What Happens When Teachers Aren't Valued?
Turns out, low pay doesn't help attract or retain teachers
A recent message from Save Our Schools Arizona highlights the teacher compensation crisis:
Arizona’s teacher pay gap is the 49th largest in the nation, behind only Colorado, according to a recent analysis from the Economic Policy Institute. In 2022 Arizona teachers earned 33% less than their peers in comparable professions. This is the worst gap since 1960, and fully one-third less than other college-educated workers.
SOS notes that there’s a direct correlation between Arizona’s state of teacher pay and the number of qualified teachers in classrooms:
The Arizona School Personnel Administrators Association reported in September that nearly 6,000 Arizona classrooms serving more than 150,000 kids lack a qualified teacher.
This should NOT be a surprise.
Years of undervaluing teacher pay have led to a crisis. Now, people aren’t taking teaching jobs, teachers are leaving, and college students aren’t exactly clamoring to get into the profession.
An Empty Pipeline
The director of teacher education at OCU has an explanation:
"More than anything, economics plays into it, right? Students don't want to take on debt into a profession that when I get a four-year degree that I'm going to have to pay loans when I barely make enough to live and that's where we are with the education profession," she said.
Alternatively, when one district dramatically raised teacher pay, look what happened:
After announcing the salary schedule change, we had pools of qualified applicants to consider. It was a fun spring. Our administrators were having to have these rich conversations about best fit, really digging into things like, ‘Here’s a full table of highly qualified people; who is going to best fulfill the needs of our school? It’s a conversation that most districts don’t get to have right now.
These two stories make the point quite clearly: Valuing teachers MEANS adding value to their paychecks.
You know, with actual money.
Where I live in Tennessee, the pay gap is not quite as bad as Arizona, but it still stands at 25%.
And here’s the thing:
For a little more than $600 million, Tennessee could raise starting teacher pay to $60,000 and give all teachers a substantial (10%+) pay boost.
From local governments like a single school district in Oregon that revamped its pay scale to boost pay significantly to state governments like Tennessee with huge budget surpluses, it IS possible to boost teacher pay.
The question remains: Do policymakers value teachers?
There is a decline of student enrollment in my district, but an increase in assistant to the assistant to the assistant superintendent with all having an increase in pay raises while teachers struggle to keep up with professional pay in the private sector.
It is painfully obvious that policy makers don't value teachers, unless they value us as scapegoats for social ills (unaffordable housing, inflation, no increase to minimum wage, etc.). Policy makers (Marsha Blackburn for example) don't value teachers, but they do value test vendors (Pearson) and the gun lobby (NRA). They value the folks who fund their campaigns and give them the high of staying in power. Actual students? They don't care a whit about them. If they did, they'd fund education and pay teachers more. All they really want at this point is to put a whole bunch of kids in one class, put them in front of a computer, and let one teacher manage as many as possible- 40? 50? More? Give kids a minimum wage type of education, wherein they have very basic skills but not much else. Why else would anyone underfund education? Underpay teachers? Overload classrooms?