One of the major issues confronting most concerned Americans in the country today is education. It is almost an unavoidable topic of concern for parents, a hot topic for debate, and a cause for nearly abject terror among teachers and faculty. So how do we evaluate teachers and what they are worth on a dollar per hour wage or what they are worth for an annual salary? You have to compare them to other jobs, and see where they stand against the poverty line. You also have to evaluate where they stand in comparison to the skill required to do a job, the required special training, and the danger involved in doing that job. How do teachers rate when compared to other white collar jobs requiring a bachelor’s degree, with low trade value, and no real danger in the work place? Now the accepted wisdom of the quality of teachers can have an almost magical effect on the overall education of a student, so what does it say about the quality of the teachers we want educating our children when we are only willing to pay them like fast food workers? Honestly though, that’s not really what teachers make. Despite all the griping and complaining about how low a teacher’s salary is, according to the North Carolina Department of Public, instruction the starting salary of a teacher with no experience and only a Bachelor’s Degree and no experience is $30,800 for a ten month “year”. North Carolina is the fourth lowest State in the nation for teacher’s salaries which means that most teachers in America make much more than that for their ten month “annual” salaries. The important part of figuring out if teachers really make a fair wage or salary is to look at the profession itself. High pay for jobs is usually offered based on certain factors or risks inherent to doing a job. For instance jobs that have a high risk level, a high inherent responsibility, high entry barriers, or a combination of the three are considered reasons for a job to offer high pay. Medical doctors, for example, have a high risk associated with exposure to illnesses or diseases from treating patients, a high inherent responsibility in that the lives of patients are on the line, and a high entry barrier with 8 years of required expensive schooling, coupled with a lengthy internship. On the flip side making burgers at your local fast food restaurant has none of the responsibility, risk, or entry challenge to doing that job so most workers there make minimum wage initially. Teaching as a profession tends to fall somewhere in between the two. It has a fairly common initial entry barrier of a bachelor’s degree in the education field. Realistically it is not the kind of initial entry barrier to drive the wage of a teacher up as it’s an expected requirement in many professions in modern day America. At best this sets the price that a teacher commands slightly higher than minimum wage because it is not the entry barrier we would see in many other skilled job professions. Also teaching has a very low comparative risk level. There have been some extremely isolated incidents of school shootings which could be argued to make for a dangerous work environment, though, on the whole the likelihood of a teacher’s life being on the line is such a low statistical probability it is almost nonexistent. In comparison to a police officer, a construction worker, or even a truck driver the risk of being a teacher isn’t even worth mentioning, which means again we see another area where teachers who frequently complain about low salaries, actual rate a lower salary than many of the other jobs that you could compare them too. The one area where teachers can make a very valid argument about their salaries being too low is when you look at the responsibility of the job. Any parent will tell you the most important thing in their lives are their children. Teachers are the most trusted individuals in a child’s life between the ages of five and eighteen, with responsibilities of educating, guiding, and mentoring children entering their formative years. With this very large responsibility a good wage is absolutely fair to the teachers today, and based on the low relative entry, the low job risk, and the high responsibility teachers should be squarely in the middle class of American wages. Now the middle class is a muddied and unclear definition but usually it seems to mean those fifty percent of working Americans that earn between $35,000 and $100,000 a year and according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics the median income nationally for teachers in 2012 was $55,050, and again that is for a 10 month work year. It’s hard to imagine that a profession that makes fifty-five thousand dollars a year as being considered an impoverished demographic but this is the popular wisdom in our society today. Another way to look at it is to compare it to another job that has similar entrance criteria and see what their comparative starting salaries would be. Job one is that of a teacher and assumes that this job is in a lower salaried state. Again, a starting teacher’s salary for a ten month year, in NC is almost thirty-one thousand dollars and possibly almost thirty-four thousand dollars if the person did the proper certifications in college. The job is as we mentioned low risk, relatively low entrance, and high responsibility. A military junior officer on entrance to the United States Armed Forces makes thirty-five thousand dollars a year for a high risk, high responsibility, and relatively low entrance career field. Essentially both jobs make approximately the same amount of money and they are not equal the risk. Now there are multitudes of ways for a teacher to make more money and career progress just like in any other career. Many teachers can choose to continue their education earning masters and doctorates in their chosen fields. They can earn experience and move into better jobs at other higher paying school districts or states or they can move into jobs that pay better at institutes of higher learning like community colleges and four year colleges. Teachers can even move eventually into administrative fields and earn better salaries that way if they choose to do so. Sara Hebel shows this in an article criticizing what she felt were unjust pay divides between faculty and administration, as she explains that public college professors make on average $80,578 annually and that private colleges make even more on average than their public school counterparts (Hebel 2). This pay jump illustrates that just like any other career this progression and advancement requires hard work and personal motivation. It seems reasonable that to make more money a person may have to work harder, apply for jobs that require them to move out of their comfort zones, and earn experience and credentials that warrant more pay. Most disconcerting of all is even the proponents of education reform that feel that raising the pay of teachers’ salaries would make the education system in America better. Donald Gratz addresses this in his article, “Special Topic/ The Problem With Performance Based Pay,” by saying “If we believe that additional pay will motivate teachers to work harder, we must also believe that teachers know what to do to improve student achievement- and that they aren’t doing it because they are not sufficiently motivated.” (Gratz 2) If we believe that more pay will help fix the issues with the current educational trends then we must believe that teachers are deliberately letting our children to fail. This is an unrealistic argument at best, because most of the time the people that go into the teaching profession do so for the non-monitary rewards offered by the profession and they don’t do it for the money. The only people that want our children to succeed as much as, we the parents do, are their teachers. In conclusion there are some places that we see a need to increase teachers’ salaries according to a Washington Post article about how much teachers make nationally places like Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Dakota all have valid complaints about how much their teachers make (Strauss 2). These States show that there are certain States where teachers need to be paid more and closer to the national averages but those places are not the whole of America and most teachers earn a fair salary for the work they do. Now there is certainly an argument waiting in the wings for all public servants deserving higher pay then they receive. That Police, Military, and teachers are all underpaid for what they do but for right now teachers are paid equivocally for their peers in public service and have the same opportunities for advancement, promotion and higher pay.
Posted on: Thu, 20 Mar 2014 13:13:30 +0000
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