Posted on 09/15/2018 3:48:35 PM PDT by Ennis85
Time magazine has a big new story out that purports to show just how little public-school teachers make."'I Work 3 Jobs And Donate Blood Plasma to Pay the Bills.' This Is What It's Like to Be a Teacher in America" telegraphs its message in its headline.
The opening anecdote tells the story of a struggling veteran teacher reduced to selling blood plasma to make ends meet.
Hope Brown can make $60 donating plasma from her blood cells twice in one week, and a little more if she sells some of her clothes at a consignment store. It's usually just enough to cover an electric bill or a car payment. This financial juggling is now a part of her everyday life—something she never expected almost two decades ago when she earned a master's degree in secondary education and became a high school history teacher. Brown often works from 5 a.m. to 4 p.m. at her school in Versailles, Ky., then goes to a second job manning the metal detectors and wrangling rowdy guests at Lexington's Rupp Arena. With her husband, she also runs a historical tour company for extra money.
"I truly love teaching," says the 52-year-old. "But we are not paid for the work that we do."
The polite term for this sort of journalism is b.s.
It may well be true that Brown's personal situation is as dire as Time makes out (I've reached out to her but haven't heard back), but things are surely more complicated than they are presented. After reading the article, I spoke with Scott Hawkins, the superintendent of the Woodford County public school district, where Brown works. He underscored that he could not talk about her particular situation but noted that a high-school teacher with a master's degree and 20 years experience would make $56,616 in salary. In a graphic and cover image for the story, Time says Brown has "16 years experience."
According to the salary schedule at the Woodford County schools website, that means Brown would make $55,645 in base pay (Hawkins explained that a teacher with a master's would be considered Rank II in the "certified salary schedule"). That doesn't include compensation in the form of health insurance and retirement contributions. Hawkins said he could not guesstimate how much the benefits were worth as percentage of salary, but Lisa Snell, director of education research at Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website, tells me that "on average in the United States you could add 23.2 percent to any average salary for all benefits for total compensation."
Time's story is built around the latest entry in a series of reports from the progressive Economic Policy Institute on what Sylvia Allegretto and Lawrence Mishel call "the teacher pay penalty" or "the percent by which public school teachers are paid less than comparable workers." They write,
Providing teachers with a decent middle-class living commensurate with other professionals with similar education is not simply a matter of fairness. Effective teachers are the most important school-based determinant of student educational performance....relative teacher pay—teacher pay compared with the pay of other career opportunities for potential and current teachers—has been eroding for over a half a century.
You can read the study here. Allegretto and Mishel argue that teacher demonstrations and shortages around the country are driven by the fact that educators in K-12 public schools are making less money compared to other college graduates and "professionals" over the past several decades. "The teacher wage penalty was 1.8 percent in 1994, grew to 4.3 percent in 1996, and reached a record 18.7 percent in 2017," they write. According to their analysis, the "penalty" shrinks to 11.1 percent when you add in total compensation.
Their agenda is straightforward: They think teachers should be paid more, both in absolute terms and relative to other workers with college degrees or professional status. They have amassed a number of statistics from credible sources which show that inflation-adjusted teacher wages have in fact been flat for about the past 20 years.
I don't agree with Allegretto and Mishel that average teacher pay should be increased and I don't buy into their framework of a teacher "pay penalty." But that's besides the point that the Time story constitutes something akin to journalistic malpractice by suggesting that teachers such as Brown, who are pulling down salaries in the mid-50s, are being forced to sell bodily fluids to make ends meet. Indeed, according to Time's sister publication, Money, the median household income in Kentucky is $45,215, meaning that Brown is making about $10,000 more than half of all other households in the Bluegrass State.
And in fact, teachers are doing well compared to households on the national level, too. The median household income in the United States is $61,372. According to the largest teachers union, the National Education Association (NEA),
The U.S. average public school teacher salary for 2016–17 was $59,660. State average teacher salaries ranged from those in New York ($81,902), California ($79,128), and Massachusetts ($78,100) at the high end, to Mississippi ($42,925), Oklahoma ($45,292) and West Virginia ($45,555) at the low end.
There are all sorts of issues and reforms of the public K-12 system that are worth talking about (go here for a start). That conversation would best be served by solid reporting of basic facts.
Oh, puleez. She makes plenty and gets the entire summer off. We’re taking in half that and sure things are tight but not so much we have to sell blood.
The hospital here hasn’t paid for blood in about 25 years. Do any these days or is she lying?
