Published: Jul 3, 2005 LOS ANGELES (AP) -The typical starting salary for teachers should be $40,000, the head of the country's largest education union said Sunday, pledging a renewed fight for higher pay.
Posted on 07/03/2005 2:20:12 PM PDT by TheOtherOne
Nation's Largest Union Sets Goal of $40,000 Starting Salary for Teachers
Published: Jul 3, 2005 LOS ANGELES (AP) -The typical starting salary for teachers should be $40,000, the head of the country's largest education union said Sunday, pledging a renewed fight for higher pay.
But the National Education Association's challenge is enormous. Not a single state pays its new instructors an average of $40,000, with the U.S. average hovering close to $30,000 for beginning teachers, according to the American Federation of Teachers, another teachers union.
NEA president Reg Weaver, speaking to reporters at the union's annual meeting, said his officers will work with their state and local chapters to lobby state leaders and school boards.
Weaver, poised to begin his second three-year term as the union's president, said higher pay for veteran teachers and classroom aides will also be a political priority for the NEA. No cost for the ideas was given, but they would likely require hundreds of millions of dollars or more.
"The issue is where the money is going to come from," Weaver said. "And to respond to that, my answer is I don't care. I don't care where the money comes from. Because when this country thinks and decides that something is important, they find the money."
Teacher pay has long been a point of contention within education. Salaries are often seen as an important reason why schools struggle to hire and keep teachers, which is particularly true for young instructors, men and minorities, Weaver said. But an increasing number of states and districts want to make classroom performance or student scores a bigger factor in teacher pay.
Overall, teachers were paid an average of $46,752 last year, a slight raise that did not keep pace with inflation, the NEA says. Pay is usually based on teacher seniority and education.
The pay proposal is part of a broader NEA priority list to close the achievement gap between white and minority children and reach out to minority communities. The NEA push comes as it is at odds with the Bush administration. The union has sued the federal government over Bush's No Child Left Behind law, arguing that it puts unfair financial burdens on states and districts.
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On The Net:
National Education Association: http://www.nea.org
AP-ES-07-03-05 1627EDT
Why not $100,000? Why not $1,000,000?
My old nemesis, my jr. high "gifted class" English teacher, wrote a letter to the paper complaining about lowered speed limits. The letter was FULL of grammatical errors. I really wanted to circle all of them with a red pen and mail them to her.
Doubling their pay is actually a cut -- when adjusted for the high cost of living.
(This is the thinking quality of those actually running our schools -- and teachers unions, of which the newspapers reporters are in awe.)
All government pay, including the teachers and other unions should have the limit of their pay and benefits NOT EXCEED the average pay and benefits of the same work found in the private sector.
In other words, major reductions in salaries all around.
It's just money.
And then we'll have million dollar teachers (education administrators) in every kindergarten classroom.
Our local school board paid five million dollars for laptop computers for grades K to 12, for THE TEACHERS to take home. I can understand the upper grades being taught to use computers for various reasons which would have homework to be corrected, but the rest?
Pretty good for 180 days of work. And of course, the 40 grand doesn't include the cost for their bennies.
Wonder how many are using them to post on DU?
Starting salaries are low because senior teachers involved in bargaining want it that way. They distribute most of the money allocated to salaries into the high end of the pay scale, where they are.
$ 50,000 for teachers that can read and write at a first grade level! LOL
One of the problems is that senior administration does not support teachers in the classroom. My dad teaches high school math as a second career. He's also former military, and fights with the Asst. Principals on almost a daily basis. They can't wait for him to retire. But most of his students (remedial cases, most of them) love him. And when the Statewide test results come out, his classes score the highest. Yet admin wants him to leave.
The government (all levels) should not be running the schools. All schools, K-12, colleges, universities...should be in the private sector, with education companies running them. This would automatically provide better choices, competition, higher quality, and reduced expense.
