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Striking Minneapolis teachers and education-support professionals hold placards in front of the Justice Page Middle School in Minneapolis, Minnesota on March 8, 2022. (Photo: Kerem Yucel/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Want to End the Teacher Shortage? Start Valuing Education
Too many lawmakers are happy to dole out subsidies for the rich and corporations while resisting pay increases for educators.
Aug 28, 2022
As students return to the classroom, school districts across the country are facing a historic number of teacher vacancies - an estimated 300,000, according to the National Education Association (NEA), the largest U.S. teachers union.
Some states are particularly hard hit, with approximately 2,000 empty positions in Illinois and Arizona, 3,000 in Nevada, and 9,000 in Florida.
How are political leaders responding? A number of rural Texas districts have moved to a four-day school schedule, creating major hassles for working parents. A new Arizona law will no longer require a bachelor's degree for full-time teachers. Florida is allowing military veterans to temporarily teach without prior certification. Florida's Broward County recruited over 100 teachers from the Philippines.
These band-aid actions ignore the root causes of the teacher crisis: low pay and burnout.
A new Economic Policy Institute report finds that teachers made 23.5 percent less than comparable college graduates in 2021. That's the widest gap ever - despite the extraordinary challenges teachers have faced during the pandemic. The gap is even wider in some of the states with the largest teacher shortages. In Arizona, for example, teachers earned 32 percent less than non-teacher college grads in the state last year. Across the country, real wages for public school teachers have essentially flatlined since 1996.
When the NEA surveyed teachers earlier this year, 55 percent reported they plan to leave the profession sooner than planned. That number is even higher among Black (62 percent) and Hispanic/Latino (59 percent) educators, who are already underrepresented in the teaching profession. In the same survey, 91 percent of teachers point to burnout as their biggest concern, with 96 percent supporting raising educator salaries as a means to address burnout.
Some states are getting the message: In New Mexico, lawmakers have instituted minimum teacher salary tiers based on experience - beginning at $50,000 and maintaining a $64,000 median wage. They're also aiming to codify annual 7 percent raises so that teachers don't lose ground to inflation.
"These raises represent the difference of being on Medicaid with your family, the difference of having to have a second or third job or doing tutoring work on the side, the difference of driving the bus during the day and having to take extra routes for extracurriculars just to make ends meet," said New Mexico teacher John Dyrcz in a recent interview with More Perfect Union. "Having this increased compensation flow down to the workers gives people dignity. It shows that their work is being respected."
In other areas, teachers are harnessing their collective bargaining power to make their demands heard. Thousands of teachers in Ohio, Washington state, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C. have gone on strike during the first weeks of the academic year.
The educators' union in Columbus, Ohio demands a simple, public "commitment to modern schools": not only pay raises but also smaller class sizes, decent air conditioning, adequate funding for the arts and physical education, and caps on numbers of periods taught in a row. Read one picketer's sign: "You think we give up easy? Ask how long we wait to PEE!"
Meeting such demands requires public investment. And unfortunately, too many lawmakers favor lining the coffers of the wealthy instead of funding our school systems.
In 2021, the Columbus Dispatch estimates schools in the city lost out on $51 million to local real estate developers. In New York, an over $200 million reduction in school budgets has provoked public outcry in a city where luxury builders have pocketed well over $1 billion in tax breaks each year.
New York City Comptroller Brad Lander told council members their cuts were particularly puzzling, given that the city boasts $4.4 billion in remaining federal stimulus funds that must be spent by 2025. "Making cuts to individual school budgets at this moment is wrong for our students, for our teachers, and stands in the way of the equitable recovery our city needs," Lander said.
On Thursday, the Columbus teachers union came to a "conceptual agreement" with the city's schools, ending their strike. Let's hope this is a sign of a turning tide. Through a relentless pandemic, vicious censorship of curricula, and surging inequality, we cannot continue to skimp on education while squandering our resources on the wealthy.