She is either the worst money manager in history, or the drug habit is not reported...
Not buyin’ this BS.
LOL, and you should see what they get in retirement. No need to sell any blood.
Ignorant journalists. She sells plasma, if the story isn’t just made up.
Here in the Piedmont of NC 40% of middle schoolers cannot pass the math or english standardized testing. There are more and more F-rated schools and, get this, the state is considering doing away with the math portion of the teacher certification test because it’s “so hard”. These people are overpaid babysitters imo.
And what about the husband? Is he a deadbeat?
“””””””The U.S. average public school teacher salary for 2016–17 was $59,660.””””””””””””””””””””
Pretty good for a part time job. They work eight months a year.
I'm sick of sob stories about government employees who weep over how little they're paid. Let the teachers quit and find higher paying jobs if it's so horrible. Otherwise they should STFU and be glad they aren't paid based on what percentage of the children they "teach" actually learn anything.
They only work around 180 days a year...this is not 1970...
The problem is they cannot fire the bad teachers..
My wife was a first second teacher...all her kids could read and do math..she made it fun..
Good school system...Air Academy school district..Colorado Springs..
There were teachers there that were not giving a 100%..
Why work hard when they cannot fire you..
This wrangling has been going on for decades.
Teachers are contract employees. They are contracted for X number of days per ‘year’. There may be allowances for so many bad-weather days, etc., for sick leave and for teacher’s days [when teachers are at school doing administrative tasks, but students are not in school].
Some teachers may earn extra pay for summer school, if available. Otherwise, the teacher has to find supplemental summer employment or be without a paycheck.
Many districts will pay the teacher spread over 12 months or 9 months, but the salary is still for X number of contract days.
Teaching is also a lifestyle job in the sense that teachers have tons of days off in the form of winter break, Christmas break, spring break and several months off in the Summer.
The job secure, surplus of free time teaching lifestyle does not comport with the Type A , 80 hour a week and never off the clock lifestyle and mindset of a stressed out corporate exec making twice what they make so teachers are generally unappreciative of their free time and relatively low stress career path
It is also true that some, but not all, teachers spend substantial amounts of their personal money on supplies for their kids
Look at what the taxes she pays. Here take home is probably comparable to someone making 20 grand more
I’m a 3rd year teacher in a large county in central VA and I make far less than this lady does. It’s true I put in far more hours than I am contracted for but that’s the job and I understood that going in. I gladly gave up a six figure income to teach and it’s the best job I ever had. When you consider that teachers get a 10 week paid vacation each summer I have zero sympathy for my fellow teachers who whine about the pay. Don’t like the pay or the hours then find another job.
And mechanics buy their own tools. I have spent years hearing about the great sacrifices of teachers who buy pencils and paper for their classes. In reality the amounts of money are small, and as a percentage of the budget of school districts there is no reason for the school not to provide whatever the kids need.
Why is it that every parent is made to go out and buy supplies at retail where the school could buy the same pencils and paper for 50% less wholesale?
Many school districts spend more than $15,000 per student per year. 1% of that is $150.00. At wholesale prices $150.00 buys a lot of pencils, paper, crayons, notebooks, etc.
I could make nothing from donating my clothes. I am financially very comfortable, but I still wear clothes until they are worn out - not until I get tired of them or until I see a "must have" deal while clothes shopping. Car payments? I've been driving my current car for well over a decade, and I never replaced a car less than 15 years old unless it was totaled or needed repairs costing triple the car's book value. I also got married decades ago, stayed married, and we lived well within our means our whole lives. Perhaps she should live on a budget rather than wasting money and whining that someone needs to give her more.
Again, it isn’t as though they were drafted and forced to teach 60 hour weeks, 52 weeks every year!
Worst of all, most of the generous tax dollars given to local schools (at least in our area) go into “administration salaries, staff, special ed, etc.
When I was in school as well as my kids, our schools had one principal, one vice principal, a full time nurse, office staff and cafeteria “ladies!”
Our math or history teacher taught driver’s ed and our physical education served as coach for our sports teams!
We also had language teachers, science teachers, and teachers in Home Econ., shop and a counselor.
In some states, first year teacher salary is only $26,000 per year. And that’s NOT BS!
It’s a pretty skimpy wage after spending 5 years in school to become a teacher.
Course, there ARE some pretty crappy teachers out there, and even that measly salary is too much, but that wasn’t my point.
I think they need a few more curriculum days and maybe a few more 3 day weekends.
They work 185 days a year.
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