We’ve Been Defunding Education for Decades
We just call it “budget cuts” or “tax breaks”
Lowest Paid Degrees
Teachers are the most underpaid college-educated profession. With a four-year college degree under their belts, they are paid a starting salary of $41,163, which is 87% of the U.S. average salary for a full-time employee of $47,520. College graduates, on average, start at $55,260 per year. Teachers start out at 74% of that.
That’s before you realize that more than half of teachers hold graduate degrees. Teachers get a big bump in pay for having a master’s degree, but they still lag behind the national average for master’s degree-holders; teachers get bumped to around $63,000 while the national average is $68,000. A doctorate is even worse. Teachers with a doctorate average about $69,000 and the national average is $97,000. Teachers receive a 67% increase from a bachelor’s degree to a doctorate; the rest of America gets a 75% increase, with their base pay starting higher to begin with.
No Overtime, But Yes Overtime
Teachers are almost always exempt from overtime regulations and are routinely expected to work far more than their contract hours.
When I was in the classroom, my contract stipulated that I was expected to be in the classroom from 7:00 am until 4:00 pm Monday through Thursday (we did not hold classes on Fridays). That’s 36 hours; legally full-time work. The contract also stipulated that I would attend staff meetings, department meetings, grade-level meetings, in-service meetings, plus IEP/504 meetings for all IEP/504 students enrolled in my classes. Those meetings went well above the extra four hours per week that would make a 40-hour workweek.
But then we were also required to chaperone/attend (i.e. — WORK) at 2–4 student council events per year (dances, socials, fundraisers), 2–4 sporting events, and 2–4 performing arts performances per year. These events were all part of our contract. We’re now well over 40 hours, and we haven’t even started grading yet.
In addition to all this, I tracked my hours for two school years. Field trips, fundraisers, performances, weekend intensives, extra rehearsals, tutoring, parent meetings, etc. All the stuff I was expected but “not required” to do. For the 2017–18 school year, it was 640 additional hours (12 hours per week) and in the 2018–19 school year, it was just shy of 800 (15 hours per week). Even though I was required through my contract to work around 45 hours per week, I really clocked somewhere between 57 and 70 hours per week. No overtime pay available.
To be fair: I had all these extra performances and trips but didn’t need to grade papers. Other, more academically rigorous subject teachers needed to grade lots and lots and lots of homework but didn’t have the travel requirements I did.
The myth persists that teachers “get summers off”. Our school had a “traditional” calendar: we started the first week of August and ended the third week of May, right before Memorial Day. That gave the students one week of May, all of June, and all of July off. Nine weeks. But teachers worked after students were done with class, usually by a couple of days. And then we came back two weeks before school started. So… six weeks off.
For what it’s worth, here in Phoenix, the police department gives officers 46 days off per year, not including the 11 paid holidays they all get. 57 days off, or eleven and a half weeks of paid time off each year. If they don’t use it, they get paid a bonus for it. That’s almost double the amount of unpaid time off teachers get in the summers.
But lots of teachers have to work through the summers. Our campus ran summer camps for incoming junior high students. Core academic teachers teach summer school. Sports programs do summer training, or else state and national seasons run through our summer, since not everyone can be doing track and field in February like we can.
Even if a teacher doesn’t have a specific job to do over the summer, most teachers use that time to complete their certification training, rewrite their curriculum, learn new software systems to improve their time management for the following year, or rearrange, clean, spruce up, and redecorate their classrooms. Or move classrooms. Or move schools. Those few precious summer weeks aren’t “off” in most cases, and suggesting that college-educated adults get a second job as a minimum-wage retail employee or lifeguard alongside their fifteen-year-old students during that time is ludicrous.
And that is to say nothing of the increasing number of schools and districts turning to year-round or staggered calendars to deal with crowding and other budget issues. If your kids are on a staggered attendance schedule, your teachers are working year-round without a break.
No Side Hustles, No Promotions
As a teacher, your side hustle options are grim. Once teachers are hired, for too little money and working way more hours than they thought, the chances for promotions are slim. If you’re promoted to be a department chair, you might get a tiny little spiff. Something $1,000 per year (that’s $38.46 per paycheck before taxes, baller).
You can get a real, honest-to-goodness second job like waiting tables or bartending, but since you’re completely locked in to a 7–4, M-F job, it’s tough to find anything other than service and/or retail; neither of which are great for a college-educated professional who is also already working tons of unpaid overtime.
You can tutor, either on your own or through an agency like Kumon or the Princeton Review. You’ll make about $10–12 an hour, and your hours will fluctuate, meaning nothing is guaranteed.
Promotional opportunities are slim, too. Education has one of the worst boss-to-employee ratios in America, making it statistically more difficult to be promoted here than in any other field. From a classroom teaching position, really the only opportunity to advance is to become an administrator.
