I have two close teacher friends who are both looking to leave the teaching profession because they cannot financially provide for their families. One of them wrote the following to me in a recent email:
"I am thinking about leaving the profession...I am not providing for my family and it is increasingly expensive as [my kids] get older...This month has been really hard...I hope that we can figure something out. My debt keeps growing and I am not keeping up with my bills. It sucks that I can't do what I want to [teach] because of money."
This makes me very sad, because this friend is a phenomenal teacher. I also know a single mom with three children who teaches elementary school in my school system. If she were to apply, her children would qualify for federal free/reduced school lunch.
While salaries are low for beginning teachers, it often doesn't seem so bad because most new teachers are young, single and just glad to be drawing a salary after getting out of school. And besides, when you are 22, many of your friends aren't earning much more money than you are. Even so, many new teachers struggle to even pay rent and make car payments. The problem appears to become more severe as teachers enter mid-career: a teacher with a master's degree in North Carolina earns $40,130 after EIGHT years of experience; after TWENTY-FOUR years of experience (16 years later), that same teacher still earns less than $50,000 ($49,970). That's an annual average increase in salary of $615 or 1.4%. Inflation averages 3.0% , which means that these teachers actually have less money each year for those 16 years.
The reality is that good, qualified, passionate teachers leave teaching because these salaries don't provide their families with the financial security they want. As a society, I don't think we can complain about teacher quality when the salary schedules discourge qualified people from staying in (or joining) the profession.
2 comments:
It's interesting that North Carolina has a statewide salary scale. Neither of the other two states in which I have been a resident have a statewide scale - but rather the scale is set by the district.
-Willis, Big
Yep, NC has a statewide salary schedule, which prevents huge discrepancies in teacher salaries from district to district that you can get in other states. Local districts can "supplement" the state schedule, but the variance is usually less than 10%. By contrast, in California, for example, the low end of teacher pay-scale for Calevaras County Unified School District is $37,564, whereas in the Mountain View-Los Altos School District the low end of the pay-scale is $55,704--that's almost 50% more. North Carolina has a highly-centralized public school system, and the statewise salary schedule is one consequence of its centralization.
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