The Importance of Teacher Pay
On Teacher Shortage: Not a solution, but without it there is no solution
Does money rate your importance in a capitalist society? Does a fat baby poot? Of course!
That gives what we pay teachers an importance beyond the financial aspect. That pay makes a powerful statement of how we as a society feel about those to whom we have entrusted the education of our children. While we praise the dedication and spirit of teachers, the statement is made with dollar signs – not words.
Sylvia Allegretto in her Economic Policy Institute article detailed the growing gap between teacher pay and that of other college graduates. The data studies that gap from 1996 to 2023, and shows it growing from 6.1% to 26.6%. The dollar signs couldn’t be clearer. Say what you want, but that’s only words. In a capitalist society we DO rank importance monetarily: Hence the importance of sending your offspring to ‘the right college’, for instance.
Substack writer Anne Lutz Fernandez described this importance:
But while promoting teaching as a calling rather than a profession has facilitated the logic of austerity in education spending, it’s not smart. Because teacher retention is just part of the story. If we want healthy, vibrant public schools that serve every student, we need to improve recruitment of new teachers, keep and distribute the best teachers, and support teachers at every phase of their careers.
Even better than stating the ‘why’, she also addresses how. Both of these articles are cited below and I recommend them.
In our country we are allowing – yea encouraging – a collapse of public education. This will fail in its original purpose, but will have devastating effect. The framers of our Constitution all harped on the fact that the survival of democracy was only possible with a well-educated populace, and they were all champions of public education. Public Education is not a ‘business’ that must justify its bottom line; it is not a ‘business’ that can and should be allowed to fail because – that’s the capitalist way. Public Education is a service provided by the government of all civilized societies. The survival of a democracy and its society is directly tied to the quality of the Public Education they provide.
In this manner, how we treat teachers reveals the level we respect both the profession as well as the democratic society we profess to claim. Is teacher pay important? Is our democracy important? Does a fat baby poot?
https://www.epi.org/publication/teacher-pay-in-2023/#epi-toc-6