An Urgent Message From Our Co-Founder
Dear Common Dreams reader, It’s been nearly 30 years since I co-founded Common Dreams with my late wife, Lina Newhouser. We had the radical notion that journalism should serve the public good, not corporate profits. It was clear to us from the outset what it would take to build such a project. No paid advertisements. No corporate sponsors. No millionaire publisher telling us what to think or do. Many people said we wouldn't last a year, but we proved those doubters wrong. Together with a tremendous team of journalists and dedicated staff, we built an independent media outlet free from the constraints of profits and corporate control. Our mission has always been simple: To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good. Building Common Dreams was not easy. Our survival was never guaranteed. When you take on the most powerful forces—Wall Street greed, fossil fuel industry destruction, Big Tech lobbyists, and uber-rich oligarchs who have spent billions upon billions rigging the economy and democracy in their favor—the only bulwark you have is supporters who believe in your work. But here’s the urgent message from me today. It's never been this bad out there. And it's never been this hard to keep us going. At the very moment Common Dreams is most needed, the threats we face are intensifying. We need your support now more than ever. We don't accept corporate advertising and never will. We don't have a paywall because we don't think people should be blocked from critical news based on their ability to pay. Everything we do is funded by the donations of readers like you. When everyone does the little they can afford, we are strong. But if that support retreats or dries up, so do we. Will you donate now to make sure Common Dreams not only survives but thrives? —Craig Brown, Co-founder |
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Rebekah Entralgo
Rebekah Entralgo is the Managing Editor of Inequality.org.
Bella DeVaan
Bella DeVaan is the Research and Editorial Assistant for Inequality.org. You can follow her on Twitter @bdevaan.
As students return to the classroom, school districts across the country are facing a historic number of teacher vacancies - an estimated 300,000, according to the National Education Association (NEA), the largest U.S. teachers union.
Some states are particularly hard hit, with approximately 2,000 empty positions in Illinois and Arizona, 3,000 in Nevada, and 9,000 in Florida.
How are political leaders responding? A number of rural Texas districts have moved to a four-day school schedule, creating major hassles for working parents. A new Arizona law will no longer require a bachelor's degree for full-time teachers. Florida is allowing military veterans to temporarily teach without prior certification. Florida's Broward County recruited over 100 teachers from the Philippines.
These band-aid actions ignore the root causes of the teacher crisis: low pay and burnout.
A new Economic Policy Institute report finds that teachers made 23.5 percent less than comparable college graduates in 2021. That's the widest gap ever - despite the extraordinary challenges teachers have faced during the pandemic. The gap is even wider in some of the states with the largest teacher shortages. In Arizona, for example, teachers earned 32 percent less than non-teacher college grads in the state last year. Across the country, real wages for public school teachers have essentially flatlined since 1996.
When the NEA surveyed teachers earlier this year, 55 percent reported they plan to leave the profession sooner than planned. That number is even higher among Black (62 percent) and Hispanic/Latino (59 percent) educators, who are already underrepresented in the teaching profession. In the same survey, 91 percent of teachers point to burnout as their biggest concern, with 96 percent supporting raising educator salaries as a means to address burnout.
Some states are getting the message: In New Mexico, lawmakers have instituted minimum teacher salary tiers based on experience - beginning at $50,000 and maintaining a $64,000 median wage. They're also aiming to codify annual 7 percent raises so that teachers don't lose ground to inflation.
"These raises represent the difference of being on Medicaid with your family, the difference of having to have a second or third job or doing tutoring work on the side, the difference of driving the bus during the day and having to take extra routes for extracurriculars just to make ends meet," said New Mexico teacher John Dyrcz in a recent interview with More Perfect Union. "Having this increased compensation flow down to the workers gives people dignity. It shows that their work is being respected."
In other areas, teachers are harnessing their collective bargaining power to make their demands heard. Thousands of teachers in Ohio, Washington state, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C. have gone on strike during the first weeks of the academic year.
The educators' union in Columbus, Ohio demands a simple, public "commitment to modern schools": not only pay raises but also smaller class sizes, decent air conditioning, adequate funding for the arts and physical education, and caps on numbers of periods taught in a row. Read one picketer's sign: "You think we give up easy? Ask how long we wait to PEE!"
Meeting such demands requires public investment. And unfortunately, too many lawmakers favor lining the coffers of the wealthy instead of funding our school systems.
In 2021, the Columbus Dispatch estimates schools in the city lost out on $51 million to local real estate developers. In New York, an over $200 million reduction in school budgets has provoked public outcry in a city where luxury builders have pocketed well over $1 billion in tax breaks each year.
