Would you believe…?
I won’t call you a sweet summer child, but I will say that you don’t work in North Carolina. Even here, we have some protections–but they don’t always apply.
Early in my career, I had one of my worst-ever bosses, coupled with one of the best-ever teachers as a co-worker. But the great teacher also stood up to some of the principal’s more boneheaded decisions. When the principal was fired upward (got so many staff complaining to central office that central office promoted her to a cushy desk job), one of her last decisions as a principal was to non-renew the great teacher’s contract.
See, the great teacher had moved here from another state, and was in the process of getting her teaching license transferred to an NC teaching license. It turned out that none of the worker protections applied in this case, and the principal could fire her at the end of the year just by declining a contract renewal–no evidence of poor performance was necessary. The principal found her loophole, and her revenge.
(The great teacher immediately got hired at a neighboring district, and last I heard she’s really happy there, so the story has a happy ending).
Caveat: Yes, doctors are not generally considered underpaid but they do often have significant professional expenses that teachers don’t have, such as medical malpractice insurance premiums, which can be in the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. Medical school debt also tends to be quite a lot higher than debt from teacher training.
I don’t dispute that on average doctors are a lot better paid than teachers, even factoring in those extra expenses. But I can see why some doctors could look at their income and outgo and decide they aren’t making enough money, without being insane or exceptionally greedy.
Also–and my information is 40 years out of date, so take it with a big grain of salt–medical school is goddamn torture. I was a kid while my dad went through med school and residency, and he was regularly working 40-hour shifts, where he didn’t get to come home, and where his only sleep was on a cot in a “break room.” There seemed to be a deliberate effort to push potential doctors to the breaking point, whether out of some sort of fucked up character building or out of a sense of vengeance or hazing I’m not sure. I think a lot of doctors come out the other side of that feeling like they should be compensated for going through such an extraordinarily grueling process.
In New Jersey the average teacher’s salary is $81,102. Depending on the district it means if you are a veteran teacher you are making well over $100,000 a year. They also have good benefits and a good pension plan. To pay for that our property taxes are astronomical. It differs from town to town but education can be about 75% of the property tax collected. The property tax means their salary doesn’t go as far but the taxes they pay pays their salary which doesn’t go as far because of the taxes they pay which funds their salary…
I’m not sure how things are different elsewhere. School boards aren’t supposed to be political. No one runs as a candidate from a political party. The school budget is voted on in open elections. The school board doesn’t answer to local mayors or councils. There is also a strong union. A teacher isn’t going to get rich here but they make decent money with benefits. It’s not bad for working 10 months a year.
I think this is something worth noting.
I posted above about very good teacher salaries in the Chicago area. @Loach noted teachers in New Jersey are very well paid.
The OP is about low teacher pay but teachers do not work for one company. Some are paid well, some are not.
Clearly some areas do value teachers and/or the teachers have an excellent union.
ISTM the underpaid teachers need to either unionize or find jobs in better paying districts. Once the shitty paying places cannot find good teachers they will need to improve the pay offered.
This can go to a larger discussion about how we fund schools but that is something for another thread (and I would not be surprised if it has already been done here).
Moving between school districts can be problematic. While new teachers, especially those filling long-term substitute positions might bounce between districts for a couple of years, established (especially tenured) teachers changing districts may be looked upon with suspicion in my experience.
That’s not to say it doesn’t happen, but it wasn’t common when I was in the field.
The goal is generally to get tenured and then stay there because salary goes up with years of service. But it also anchors a teacher, and when one changes districts there isn’t any guarantee that they’ll be hired at the same level with credit for their previous years.
It’s a bit different in specialties where there are frequent vacancies, such as special ed. But classroom teachers at the elementary level were usually lifers. Kind of a golden shackles situation. In this way, teaching is not a typical marketplace.
Speaking as someone who spent five years actively working in a union in NC, including three years as my union local president (hardcore burnout hit me last year, and I stepped back so other folks could step forward), this isn’t a “holy shit, we shoulda thought of that!” idea. It’s just that it’s really really fucking hard to make progress in a state that’s spent more than half a century making it hard to be an effective union.
In North Carolina, for example, contracts between government bodies and public sector unions are illegal, and cannot be enforced in court. Going on strike is punishable by a $10,000 fine, or up to six months in jail.
Trust me: we’re working on it. But it’s hard as shit to succeed at it.
what? how can this be legal?
This may be swerving into a hijack but I thought the National Labor Relations Act protects the right of employees to form a union. Doesn’t that trump state law?
That also includes the right to strike (I think).
Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) states in part, “Employees shall have the right. . . to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection.” Strikes are included among the concerted activities protected for employees by this section. The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the right of employees to go on strike whether they have a union or not. Specifically, in 1962, the Supreme Court in NLRB v. Washington Aluminum upheld the NLRB’s decision that workers in a non-unionized workplace who walked out because it was too cold were protected under the NLRA and the employer could not fire them. - SOURCE
There must be an exception for public-sector unions. Recall that Reagan famously fired all of the striking federal air-traffic controllers.
Also, I was in a public-sector union years ago and IIRC it was forbidden for us to strike.
ETA: this Wikipedia article on the air-traffic controller union indicates that there is a federal law that prohibits strikes by federal government employees. I have no doubt that states have similar laws for state and local government employees.
I thought you were going to point out the loss of years of credit for established teachers moving districts.
Oh you did. Yeah, pretty much you only get paid for 7-10 years of experience.
Doesn’t that mean those teachers are paid better staying where they are than if they went somewhere else that seems to pay better?
I guess I am missing the problem. If you are paid so well to stay where you are because you will be paid less elsewhere then…?
Just do the math. Will you be paid better in place-A or place-B? I get that there are fudge factors to consider (cost of moving, leaving friends and community you know, etc) but, if the point is teacher compensation then go where the money is.
I’m having trouble finding a specific cite, but from years of labor activism, I am confident in saying that there’s no federal right to strike for public sector workers. There are plenty of states where public sector strikes are illegal, and people do them anyway; in those states, there are other protections for union workers (see: collective bargaining), and a much deeper and long-running culture of union activism. In NC, we’re doing the work that folks in NY did some 80 or 90 years ago.
It shouldn’t be. But anti-union laws are part of the Jim Crow legacy: the assholes in charge in early and mid 20th century South really didn’t want multiracial coalitions forming to agitate for economic justice. That’s the work MLK was engaged in at the time of his assassination–the Poor People’s movement–and it was a tremendous threat to the powers that be. It’s the work of the Fusion Party in North Carolina at the end of the nineteenth century, and it led to the Wilmington Race Massacre and Coup in 1898.
And there’s no standardization on this, state to state. Even changing districts within a state is fraught for a tenured teacher. There’s very little to incentivize such a move, which leads to suspicion at job interviews. If you say you’re leaving because you’re unhappy, you’re probably not getting hired elsewhere no matter how bad the situation really was. Better to say your spouse has to move because of their job.
Those two are not the same. Just because you have to take a pay cut to go somewhere else doesn’t mean you are being paid well now.
Excluded from coverage under the Act are public-sector employees (employees of state, federal and local governments and their sub-divisions), agricultural and domestic workers, independent contractors, workers employed by a parent or spouse, employees of air and rail carriers covered by the Railway Labor Act, and supervisors (although supervisors that have been discriminated against for refusing to violate the NLRA may be covered).
A different federal law governs collective bargaining for federal employees, and whether state/local employees have a right to collective bargaining is a matter for state law.