Teachers' salaries: disrespectful pay

The last time the faculty members at Lenoir-Rhyne College were granted a significant pay hike was after I petitioned the administration for permission to supplement my income by bagging groceries at Winn Dixie, a local grocery store. I don't know if there is any relation between my petition to bag groceries and our pay hike, but I do think the coincidence -- if that's what it was -- is interesting. For some ten years before that the faculty had endured a virtual salary freeze precipitated by the fiscal mismanagement of the administration in the 1980s. This put the faculty about a decade behind where it should have been by the 1990s. In fact, when the wife of one of my colleagues retired from teaching at a local elementary school just a few years ago, she was earning more than her husband who was a full professor with a Ph.D. nearing the end of his career.

What do public school teachers make? Dave Eggers in the May/June issue of Mother Jones writes:

"The latest statistics put the average teacher's salary at about $46,000; some teachers earn a little more, some a little less (the average teacher's salary -- not the starting salary -- is $38,000 in Kansas, $36,000 in New Mexico, and $32,000 in South Dakota). Overall, that's about the same that we pay pile-driver operators ($45,980) and about $8,000 less than the average elevator repairman pulls down. Meanwhile, a San Francisco dockworker makes about $115,000, while the clerk who logs shipping records into the longshoreman's computer makes $136,000."

But the really interesting thing is that my colleague, a professor near the end of his teaching career at Lenoir-Rhyne College, was making less than his wife was making as a second grade public school teacher. In Eggers' Mother Jones article, entitled "Reading, Writing, and Landscaping," he seeks to address the scandal of such disproportionate inequities:

"The first step to creating an education system full of the best teachers we can find is to pay them in line with their importance to their communities. We pay orthodontists an average of $350,000, and no one would say that their impact on the lives of kids is greater than a teacher's. But it seems difficult for everyone, from parents to politicians, to shake free of a tradition in which teaching was seen as something of a volunteer project for women whose husbands brought home the real money. Today's teachers need to, but very often can't, support a family on their salaries. They find it difficult or impossible to buy homes, to save money, to live comfortably, and, in wealthier areas, to live in or near the towns where they teach."

Eggers recalls how his sixth-grade math teacher in the 1970s was also a licensed travel agent, and seeing a number of his high school teachers, all with master's degrees or Ph.D.'s, painting houses and cutting lawns during the summer. "This kind of thing still happens all over the country," says Eggers, "and it's a disgrace":

"When teachers are forced to tend the yards of students' homes, to clean houses, or to sell stereos on nights and weekends, the quality of education is diminished, the profession is disrespected, and we parody the notion that we hold our schools and teachers in the highest regard. Teachers with two and three jobs are tired, their families are frustrated, and the students they teach, who want to -- and should -- consider their instructors exalted figures, learn instead to think of teaching as a part-time gig, the day job for the guy who sells Game Boys at Circuit City."