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.
