On top of everything else they're paying teachers less.
Looking at the comparables.
I’m retired ten years from teaching.
In that ten years, the decline in earnings of teachers is the largest among occupations with similar education.
So, in addition to teachers having to deal with all the complexities of teaching in a time of plague, they get to earn less money too.
That is one hell of a deal.
Don’t forget though. This is the time of The Great Resignation.
As Johnny Paycheck sang, Take This Job and Shove it.
It doesn’t take much to understand the cause of the current teacher shortage.
No job with similar training and college degrees compensates worse than teaching.
It has been true for as long as I remember. It is just that in the past ten years it has gotten worse.
Illinois is a blue state with collective bargaining rights. Even so, go south of Interstate 80 and salaries really suck. It was so embarrassing that last year the state legislature raised the minimum starting teacher pay from $10,000 to $40,000.
But even then, starting teachers will have to wait four years until the full raise kicks in.
I still remember sitting across the bargaining table from board members who believed their main job was keeping raises as low as possible in order to keep a 40 percent surplus in the district’s budget.
A “rainy day fund,” they called it.
“What you have to understand,” board member Joe Baldi once told us, “you’re just another cost to be contained.”
We would start bargaining by agreeing on a list of what they called comparables.
The list of comparables were supposed to include school districts that closely looked like ours in terms of size, demographics and salary schedules.
Their goal was to keep us low on the list. Our goal was to get to the top.
What wasn’t on the list were jobs that required the same skills and college as teaching.
We were always on the bottom of that list.
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