New York City Comptroller Brad Lander told council members their cuts were particularly puzzling, given that the city boasts $4.4 billion in remaining federal stimulus funds that must be spent by 2025. "Making cuts to individual school budgets at this moment is wrong for our students, for our teachers, and stands in the way of the equitable recovery our city needs," Lander said.
On Thursday, the Columbus teachers union came to a "conceptual agreement" with the city's schools, ending their strike. Let's hope this is a sign of a turning tide. Through a relentless pandemic, vicious censorship of curricula, and surging inequality, we cannot continue to skimp on education while squandering our resources on the wealthy.
Rebekah Entralgo
Rebekah Entralgo is the Managing Editor of Inequality.org.
Bella DeVaan
Bella DeVaan is the Research and Editorial Assistant for Inequality.org. You can follow her on Twitter @bdevaan.
As students return to the classroom, school districts across the country are facing a historic number of teacher vacancies - an estimated 300,000, according to the National Education Association (NEA), the largest U.S. teachers union.
Some states are particularly hard hit, with approximately 2,000 empty positions in Illinois and Arizona, 3,000 in Nevada, and 9,000 in Florida.
How are political leaders responding? A number of rural Texas districts have moved to a four-day school schedule, creating major hassles for working parents. A new Arizona law will no longer require a bachelor's degree for full-time teachers. Florida is allowing military veterans to temporarily teach without prior certification. Florida's Broward County recruited over 100 teachers from the Philippines.
These band-aid actions ignore the root causes of the teacher crisis: low pay and burnout.
A new Economic Policy Institute report finds that teachers made 23.5 percent less than comparable college graduates in 2021. That's the widest gap ever - despite the extraordinary challenges teachers have faced during the pandemic. The gap is even wider in some of the states with the largest teacher shortages. In Arizona, for example, teachers earned 32 percent less than non-teacher college grads in the state last year. Across the country, real wages for public school teachers have essentially flatlined since 1996.
When the NEA surveyed teachers earlier this year, 55 percent reported they plan to leave the profession sooner than planned. That number is even higher among Black (62 percent) and Hispanic/Latino (59 percent) educators, who are already underrepresented in the teaching profession. In the same survey, 91 percent of teachers point to burnout as their biggest concern, with 96 percent supporting raising educator salaries as a means to address burnout.
Some states are getting the message: In New Mexico, lawmakers have instituted minimum teacher salary tiers based on experience - beginning at $50,000 and maintaining a $64,000 median wage. They're also aiming to codify annual 7 percent raises so that teachers don't lose ground to inflation.
"These raises represent the difference of being on Medicaid with your family, the difference of having to have a second or third job or doing tutoring work on the side, the difference of driving the bus during the day and having to take extra routes for extracurriculars just to make ends meet," said New Mexico teacher John Dyrcz in a recent interview with More Perfect Union. "Having this increased compensation flow down to the workers gives people dignity. It shows that their work is being respected."
In other areas, teachers are harnessing their collective bargaining power to make their demands heard. Thousands of teachers in Ohio, Washington state, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C. have gone on strike during the first weeks of the academic year.
The educators' union in Columbus, Ohio demands a simple, public "commitment to modern schools": not only pay raises but also smaller class sizes, decent air conditioning, adequate funding for the arts and physical education, and caps on numbers of periods taught in a row. Read one picketer's sign: "You think we give up easy? Ask how long we wait to PEE!"
Meeting such demands requires public investment. And unfortunately, too many lawmakers favor lining the coffers of the wealthy instead of funding our school systems.
In 2021, the Columbus Dispatch estimates schools in the city lost out on $51 million to local real estate developers. In New York, an over $200 million reduction in school budgets has provoked public outcry in a city where luxury builders have pocketed well over $1 billion in tax breaks each year.
New York City Comptroller Brad Lander told council members their cuts were particularly puzzling, given that the city boasts $4.4 billion in remaining federal stimulus funds that must be spent by 2025. "Making cuts to individual school budgets at this moment is wrong for our students, for our teachers, and stands in the way of the equitable recovery our city needs," Lander said.
On Thursday, the Columbus teachers union came to a "conceptual agreement" with the city's schools, ending their strike. Let's hope this is a sign of a turning tide. Through a relentless pandemic, vicious censorship of curricula, and surging inequality, we cannot continue to skimp on education while squandering our resources on the wealthy.
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