NEA execs collect 8 times teacher pay
Study: Bigwigs haven't been in classroom for decades, out of touch with membership
Posted: August 20, 2002
1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Jon Dougherty
© 2002 WorldNetDaily.com
A public-policy think tank says the leadership of the National Education Association, the country's top teachers' union, is so far removed from ordinary classroom environments they can no longer relate to the tasks facing working-class teachers.
"The new leaders of the National Education Association tout themselves as classroom teachers on leave to represent their colleagues," said Carl Gibson, a spokesman for the Olympia, Washington-based Evergreen Freedom Foundation.
But, Gibson continued, "we did a little digging around to see what kind of classroom experience they have. Turns out none of them have worked in a classroom during the last decade. For some, it's been far longer."
Gibson said EFF looked at Bob Chase, the 2.7-million member NEA's outgoing president; Reg Weaver, its incoming president; Dennis Van Roekel, the union's new vice president; and Lily Eskelsen, NEA's new secretary-general. The union's top officials are not the seasoned teaching pros they often claim to be. Plus, the group said, the NEA elite do much better financially than teachers still in the classroom – even veteran teachers. According to a July 3 press release, the NEA said Weaver is "a 35-year teaching veteran and middle-school science teacher from suburban Chicago." In published statements, Weaver said he was an "advocate" for public-education reform.
But EFF countered that Weaver has instead been a union official for three decades while a teacher "for less than 10 years."
The think tank said Weaver first began teaching in Harvey School District 152, which is just south of Chicago, in 1961, but district personnel say Weaver has been on leave for a decade. He served as president of the Harvey Education Association in Illinois from 1967-71, then became vice president of the Illinois Education Association from 1977-81.
He left that position to become president of IEA until 1987. Two years later, Weaver became a member of the NEA's executive committee and served in that post until 1995. The following year he was selected as VP of the NEA; in 2002 he ascended to NEA's presidency.
Former NEA head Bob Chase ran the union from 1996-2002. Before then he spent seven years – from 1989 until 1996 – as its vice president. Prior to his national posts, Chase served as president and vice president of the Connecticut Education Association from 1979-1989, having served the CEA in a junior capacity for an undetermined amount of time before 1979.
Dennis Van Roekel, the NEA's vice president, is a "supposed 25-year teaching veteran," EFF said, but research shows he's had "approximately 17 years in the union and approximately five to seven years as an actual teacher."
Van Roekel's resume includes secretary-treasurer of the NEA from 1997 until his election as its VP, preceded by two terms on the NEA's executive committee, a term as president of the Arizona Education Association, two terms on the Paradise Valley Education Association and a stint as treasurer of the PVEA, all from 1977-1996.
Can NEA executive committee members and leaders remain full-time educators? No, according to union officials, because there is too much time involved in running the organization.
In terms of compensation, however, that isn't a problem for the union's top officials. According to the Education Intelligence Agency, a for-profit public-education research firm, Weaver's salary this year will top $231,000, but go up next year to $237,967.
Yet, the NEA's own data says the median salary for in-the-trenches teachers is $38,316 a year. New Jersey teachers have the highest average salaries at $52,381 a year; South Dakota teachers make the least at $30,265 annually.
And, in an April 8 press release, NEA officials were complaining – hypocritically, some claim – that nationally, teachers' salaries remain too low.
"As more money was invested in public education, teacher salaries remained stagnant – all while the U.S. was in a time of economic expansion," Chase said in a July statement. "If we, as a nation, are serious about student achievement, we need to make sure we can attract and retain high-quality teachers."
Besides generating well-above-average salaries, NEA executives will also reap a combined $570,817 in cash allowances, benefits and travel expenses over and above their paychecks this year. Next year, EFF said, that figure climbs to $582,075.
"Each of the three executive officers gets an additional 20 percent of salary as a cash 'living allowance,' plus another 20 percent of salary for benefits, since they are not on the employees' benefits plan," said Mike Antonucci, head of the Education Intelligence Agency. "So that additional 40 percent for each of them comes out of that half-million.
