notes, a pencil, a stapler and a pencil sharpener (both of which we were to return at the end of the year), and,one row of staples. That’s right. They would buy those little 39-cent boxes of staples, open them, take one row of staples from the box, enough to fill the stapler once, and put that into the plastic supplies baggie to go into our mailboxes. Thereafter, we were on our own. I actually took a picture of this supplies baggie to share with friends because it was so tragicomical.
I tried going to a Dollar Store to buy supplies from what I was being paid, which was a fifth (I’m not exaggerating) of what I was paid in my previous job as a publishing exec, but the whiteboard markers from there would dry up after a day or so.
But hey, since I had 180 students, that one row of staples would be enough to staple one set of tests one time with 40 whole staples left over!!!
I know, you nonteachers out there must be pretty envious of our access to such unimaginable resources!
🙂 a good day
Good morning Diane and everyone,
While salary is important, it doesn’t take into account the larger situation. Teachers also deal with:
1. Senseless meetings and paperwork
2. Insufficient prep time
3. Tough schedule of 5-6 classes and sometimes numerous preps
4. Evaluation based on student grades
5.improperly managed discipline problems (by administration)
6. Student lack of responsibility and interest in learning
7. Cell phone use and distracted students
8. Pressure to teach to a test
9. Difficult parents
10. Having to use personal money to buy school supplies
11. Violent students
12. Lack of societal respect
13. Lack of mentoring
14. Lack of common prep time with colleagues
15. Political pressure on course content
So there are a lot of factors besides salary.
mandatory coverage of other teachers’ classes during one’s prep period
car line duty
mandatory word walls
mandatory data walls
mandatory data chats
mandatory test prep
lack of supplies
lack of access to a library
no nurse
guidance counsellors with no time for guidance
one could go on
Thanks Bob. Oh and I forgot to mention Professional Development that treats you as if you were a vacuous dimwit. I remember having to draw pictures on a paper plate or some ridiculous thing. I walked out. Give it time and we could come up with more….
Ah, the drawing pictures on paper plates exercise! Been there, refused to do that!
I’ve thought of writing a farce about the whole thing but it would probably have to be considered non-fiction instead!
LOL. Yes! And the farce has precipitously fallen over into tragedy.
Oh, Bob.
I’m so glad I retired. I did, however, need to move from teaching in a public school (where I felt I ‘connected’ with many students who others had trashed) into a private school for rich kids so that I could continue in control of my courses.
Even many of these outlets, however, have become infested, and one wonders where our society is headed.
And then there was the parent who called to complain that Mr. Shepherd was teaching demonology because he had assigned the reading of the first scene of Macbeth.
And the one who called to tell my Principal that Mr. Shepherd was insane because when a kid asked how old he was, he said, “Well, let’s see, the sacking of Tyre by Alexander happened in 333 BCE, when I was still a toddler, so. . . .”
a KEY understanding: this is so minimally understood as newscasters promote only one side of the MUCH larger problem
yes!!!
Very much to the point.
Most teachers start without the expectation of getting rich, however in the past, they expected respect for their expertise and control over their course material. At least, if they didn’t develop their own curriculum, they could pick their own textbooks, and didn’t have to worry about ‘Common Core’ tests.
Now, they are expected to be technicians controlled by the testing industry and ‘business majors’ who have no understanding of education. No wonder there’s a ‘teacher shortage’, and money (alone) won’t cure it unless the business hacks, themselves, take to the classroom, which would be a disaster for most of the students.
This is where I believe the federal government can step in without getting involved in state education policy. Only the federal government has the fiscal resources to get teachers and other school staff to an income level that is commiserate with their work while reducing class sizes. This would help poorer states compete more effectively for quality teachers. One of the significant reasons for financial disparity among public schools comes form our over dependence on local property taxes. Federal funding of salaries at the school house would alleviate this difference significantly and improve instructional delivery dramatically. This would require a significant change in the political make up of Washington and should be a major Democratic Party selling point.
Possibly, Paul. But that would mean cutting the military budget, and you know that ain’t gonna happen.