Teacher’s Salary Article Brings No Argument
My recent post titled Are Morgan Hill Teachers Actually OVERpaid? has elicited surprisingly little response thus far. I expected an outporing of comments, posts and emails from parents, teachers and administrators – not to mention the random passersby who usually chime in on such things. But, despite the article being viewed a couple of hundred times, there has yet to be a single comment posted thus far. It seems that, when presented with actual data, those decrying that “teachers are SOOOO underpaid” have very little to say. A shame really. I was hoping for nice give and take on the issue.
Mercyne over at Paranoia is always justified did take a swing at defending the teachers in her area, bringing out the classic argument-
There are teachers in my district who have to buy school supplies for the lower income students out of their own pocket, just because they hope to give them a future, only to burn out so quickly because the job is rarely a rewarding one.
To which I respond that no one is forcing teachers to spend their own money on students. Maybe if they got the teachers’ union to lobby for more school supplies instead of yet another annual payraise without a measure of merit they wouldn’t need to anymore. We’ve all heard of teachers going on strike for more pay and/or benefits, but has there ever been a case of a strike for more materials? And if the career isn’t a rewarding one, then they should feel free to find another. It’s not as if the field has changed dramatically in the last 20 years or so. I’ve been hearing the very same complaints since I was in grade school myself.
The article was included in the Carnival of Economics at Worldly Economic Thoughts as well as the Carnival of Education over at Joanne Jacobs’ Free-linking and thinking on education blog this morning, so perhaps we’ll get some more responses from there…
Until then, anyone else care to chime in with their thoughts?
Tags: economy, education, News, salaries, schools, teachers
Perhaps one reason that this post received so few responses is that educators simply are too busy doing their jobs to spend time and energy answering yet another voice in the perpetual onslaught of criticism to which few other professionals are subject. Patients don’t belittle their doctors because they got sick, nor do they assume that, because they’ve been in numerous doctors’ offices throughout their lives, they could practice medicine. When it comes to teaching, though, somehow everyone is an expert.
Contrary to the writer’s claims, teachers’ salaries have not risen beyond inflation; the reality is that teachers’ salaries have not kept up with inflation. The writer also does not take into account that teachers’ education levels tend to be higher than those required for positions to which their salaries were being compared.
Unfortunately, the salary comparisons and ubiquitous complaint that teachers do not work for an entire year never take into account the pace of a school day, which is pretty much unlike any other job except, perhaps, that of EMT’s during a crisis. If you were to visit a school site, you’d see teachers running to use restrooms and wolfing down lunches during extremely short breaks — and that’s if they are not supervising students during these breaks, which many do. There are no long lunches and chats around the water cooler in our public schools. And most teachers also work well beyond the formal school day.
There’s much buzz around educational “accountability,” but apparently accountability is NOT something expected of CEO’s receiving billions in government bailouts — AFTER having proved themselves incompetent, no less. When have schools ever seen anything like the funding these companies have received? I would love to see the schools in my state “bailed out” in such fashion.
Ineptitude is not peculiar to education; some of it can be found in teaching as it can in any profession. By and large, however, educators work in their field because they recognize that their job is important to the well-being of society. Perhaps, then, instead of suggesting that teachers should care less or choose another career, we should consider what our communities would look like without them and act accordingly.