So your answer is really good at negative point
six, you guys are rock stars and how are you
doing out there, OK?
Yeah. Tell me what you're thinking.
I think I like it.
I just I'm a little bit confused with the
equation part. And I almost everyone remembers
that one teacher who had a transformative impact
on their life, the teacher that made school
exciting and interesting and that genuinely cared
teacher quality is the number one school related
factor to student achievement.
So no stress on that this weekend, Anna it's going
to be beautiful weather. So go enjoy it.
In the meantime, you all take good care of
yourselves. All right. I'm going to let you go a
couple of minutes early today.
This is an extremely important profession.
Teachers literally have the future of the
country in front of them every day.
But the teaching profession is in turmoil.
The wage gap between teachers and others with the
same level of education and experience is nearly
20 percent and growing.
I think I'd be remiss to say I haven't had that
moment where I was like I could probably double
my salary if I left and went elsewhere.
I've never been really tempted enough to actually
pull the trigger and I really love what I do.
And and there is no other job like this.
In some areas of the country, up to a quarter of
teachers leave the profession annually and about
one fifth of the workforce has to resort to a
second job. The pandemic is likely making things
worse. The exodus of some of our best and
brightest teachers is that they realize they
can't stay in a life that they had dreamed of.
So why are teachers paid so little?
And is there anything that can be done to change
that?
Hey, guys, how's everybody at home?
I say everybody's finally here.
It's all good. This is Kate Diaz.
She's a math and statistics teacher at Manchester
High School in Connecticut.
She's been working here her entire career, nearly
21 years. I came to teaching late in the game.
I wasn't necessarily somebody who went through
high school and college thinking, I'm going to be
a teacher. I was substitute teaching.
I was trying to kind of navigate those roads.
And that was where my aha moment was.
I was like, this is perfect.
Show me one of your first.
My first. OK, let's see.
This is fun with my first.
The first contract. Yeah.
This is the first. So, you know, 20 years ago if
you had gone through five, you know, a bachelor's
and master's, you're still entering at thirty six
thousand. We have what we call like a slow burn
in teaching. So there is this gradual kind of
incremental increase that we are we contractually
will negotiate. And then we hit what we call the
max ten years in I was probably at about sixty
thousand now, twenty one years and I'm about
ninety thousand. That's considered high in the
U.S. for example, in Mississippi, the lowest
paying state, a teacher with 20 years of
experience makes around fifty thousand dollars.
The average starting salary is just over forty
thousand dollars. That's not a living wage in
many parts of the country.
I don't think the wages match sort of the level of
expectation of the position.
If you look at a teacher and you say to them, we
want you to be a therapist, we want it to be a
social worker, we want you to be a teacher,
obviously, we want you to have some safety
training. And then you learn the joys of the
pandemic and learning to teach online and to
teach remotely. But don't forget that we do have
the joy of standardized testing that we're going
to layer on top of that and then we're going to
evaluate how you're successfully navigating all
of the challenges facing the world while you're
teaching a kid to read.
Since the 1990s, the average inflation adjusted
teacher salaries have remained largely stagnant
and even declined in the majority of states.
That and the increasing stressful environment
have resulted in low retention rates, shortages
and national teachers strikes around the country.
In twenty eighteen, three hundred and seventy
five thousand school employees walked out to
demand increased education funding and better
pay. The full effects of the pandemic remain to
be seen, although experts say it's not looking
good. The movement, red for ED was all about
saying we need to pay attention to who the
teachers are and to what they're doing and to
what their compensation is.
And it gave a national platform to the question
of do we value education?
The American public school system, as we know it
today, was invented about a hundred years ago.
Before that, it was mostly men teaching quite
quickly. It was reconfigured into, quote unquote,
women's work. And one of the big reasons was, is
that you could save money for the taxpayer.
And so this kind of set the bedrock, the tone and
a sense that this was relatively low paid work.
In the 1960s, teaching paid women 15 percentage
points better than if they'd chosen another
field. But at that time, options were limited.
That's not the case anymore.
Still, teaching is overwhelmingly a female
profession and has become more so over time.
Today, more than three quarters of teachers are
females. A lot of it boils down to the status of
the line of work. There was this idea that, gosh,
you don't have to be that smart.
It's not as complex, as difficult as, you know,
being an accountant, working with numbers, being
a dentist, working with teeth.
