Posted on 08/13/2015 11:04:39 AM PDT by MichCapCon
The average public school teacher’s salary in Michigan in 2014 was $62,169, according to the state Department of Education.
The average salary in Michigan's private sector was $48,043 in 2014, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Yet, a small but very vocal minority of teachers across the state have participated in a campaign to paint their profession as low-paid, and their compensation complaints have frequently been picked up by numerous media outlets.
The stories have often uncritically repeated allegations that teachers are living on food stamps, make less than substitute teachers or need second jobs to pay their bills. They have done so even though the actual compensation levels in the form of union pay scales are available online.
Consider just some of the numerous examples.
In 2012, the Center for Michigan’s Bridge magazine published a story about retired Royal Oak teacher Kathy Kapera, who said the lucrative retirement benefits teachers receive “would make up for the relative lack of financial compensation she would earn as a teacher.” But the story never reported how much Kapera was actually paid. According to the district's union contract, a teacher with Kapera’s 32 years of seniority would have been collecting an $81,000 annual salary at the time of her retirement in 2010, plus benefits.
In 2012, Rockford Public Schools teacher Craig Beach wrote an op-ed in MLive in which he described the complaint of a colleague's daughter: “Mom, I know what goes into the profession. You demonstrate the many hours put in after leaving school, the stress, the lack of respect and now extremely low pay. I want to eat and have a life.”
In 2015, Beach and his wife, also a teacher at Rockford Public Schools, were each paid $72,349 plus benefits. Their salaries were not reported in the article.
In 2013, Grand Rapids Public Schools teacher Tina Ratliff told school board members, “I could make more money as a substitute.”
The MLive article containing the quote never questioned Ratliff’s claim. But the Education Action Group filed a Freedom of Information request and found Ratliff was paid $40,830 in 2012. That year, the district paid substitute teachers $85 per day, so a substitute teacher working the same 191-day schedule as Ratliff would have earned $16,235. Plus, substitutes don't get health insurance or retirement benefits, which can add an estimated $26,000 in value to a regular teacher's salary. This information was available online.
In November 2014, Romulus Community Schools teacher Serena Kessler posted on her personal blog her views of teacher compensation. Kessler said the brightest and most talented teachers would stay away from education as a career “since they don’t see how they will ever earn enough money to pay off their student loans, buy homes, and support families.”
Kessler's salary was $77,390 in 2015, not counting benefits.
And most recently, the Oakland Press reported that Rochester Public Schools teacher Karen Malsbury “needed” to get a second job to provide an additional source of income for her family. Malsbury, 37, was paid $87,349 this past year, plus benefits. The Oakland Press did not report Malsbury’s salary or list how much a teacher with her seniority earns, a figure that can be looked up in the union contract posted on the district’s website.
"Teachers are professionals and deserve fair compensation," said James Hohman, the assistant director of fiscal policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. "But they are often spoken of as victims of low pay, when in most cases the data shows otherwise."
Teacher pay varies across the state, although the compensation formula is virtually the same in almost every district: salary is based on seniority and number of academic credentials. This "single salary schedule" ("single" for each individual district) limits how much teachers can be paid, and guarantees that no matter how well any individual performs in the classroom, each will always receive exactly the same as colleagues with equal seniority and credentials.
For example, at the Stephenson school district in the Upper Peninsula's Menominee County, a starting teacher with a bachelor’s degree gets $31,167. After 10 years, this teacher would earn $44,952 with a bachelor’s or $48,848 if she had attained a master’s degree. The same starting teacher at the Ann Arbor school district would get $39,540 the first year, and make $65,662 after 10 years with a bachelor’s degree, or $78,333 with a master’s.
Starting teacher pay is one of the themes often sounded in the discussions of compensation levels. Although he has not participated in the low-pay characterizations described here, Michigan’s new state superintendent of education, Brian Whiston, echoed this theme in a recent public TV broadcast. Whiston referred to people who had been “kind of been turned off by going into education” because of “lower starting wages,” among other things.