School board positions are elected positions; that’s why school boards are usually half-full of people who don’t give one shit about schools or kids in classrooms. They’re using the board as a launchpad for their political career. Our local elementary school board has five members (not linking for my personal privacy reasons):
- A professional accountant, with no teaching experience
- A computer programmer, with no teaching experience
- A classroom teacher!
- A man with a psych degree from a for-profit Christian university who owns four businesses and doesn’t live in our town (none of the businesses he owns are related to psychology, somehow)
- A doctor whose biggest educational brag is that he was educated in a public school district on the other side of the country (disclosure: I voted for this guy, but mostly because he wasn’t the guy in #4, who was also on the ballot)
Our local high school board has five members, too:
- A classroom teacher turned politician
- A politician
- A certified clinical trauma specialist, specializing in foster care trauma
- A politician
- A teacher-turned-administrator
So out of ten people running our schools, three of them have classroom experience. One more has experience working with children in any real capacity. While she is likely one of the most compassionate people available for the job, and we need people like her helping to make decisions for our students, it simply underscores the fact that teachers aren’t really considered to be qualified to run our schools, and those opportunities are closed off to them.
Out-of-Pocket Costs
Most states require teachers to be certified. To be certified as a music teacher in Arizona, I would need to:
- Get fingerprinted — $67 + $7 application fee
- Submit an application — $60
- Pull my official transcripts, for two college degrees — $30
- Take a certification test — $118
- Take a music-specific certification test (yes, two tests) — $118
- Fifteen clock hours of continuing education per school year — costs vary on this; my school worked these hours into our inservice meetings, other schools require you to pay out-of-pocket, with courses reaching as high as $200 per hour. That’s up to $3,000 per school year, per teacher.
- Total out-of-pocket costs to become a board-certified teacher in my subject area: $400 — $3,400 per year.
Even if you don’t want to become a board-certified teacher, and if your state allows you to work without that certificate, you can’t get around the fingerprint requirement or the transcript requirement, so you’ll spend around $100 just to get the job in the first place, if you’re lucky.
Teachers spend an average of $750 per year on their classrooms, a number that jumped from $600 pre-pandemic.
DonorsChoose.org is full of teachers begging for money for supplies, equipment, and even food or clothing for their students.
School-issued laptops are a nightmare. They’re old, out-of-date, slow, and usually have battery issues, so you have to stay plugged into the wall and the wired internet, making it less of a laptop and more of a very un-ergonomic desktop. Many teachers choose to use their own computers. I bought speakers for my classroom so I could play… music. In my music classroom. They were destroyed by someone while I wasn’t on campus, so I bought more. All out of my pocket.
No Pay Increases For You
If your state continues to fund schools well, and your district is well-run, and your administrator decides to spend salary dollars on actual salaries, you might get a cost-of-living raise every four or five years.
Here in Arizona, teachers had their pay frozen during the Great Recession of 2007–08 and it didn’t un-freeze until 2018. In 2007, the average teacher pay was $45,941. In 2018, the average teacher salary was $46,949. By that time, once inflation was taken into account, teachers should have been paid $55,665.31; they had really taken a $9,724.31 (21%) pay cut.
In 2018, Governor Ducey made a promise to raise teacher salaries by 20% by the year 2020. That, of course, never happened, since he followed that “promise” up by cutting taxes. For the 2020–21 school year, which is when his promise should have been fulfilled, teachers in Arizona were paid $50,782; an 8% increase from their starting point in 2018.
Lest you think this is an “Arizona Problem” — the trend bears out across the nation. In 2007, average teacher salary was $52,800. In 2018 (the last year teacher contracts were signed without pandemic interference of any kind), average teacher salary was $61,730. That’s a raw increase of almost $10,000 per year ($384 per paycheck, before taxes), but once adjusted for inflation it’s $1,400 less per year; in order to keep pace with inflation, teachers should have been paid $63,167 per year in 2018.
A National Embarrassment
All of this doesn’t even take into account the fact that we ask teachers to run active-shooter drills and then have the mitigated gall to ask them to sacrifice themselves for our children’s comfort.
Have you ever had to do an emergency lockdown at your job? I have.
A domestic dispute in the neighborhood behind our school meant an angry man with a gun was running from police. This man had a child enrolled at our school and at the school across the street — the same school where my own children were enrolled.
We were given the lockdown call during lunch, and every junior high kid was yanked into the building. I had the largest classroom on the first floor, so most of these kids became “stowaways” in my classroom. For nearly an hour, we sat in darkened silence, trembling every time we heard footsteps or someone rattling a doorknob. It was me and 104 12–14-year-olds, locked in a music room, with one four jiggly doors as potential entry points, plus six windows.
No one gets paid enough for that. Yet some say teachers are paid too much.
We spend 5% of GDP on education in this country. Five percent. We are ranked #66 in the world for educational spending.
It’s a disgrace.
And women are bearing the brunt of that disgrace.
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