"Whatever is left over is for travel expenses, and that goes into a common pot for the three of them," he added. "Naturally, the president will tend to travel more than the other two."
Michael Pons, a spokesman for NEA, dismissed the EFF report.
"I don't know where [it's] going or what the general public interest is in this," he told WND.
But, he said the salaries of the NEA's top officials was not commensurate with the kind of salaries earned by the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies who have far fewer employees. Also, he questioned the manner in which Antonucci calculated NEA compensation.
"[Antonucci] converts to 'salary' [NEA executives'] salary, their benefits and their travel," he said. "Is that how you talk about your job? Most people don't."
"Even if [their salaries] were in the amounts he talks about, it's relatively low for people who hold that kind of position in an organization of this size," Pons said. "It's like a tenth of what a CEO would make in a comparably sized organization."
He also said it was "interesting" that "nobody knows what [Antonucci] and others make, yet they're all for full disclosure."
In terms of reform, Pons said NEA was focused mostly on finding "qualified teachers" for all schools, including inner-city urban schools, where that need is the greatest.
The EFF report comes amid growing turmoil over public education. While most kids in the U.S. attend public schools, parents and educators are becoming increasingly skeptical of them. Years of falling test scores, increased violence and drug problems, and higher dropout rates in the public schools have driven some parents to send their children to private or parochial schools, or to sacrifice even more by teaching them at home.
The Supreme Court recently gave advocates of alternatives to government schools a critical legal victory. In July, the panel ruled that Ohio's school voucher program, which allocates some public funds for private-school education, is constitutional.
However, though Weaver and other NEA officials say they support education "reforms," school vouchers are not one of them.
"Vouchers are a divisive and expensive diversion from continuing progress" in public-school education, said an NEA statement following the Supreme Court decision. "Make no mistake – vouchers are not reform. If policymakers want to act on the issues that parents care most about – the kitchen table discussions about education opportunity for their children – they will address teacher quality, class size, making sure all schools have high expectations for every child and providing the resources to help students succeed."
Also, the union historically has opposed other so-called "school choice" initiatives that include any alternatives to government-run public schools.
According to the National Center for Policy Analysis, tuition tax credits, education savings accounts, and vouchers – coupled with dramatic changes in curricula – provide the best "choices" for parents seeking to improve their children's education opportunities.
After elementary school,grammar is simply not taught.No more diagramming sentences or learning verb tenses.Reading and interpreting novels are pretty much the sole focus of all the English classes I have ever subbed for in California.
I don't blame it all on the teachers,however.The curriculum has already been laid out for them by people far from actual classroom settings.
Teaching in any public school these days is very difficult.You have to CONSTANTLY watch your back.Not even the liberal pro-union types like to be called"m
Talk about a joke... I make less than that($38,000) a year at my job and I have a business degree. If I'm making less than the NEA's "typical" teacher and I'm in it basically for the money (there's no way in hell people want to do spreadsheets every day for the pure joy of it), then the typical teacher, who should be in their profession because they love it, should be willing to start for much less than that.
These guys are not too bright. With higher wages, all they become is a bigger target for voucher supporters. Maybe we can get rid of govt. schools a little quicker.
drop pensions and health insurance, which most teachers don't pay one cent of, unlike the rest of the working world. Let the teachers all be part of a giant HSA where they have pay their own premiums.
That would save tons of money 'for the children'. After all, that is what the taxpayers are always supposed to sacrifice for, right?
They also answer to shareholders for the success or failure of their companies. The NEA is under no obligation to actually produce results in the classrooms, just more pay for their membership. More examples of what's wrong with public education.
The two declared majors of incoming freshman with the LOWEST SAT averages: Education & Law. With education I believe it is about 930-970.
Give some thought to the meaning of those numbers, while noting that the SAT scores have been "re-centered" twice in the last 20 years.
Also keep in mind that my [homeschooled] daughter took the SATs at 12 and scored 1135. Much higher at 15, BTW.
There is not any kind of positive correlation between pay and quality of teachers.
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