I’m not a fan of public education. Many of you are here because you share my views on public education, which is awesome.
Unsurprisingly, President Joe Biden does not share those views.
In fact, it seems the president is ready to pander to teachers. How? By pitching a pay raise over on X, formerly Twitter.
Now, obviously, this isn’t a perfectly thought-out, developed policy proposal with all the nuts and bolts we can look at and evaluate.
But we do know that this is a popular talking point among Democrats, where at least some people like to pretend teachers have to work second jobs just to make ends meet. If that’s true, then clearly they need to be paid more, right? No one should work a full-time job that requires a college degree and still need to find a part-time gig.
Except, none of that is true.
According to the NEA, a teacher’s union that has a vested interest in advocating for increased teacher pay, the average teacher’s salary is $69,544 per year. While that’s not exactly CEO money, it’s not terrible, either. Especially when you consider that the average household income in the United States was $74,580 in 2022.
Just $5,034 a year before the household average for a single person isn’t anything to sneeze at.
Especially when you consider that teachers only work part of the year. 180 days is the norm in most states, which means that if teachers were paid for a full year of work, they’d earn over $92,000.
Again, do they need a pay raise?
I’m sure you’d be hard-pressed to find many educators who wouldn’t want one and can’t articulate the need for one, but that’s true of anyone in any line of work. God knows I probably deserve a pay raise myself.
But the true mark of whether they deserve a pay raise should be based on outcomes. Are they doing a job worthy of a pay raise? After all, most might get a cost of living adjustment, but teachers generally get that as well. The real pay raises generally mean you’ve done something to deserve it.
Or, at least, it should.
Anyway, I’m sure Biden can cite significant improvement in test scores, right?
Well, he can’t. Test scores have largely been stagnant since the 1970s when the Department of Education was first created. What modest gains had been made—and they were, in fact, very modest gains at best. Some would term them as nearly non-existent and probably be more accurate—were wiped out by the learning loss from the pandemic.
After all, on a scale going up to 500, here are the comparisons to 1971 and 2020
Reading: [1971: 208/2022: 215]
Math:[1971:219/2022: 234]
That’s not a lot of progress over more than 50 years. That wouldn't be a bad thing if we were maxing out the scale back in the day, but we weren’t. We were below the 50 percent mark, which means there was plenty of room for improvement.
So with teachers, what we have right now is a fairly high rate of pay, especially when you tack on their pension and other benefits available to them that go beyond what most folks out there get and especially considering the lackluster results of their work.
And this doesn’t touch on teachers blatantly using their role as an authority figure to try and indoctrinate children with their own personal politics, including identity politics and outright communism.
If they were really making chump change, you might understand those particular excesses. You might figure that such a job would be far more attractive to communists, for example, or that they figure they have to get something out of their job since money isn’t on the table, but clearly, that’s not the case.
Of course, I’m talking about averages, which means some people make a lot less than that and might feel they have more of a gripe. The thing to remember is that a lot of so-called educators are also making a whole lot more than that as well. They have even less gripe.
The thing is, though, these are our tax dollars we’re talking about here. This isn’t money being fabricated out of thin air, then handed to teachers. This is money taken from us and given to them, all so they can supposedly educate our children.
And they’re not.
So no, President Biden, let’s not give teachers a pay raise. Especially considering that what we really need to do is scrape our entire educational model rather than pushing the same crap with more taxpayer money.
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One of my sisters is a teacher (overseas for the past 15 years, but in the US as she began her career) and her summers were full of required re-certification courses and the like (which she had to pay for) that were a condition of keeping her job so it's not all fun and games for them in the summers. Not every summer, and not completely filling the summer time, but it was still there.
Since she started doing working at overseas schools that's actually been less of a requirement, and overseas pay often includes housing and a car as part of it, plus she's paid in dollars in (often) poorer countries so she's been able to sock away enough that she's almost ready to retire and she's not even 50 yet, so there's that too....