Why Great Teachers Quit by Katy Farber

Author:Katy Farber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2015-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Teachers begin their careers feeling disrespected, because their salaries are so incommensurate with what other professionals earn. New teachers in America can expect to earn about $34,935 a year, according to a recent study by the National Educational Association (NEA, 2009b). When you compare that with $42,123 for beginning management trainees, $47,453 for beginning public accounting professionals, and $51,341 for beginning registered nurses, it looks particularly bleak (NEA, 2009b).

The situation doesn’t seem to be improving. “Teacher salaries have risen a scant 0.8 percent since 1996, says the Economic Policy Institute. That’s a whole lot less than the 12 percent increase other college-educated workers have enjoyed over the same period” (Flannery, 2007, para. 4). In many districts, teacher pay is actually going down, when you consider that the contributions to health care have gone up significantly (Allegretto, Corcoran, & Mishel, 2008). And teachers are fighting threats of increases in health-care premiums and nominal salary increases in contract negotiations. Often these struggles are public, with the school boards led through the lengthy process by a lawyer and teams of teachers representing themselves after teaching all day (sometimes with union support, and sometimes without). The lawyers and school board teams work together to develop the best strategy for having to pay less, to give less in terms of benefits, but the teachers are too busy teaching their children to do the same.

Figure 5.1 Median salary by years experience: All K through 12 teachers (United States)

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