But while starting educator salaries are not high, they rise steadily. In addition to the examples above, a first year teacher with a bachelor’s degree hired by the Walled Lake school district in 2006 would have made $37,724 that year. That teacher would have been in his ninth year in 2014 and been earning $62,312 with a bachelor’s degree, or $70,070 with a master’s degree. These figures were obtained from the salaries posted in the union contracts.
Generally, a teacher reaches the top of the union pay scale after 15 years. At that point, some teachers can earn $100,000 or more with perks, especially if they take on additional duties. These amounts do not include retirement and health benefits.
At the Troy school district in Oakland County, there were 96 teachers whose annual salary topped $100,000 in 2014. The highest-paid teacher made $133,647. Those amounts include payments for taking on additional duties at rates specified in the contract, such as coaching sports, filling in to replace an absent teacher or working at an after-school athletic event.
Most district pay scales do not run as high as Troy, where housing costs are higher than in many other parts of the state. At the Eau Claire school district near the Indiana border, the superintendent earned $93,339 in 2014 and the maximum teacher salary on the union pay scale was $61,086. This past year, the starting salary at Eau Claire was $32,528.
The individual teacher salaries reported in this story came from the state of Michigan in a Freedom of Information Act request.
PLUS they only work part of the year. They get amazing benefits. If I found a job that paid me full time to work only part of the year I’d do it. BUT, I have to work way more than full time to keep my shop up and running.
teachers are actually overpaid in many instances for their very simple degrees....
you don't see social workers or accountants or librarians or journalist coming out of school with the whole summer off, every weekend and holiday plus extended time off through out the year...
its the teachers dirty little secret how much they make....
and does everybody like me get so teary eyed when they read how some of these teachers have to pay up to $200 a year just to get bulletin board decorations....imagine any other "professional" whining about such a tiny little cost of doing business....and still, they get a credit on their income taxes for it...
the teaching profession and their sycophants have been running a scam for decades now...
If it’s overpaid, then why are there still vast numbers of openings for Stem teachers ? Being a former teacher, I can say the average person wouldn’t last a week in today’s typical public school classroom. These kids are not angels.
If it’s so easy, then try the job yourself.
Again, if it’s a cushy job then why are you (and many others) not running off to do it ?
You do believe in market forces, correct ?
They are evil.
I did not want to have children after working in public schools. They were that bad.
No thanks, teaching not for me.
Teachers' work is not between 8 and 3 p.m.; it is more like 2 jobs during the school year. When I leave school, my "second" job is just beginning. I have to go home, research and write another lesson plan (or two or three, depending on how many subjects I am teaching that year). I am very picky about the images I use for my PowerPoints, so it could take quite a while to find the perfect image or graph. I have to call parents. I have to go out and buy stuff (on my own dime) for classroom activities. I have papers to grade. I have mandatory workshops and meetings to attend as well, outside of regular school hours. Yeah, I just WISH I could go home and put my feet up. But teaching is not that kind of job. So I am working double hours during 10 months of the year. I am lucky to get to bed before 1 a.m., and then get up at 5:30 a.m. or 6 to do it all over again.
All this, for a steadily decreasing reward of the satisfaction of seeing kids learn. Nowadays, you are forced to pass kids that should never pass or see administrators change the grades of your students behind your back so that their passing stats look good. You have to stand there and put up with students threatening you, "F___ you, bitch I gonna get you fired!" or "F___ you bitch, I gonna find your a@@ after school and jump you", knowing the administration will not only give you no support, but will likely bring you up on charges based on student fabrications. And now the good governor Cuomo wants teacher evaluations based 50% on state exams. So if you are teaching ghetto kids who barely attend class let alone do any work or, G-d forbid, study, it won't matter how thoroughly you prepare your lessons or try to help the students; you can lead a horse to water, as they say. And if the students then tank on those tests, YOU are penalized. As if you can control how much they study for the tests.
There are significant drops in enrollment in teacher degree programs and more and more states are experiencing teacher shortages. Who would sign up for this?