Sylvia Allegretto has been studying something
called the Teacher Pay Penalty or teacher wage
gap for nearly 20 years.
Allegretto and her partner found that the weekly
wage penalty for teachers has gotten worse over
time. Today, men make about 27 percent less and
women make about 16 percent less than if they had
chosen another profession With the same level of
education and experience.
You have to wonder how are you going to attract
students into the teaching profession?
An international comparison with the Organization
for Economic Cooperation and Development, or
OECD, found that teachers in the U.S.
make nearly 60 percent less than that of
similarly educated professionals lowest across
all OECD countries.
The claims of a teacher pay gap are that teachers
earn less than similarly educated private sector
workers. What this ignores, which in every other
context we know very well, is there within any
given educational category, There is a lot of
differentiation in pay.
We all know today that people who graduate from a
top college with a bachelors degree in
engineering or another STEM field earn a great
deal in the private sector.
We also know that people who graduate with a
liberal arts degree aren't going to earn quite so
much. There's not one answer to this question.
There's not a national answer to this question
because. Salary levels differ and markets as an
example, in Florida, there are schools that train
engineers and there are a lot of jobs that
actually the salary levels there for engineers
are lower salaries in Massachusetts for teachers,
as an example, are two or three times higher than
salaries in Arizona in most localities.
We find teachers significantly under the family
living wage. The profession has been known to
have great benefits, according to Biggs, twice as
generous as for the average private sector
worker. But studies show that teachers only
receive their pension if they stay in the
profession for 25 years or more, and only a
quarter reached a break.
Even point on total contribution and interest.
Weekly wages actually really matter because you
can't pay your rent or pay for your food from
your benefits. So you have to find alternate..
Income Mobility is another source of contention.
Unless a teacher moves to a higher paying state,
wages only increase one to two percent per year
in a private industry.
If you're doing really well, you'll be eligible
for a raise or you're going to shift companies.
We end up sort of stuck in the profession as the
only way to kind of substantially increase your
salary is to leave the profession.
Raising teacher quality is the number one driver
to improve student achievement, and the U.S.
is falling behind international counterparts.
It's one of our highest ideals that we're going to
make the adequate investments in all of public
education so that each and every kid in this
country is able to get a good and decent
education. And we're falling short of those
promises. But increasing teacher salaries seem
unlikely at the moment.
Even at times when education spending increased,
it still didn't impact salaries.
On top of that, there are a lot of teachers out
there, about three and a half million In fact.
It's been hard to tackle teacher compensation
right now because there's so low to start with
that there's always this feeling that any
solution, somebody loses.
And so how do you get out of this zero sum winners
and losers kind of situation to close the EPI
teacher compensation gap?
Andrew Biggs estimates that it would cost roughly
twenty nine billion dollars.
The CARES Act included thirteen point two dollars
billion in direct funding for K-12 public
education, but that was less than two percent of
total public education funding.
An additional relief from Congress is uncertain
at the moment. Kiran works with school districts
around the country to figure out how to
reallocate available money to maximize results.
She says one viable solution is creating
leadership roles.
In Washington, D.C., for example, teachers can
make up one hundred and thirty thousand dollars.
The way they funded that was a first.
They got outside support, transport and and
helped to fund the transition to a new salary
structure. Then they transitioned to a new salary
structure where they paid the teachers that did
the most and worked in the toughest assignments
significantly more.
They freed it up by reducing staff.
Also in the salary structures, it means probably
giving less money for every additional year and
linking the raises instead to changing roles.
Experience matters, but experience matters if
it's leading to good teaching.
Washington, D.C. is just one of the over thirteen
thousand five hundred school districts in the US,
while the red for ed movement resulted in 15
states increasing salaries.
A complete overhaul of pay structure for the
profession, such as the one in Washington, D.C.,
could take a long time, Money and resistance.
People get into teaching, really do get into it
for some very altruistic notions.
For this to be a sustainable profession, we have
to build a model that's financially sustainable
for people. Otherwise, what will be is a
revolving door profession where people come in,
hang out as long as they can, and then leave to
go make money. And that's not what we want.
We know that the best teachers come from
experience, they come from commitment, and they
come from the willingness to stay and really
learn about the communities, learn their
curriculum, learn their craft.