Appreciating Teachers with More than Love

Most American students are in school for approximately 6.5 hours a day, 180 days a year for 13 years, not including after care. That is more than 15,000 hours that our children are in the care of professional educators between Kindergarten and 12th grade.

Teaching is an intensely interactive profession and just like engineers, attorneys, and doctors, they are educated (more than half hold master’s degrees), trained, certified and recertified. They have completed extensive coursework in learning theory and educational practice. So it seems obvious that school districts recruit, retain, and compensate high-quality teachers to be responsible for educating the next generation. But unfortunately, it’s not that easy.

A teacher’s day doesn’t end when the bell rings. Teachers spend an average of 50 hours per week on instruction, including an average of 12 hours each week on non-compensated school-related activities such as assessing student work or bus and yard duty. In a survey by Scholastic, teachers on average spend $530 of their own money on school supplies — and teachers in high-poverty schools spend nearly 40 percent more than that. Teachers also don’t necessarily have the summer off. They are often working a second job to make ends meet, taking professional learning classes, or planning for the next school year.

Plus, over the past several decades, students in the United States have grown more diverse. The makeup of the US K-12 public school population has changed dramatically over the last 50 years. Students are more diverse across many categories, including linguistics, culture, geography and socioeconomics. Further, the latest research from the learning sciences has advanced our understanding of learner variability and the importance of grounding educational practice in the individual — rather than the fictional “average” student. This places even more demand on our educators.

Many times, intrinsic rewards of an education career are used as a rationale for low salaries. Teachers teach because they love kids, right? But low teacher pay comes at a very high cost. According to a study from the Center for American Progress, “close to half of new teachers leave the profession during the first five years. New teachers are often unable to pay off their loans or afford houses in the communities where they teach.”

Additionally, the study reports that slow teacher salary growth contributes to high turnover. Research shows that 13 percent of teachers each year change schools or leave the profession due to low pay. In 2015, public school teachers’ weekly wages were 17 percent lower than those of comparable workers—compared with just 1.8 percent lower in 1994. Teachers’ compensation (wages plus benefits) was 11.1 percent lower than that of comparable workers in 2015.

This week shines a light on our teachers. And I wholeheartedly support this important recognition each and every year. But, for positive change to occur in our schools, all education stakeholders must band together. Recent protests in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona are not surprising. These protests were not just about teacher salaries. They were about the need to vastly improve support and funding for public education.

We need more money for schools, and higher salaries for educators nationwide. And appreciating teachers by compensating them as professionals so they can educate the next generation is critical. Our national competitiveness, security, prosperity and the future of our democracy depends on it.