What Would You Like Your Teacher to Know About You
In 2018, teacher protests swept the country with educators speaking out confronting widespread public school budget cuts and wage stagnation. Those protests led to strikes, including the Los Angeles teachers' strike in Grand Park on January 22, 2019, in Los Angeles, California. There, thousands of teachers — and supportive parents and students — celebrated a seeming victory when the United Teachers Los Angeles union and the Los Angeles Unified School District struck a deal that included capping class sizes, providing funding for school nurses and increasing educator pay.
While this victory was significant, it as well serves as a testament to the ongoing issues plaguing the United States' education system. If waves of protestors aren't enough to convince you of the problems surrounding instructor pay (and other concerns raised by educators), and so perhaps these shocking numbers will. Bacon.com listed $44,926 as the boilerplate starting salary for public educators on August 27, 2021. On the other end of the pay scale, top-paid U.S. elementary school teachers make $71,000 annually, while pinnacle-paid high school teachers make between $71,000 – $81,000 a yr on average. Meanwhile, in Luxembourg, the highest average salary for unproblematic school teachers is 114,000 euros (or $133,316.16) annually.
Looking at things on a state-by-country basis, New York teachers come out on top, making a median salary of $85,258 (via USA Today) — though New York also requires teachers to earn a principal'due south caste inside their first v years of being on the job, a caveat that tin can create more barriers for fledgling educators. Other states that compare to New York's payscale include California, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Alaska, merely and so many others land on the opposite end of the spectrum, including Oklahoma, where "half of all teachers are [made] less than $33,630 a year" in 2019.
Teachers Spend Their Own Money on Supplies and Hold Second Jobs — only This Shouldn't Be the Norm
EdTech Magazine asked, "If y'all were offered a job that paid an average annual salary of $49,000 and required you to piece of work 12- to xvi-hour days, would you take it?" Sounds rough, doesn't it? Well, sadly, that'southward the norm for the majority of teachers in the U.S. Teachers spent an boilerplate of $745 of their own coin on classroom supplies during the 2019/2020 school year. Teachers also paid approximately $252 out of pocket on distance learning materials during the jump of 2020.
To make matters more frustrating, the National Education Association (NEA) found that roughly 16% of teachers held 2nd jobs over the summertime, while twenty% relied on secondary income year-circular in 2019. If at-schoolhouse secondary jobs are counted — coaching sports, instruction extra courses, helping with extracurriculars — that figure jumps to 59%. The bottom line? Public schools should be funded adequately; teachers should be compensated fairly for all they do. Despite all of this, Education Week legislators scaled back or outright nixed plans to raise teacher pay when the initially pandemic hitting.
Educators were abruptly thrust into a public wellness crisis in March 2020. Despite teachers' best efforts, near schools, specially public schools, didn't have roadmaps to deal with all-virtual learning scenarios. In fact, plenty of universities and otherwise privately funded schools with seemingly huge endowments weren't well-equipped either. Betwixt technological roadblocks and the fact that many students don't accept access to computers, tablets or the internet at home, the novel coronavirus pandemic certainly spotlighted discrepancies and shortcomings in the American education system.
In August 2020, the White House formally declared teachers essential workers, noting that they are "disquisitional infrastructure workers" — or, in other words, critical to the infrastructure of reopening the country and bolstering the economy. All the same, unlike other essential workers, teachers do not always have the training and background to mitigate all of these public health concerns. Funding for PPE and other essential, virus-combating supplies is non always available or particularly abundant. Despite this, educators must potentially risk their health, their families, and their lives to teach their students.
It's indisputable that teachers are essential members of our communities, but they are also people who, merely like all of us, are navigating the horrors of this pandemic. Frequently, they go beyond the call of their task descriptions — even exterior of the classroom. "My students accept lost family members, and there's a lot of trauma we are not addressing," Jessyca Mathews, an English teacher at Carman-Ainsworth Loftier School in Flintstone, Michigan, told Time. "When COVID hit, I had kids who were texting me in the middle of the night, and I answered them every single fourth dimension."
Mathews is not alone in her dedication to her students. "My colleagues and I have been stressed since jump intermission considering nosotros care, and nosotros're worried and we know the ins and outs of our jobs," Kara Stoltenberg, a language arts instructor at Norman High School in Norman, Oklahoma, told Fourth dimension. "And nosotros know that what the CDC is recommending for in-person learning just isn't really feasible, because the lack of funding that nosotros've had for a decade." In states that were more severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers drafted wills and obituaries ahead of the school year.
This is tiptop dystopian-level disturbing, but, what'south peradventure about disturbing of all is that none of these problems — from instructor pay to how we value teachers' lives and wellness — are new. Instead, the pandemic has revealed every fissure and fault line in the U.S. pedagogy organisation. Information technology falls on us to reverberate on the lessons we've learned among the COVID-19 and strive to improve American educational activity for teachers and students.
Source: https://www.ask.com/culture/teacher-pay?utm_content=params%3Ao%3D740004%26ad%3DdirN%26qo%3DserpIndex
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