Oh yeah, you knee-jerk "teachers are bad" folks: flame away all you like. I'm simply telling it like it is. I have thousands of colleagues who are IN the trenches, unlike the finger-pointing outsiders, who will back me up.
I’ve never had sympathy for teachers because I have too often experienced their whining. “Oh, I have to go back to work tomorrow! I ONLY had three months off! It went by SO fast! Poor me!” And they have the nerve to do this in front of people who only get two weeks off in an entire year! Not to mention the spring breaks, winter breaks, and numerous holidays teachers get, plus fully paid medical, etc.
Either go into teaching because you love it, or if you think teaching is such a rotten deal, look for a better paying job and quit griping.
You answered your own question. It’s not a matter of money; it’s that schools are liberal cesspools.
With apologies to all the great teachers out there, American schools as a whole suck. Teacher’s programs suck even worse. Dewey was a brilliant evil bastard and our school system is the culmination of his vile socialist dreams.
The teacher’s union and the majority of teachers are interested in tenure, high pay, and huge pensions. All of this paid for by regular people who make much less. The whole scheme is a racket which must be stopped.
Most teachers are not bad, but the entire system is evil. American public education had spent almost a century now systematically undermining the American way of life. It has set itself against every tenet of Western Civilization: it has worked to destroy discipline, family, religion, capitalism, and patriotism.
They claim ownership of the nation’s children and target any who dare oppose their hubris. They grant themselves titles, all the while opposing any independent objective measure of competence. I agree they have been underpaid—those running the institutions should be paid in full...
for their calculated treachery.
And true American teachers should be free to work toward professional certification, in competitive, private-sector solutions that reflect American ideals rather than socialist indoctrination factories. Those who risk the ire of the system should be greatly remunerated.
FReeper Clara Lou was/is a teacher in the school I worked in as a long-term substitute.
A middle school.
It was a racial war zone were everyone lived in fear of the blacks. Their savagery, lack of empathy, and predisposition to violence made it very unfulfilling.
One student, Malachi, had a mom who sued the district. He was a feral savage animal. Thus everyone was afraid to reprimand him, so be was free to roam the halls and punch white girls in the face with impunity. The female teachers refused to even acknowledge the issue unless pressed. When pressed they made a lame assed liberal excuse (example: I just didnt understand because I did not come from a poor black background).
It disgusted me that the women there (like most schools, the faculty was dominated by females) would defend the violent criminal and blame the victim, AS POLICY, so as to protect their careers.
It never entered their brains that children were being assaulted and injured, sometimes seriously, on their watch. They were a fundamental part of the problem.
This occurred in Bryan, TX.
Did that. Shop teacher. Quit.
Teachers have always cried poverty. It got old when I was in grade school. And RAT politicians also lie about how poorly paid teachers are.
I teach in the Ozarks, below the state average in pay in a state that is below the national average. Like people in all professions I'd like to be paid more but I'm not a big whiner about it. I knew what I was signing up for and I like the other benefits. Besides, just as my dad knows God called him to preach I know He called me to teach and coach. Why teach in those “Godless” public school? Like Jesus said, you send a doctor to sick not the healthy.
I know our school is different, we say the pledge every morning and our FCA chapter has great support for our administration. Our principal spoke openly of his Faith in front of hundreds of students at our Fields of Faith rally. If I lived in another place I might have homeschooled.
But I can always count on my fellow freepers to tell me how evil, greedy and sinful I am for following God's call to teach. Makes me understand why Jesus hated the Pharisee's so much.
In 1987, I worked as a teacher in a small rural Texas school for $14,000. Two years later, I took a summer contract with GTE (now Verizon) at $14/hr ($28k/yr) while I worked on my masters degree. That ended up becoming a 21-year career where my pay maxed out at about $100k (plus comparable benefits).
I’m back to teaching, this time in a rural community college at just under $40k. The minimum starting teacher pay in Texas is $28k, but many districts start around $45 or more.
The hours are great, the benefits are adequate, vacation time is great, the students are great. The pay is low compared to what my skills could command, but I choose to do this and I knew what I was signing up for when I took the position, so no complaints here.
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