To Teach or Not to Teach?

If I was a young person today, I would be confused about the mixed messages on becoming a public school teacher.

A few weeks ago, EducationWeek online released teacher pay data for each of the U.S. states. The article stated,

“Average teacher pay ticked up slightly in the last year, but it has failed to keep up with inflation over the past decade, according to a report by the nation’s largest teacher union.”

“The National Education Association estimates that the national average teacher salary for the 2022-23 school year is $68,469 – a 2.6 percent increase from the previous year. But when adjusted for inflation, teachers are, on average, making $3,644 less than they did 10 years ago, the union estimated in its annual report that ranks and analyzes teacher salaries and education spending by state.”

“’Chronic low pay,’ the union said, ‘is plaguing the profession.”

“’Educators who dedicated their lives to students shouldn’t be struggling to support their own families,’ said NEA Becky Pringle in a statement. ‘A career in education must not be a lifetime sentence of financial worry. Who will choose to teach under those circumstances.”

“There has been a bipartisan effort among state lawmakers and governors to raise teacher pay this year, and Democrats in Congress have proposed raising all public school teachers’ base pay to $60,000. But the NEA report argues that there’s a long way to go: The national average starting teacher salary was $42,845 in the 2021-22 school year.”

“And sometimes even districts’ maximum pay falls far short of that mark: Nearly 17 percent of school districts pay a top salary below $60,000, according to the NEA’s analysis of salary data from 12,000 school districts.”

“Massachusetts, New York, and California top the list with the highest salaries this school year, while Mississippi, South Dakota, and Florida are at the bottom.”

Around the same time EducationWeek online ran the above salary story, they published an article titled “’Never Get Into Teaching’: The Message We Need to Stop Sending Students.” It was written by Sharif El-Mekki, a former principal and teacher, and the founder of the Center for Black Educator Development.

El-Mekki writes,

“Hiring season is here.”

“School systems around the country are looking to staff up and address retirements, job changers, and leavers of all kinds. This is the time of the year that principals vacillate between dreamy ambition about how to strengthen their staff for next year and outright panic that they won’t have enough people in classrooms to open for the first day of school.”

“It’s an annual ritual.”

“As that yearly tradition gets underway, I’d like to take the opportunity to challenge all of us who have responsibility over hiring and staffing decisions to undertake that work in a way that meaningfully invests in the future. Principals and district leaders should absolutely be focused on getting the best teachers and school staff that they can today, but they should also think about the actions they are taking that shape what talent may walk in the door five and 10 years from now.”

“A principal or school leader can start by looking at the talent sitting in their high school homerooms right now.”

“Especially for black and brown students, the power of positive experiences with culturally competent teachers is well established. Black and brown students do better when they have more black and brown teachers and when they have teachers that make them feel understood and safe. That kind of connection also shapes how those students think about the teaching profession.”

“A recent study of teachers of color by Donors Choose found that 50 percent of respondents were inspired to become teachers by their experience with another teacher when they were a student. How we teach students is also how we present the profession to our high school students – classroom instruction is truly the primary recruitment ground for future teachers.”

“Unfortunately, we rarely treat it as such. As education professor Christopher Emdin shared with our Black Male Educators Convening participants, recruiting young black men into the profession often is like recruiting someone to return to the scene of a crime, a crime committed against them.”

“How many times have we overheard a colleague casually telling their pupils to ‘never get into teaching’ or something similarly dismissive of the profession. Those words matter, those sentiments give shape to perceptions that influence future choices. We should approach these things with some degree of intentionality – especially as black and brown educators interacting with black and brown students.”

“That’s because the high school years for our black and brown students are especially important for shaping their sense of agency and associations with the teaching profession. Many black and brown students attend majority nonwhite high schools, but of those who go onto college, many will often do so at a predominantly white institution. Diversity in teacher-prep programs outside of historically black colleges and universities is abysmal, according to research by TNTP. As a result, we need to give black and brown students all the momentum we can coming out of high school.”

And that momentum is based on making a little less than $43,000 a year as a starting teacher?

We must think we are molding fools inside our public schools instead of citizens.

No, I think teaching, as part of the traditional public school system, needs to be put to rest. We won’t ever pay teachers what they deserve – ever. And, because of that, young, smart, energetic talent, whether it be white, black, or brown, isn’t going to enter this employment endeavor we want to brand “a profession.”

We paid our learning coaches over $100,000 a year during the personalized learning pilot school we launched in the Houston Museum District.

If we could figure out how to reward 2 learning coaches, responsible for 50 young learners, with that type of salary, then we should be able to figure out how to scale that type of compensation to more learning coaches, who in turn would be responsible for more young learners. Til tomorrow. SVB