Teachers are given the power to educate children from the ages of 3 to 18, to help kids grow socially, and to shape students’ perceptions of the world. Despite this level of responsibility, teachers aren’t treated with the same prestige as doctors, lawyers, or professional athletes.
At the same time, teachers are being asked to do more. They play critical roles in the ongoing implementation of Common Core standards and the effort to better serve a growing population of English language learners, for example. And in many states, they’re doing all of this with a stagnant, if not shrinking, education budget.
“The hypocrisy is that you are trusting me with all of these things during my day job, but you are not trusting me to have the voice to shape my day job,” Mary Cathryn Ricker, the executive vice president of the American Federation of Teachers, said at event last week aimed at figuring out how to elevate the teaching profession.
The recent TeachStrong event, organized by the left-leaning think tank the Center for American Progress, featured a coalition of 40 diverse education groups discussing some concrete strategies for improving the situation for teachers. (Disclosure: ThinkProgress is an editorially independent news site associated with the Center for American Progress.)
In the past few years, efforts to hold teachers accountable for poor academic performance — such as tying a large portion of teacher evaluations to test scores — became a popular talking point for governors and members of Congress of every political stripe. But now, many of those politicians are walking back their statements on teacher accountability, and using more supportive language when addressing inequities in education.
It’s a welcome shift for many teachers, who say that if they’re going to have higher accountability, they also want to have additional workplace supports — like higher salaries that allow them to live where they work, more time to collaborate with other teachers, and better teacher preparation and mentoring programs. There is also a national need to make the teaching profession more appealing, because Baby Boomers are retiring soon and fewer people are entering the profession. With higher teacher turnover in general, there is a greater influx of less experienced teachers, which may create instability for schools, especially high-poverty, segregated schools.
Teachers aren’t getting paid enough
One of most glaring challenges to attracting people to the teaching profession is the low pay that teachers receive. Teacher salaries are 40 percent lower (at $36,141) than other professions that require college degrees, according to the 2011 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development paper, “Building a High Quality Teaching Profession.”
The popular rebuttal to advocates for higher teacher pay is that teachers don’t go into teaching to get rich, but as Ricker pointed out, teachers do expect a salary that allows them to afford to live nearby the school district in which they work.
When discussing teacher salaries, it’s important to look at cost of living, since a teacher earning $36,141 in a rural town in upstate New York can afford much more than a teacher living in the greater New York City area who is making the same salary.
An April 2015 Oklahoma State University and IZA research network paper adjusted teacher salaries for cost of living and found that Rhode Island ranked No. 1, followed by Michigan, Ohio, New Jersey, and California. The worst salaries when you adjust for cost-of-living were in Arizona, Montana, Oklahoma, and South Dakota. Teacher pay has also either declined or changed very little in the past 10 years, The Teacher Project reported.
Teachers need more opportunities for mentorship and collaboration
But improving teachers’ working environments includes much more than offering better pay. Some of the principles that the 40 education groups decided on include high-quality professional training once teachers are in the classroom, such as mentoring programs and teacher collaboration.
Bobby Miles, who teaches at Ranson Middle School in Charlotte, North Carolina, initially considered becoming a pediatrician instead of a teacher because — unlike the medical profession — teaching offers little prestige. Despite those reservations, he decided to become a teacher anyway, and describes the field as his “first love.” But he didn’t feel very prepared for the job.
“I was thrown into the classroom without a mentor or coach,” Miles said of his first experience teaching.
“People know all great teachers need coaches.”
Miles eventually became a multi-classroom leader, which allows him to lead a team of teachers. Now that he mentors a team of teachers, helping them develop their lesson plans and observing their classrooms, Miles said he sees the value of giving every teacher a teaching coach, which unlike teacher evaluations, provides more of a collaborative partnership for teachers.
“People know all great teachers need coaches. In this model, they know I’m not there to evaluate them but to help them,” Miles said.
Time for teacher collaboration is also important for teacher morale, according to a 2015 Walden University study. The study also concluded that better teacher morale would in turn create more of a sense of community, as well as an environment that would be more conducive to learning “as teachers are better able to dedicate themselves to their profession, colleagues, and students.”
Teachers need more opportunities for professional advancement
The coalition also advocated for more opportunities to give teachers regular salary bumps that don’t require them to either wait a few decades or become a school administrator.
“They feel like the only opportunity they have to make more money is to become an assistant principal, and that’s why we’re putting more money into this,” Delaware Gov. Jack Markell (D) said during the TeachStrong event. Markell has pushed for reforms to teacher compensation models that would recognize different teacher roles, which would reward teachers who take on more responsibilities, instead of deciding pay raises completely by experience and credentials.
Ricker acknowledged the importance of providing teachers with more options to raise their salaries, but emphasized the need for governors and state legislatures to work with teachers on new compensation models before introducing them.
“I think it is controversial when it is done to us,” Ricker said.