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Teacher Pay In Arizona, Is It Too Low?
An Arizona teacher in her own words:
I’ve debated about posting this but in the end want to show what a teaching salary really looks like in Az. This is my new pay after taking a few professional development classes…I actually laughed when I saw the old salary vs. the new one. I mean really, I need a college degree to make this? I paid 80,000 for a college degree, I then paid several hundred more to transfer my certification to Az. I buy every roll of tape I use, every paper clip I use, every sharpie I grade with, every snack I feed kids who don’t have them, every decorated bulletin board, the list could go on. I love teaching! BUT…the reality is without my husband’s income I could NEVER be an educator in this state! I’m sad for my single mom teacher friends working 3 jobs to make ends meet! Something must be done…otherwise our poor children will be taught by unqualified, burned out, and just plain bad teachers! P.S.No one goes into teaching for the money, by all means…but we do need to eat and have a home! #RedforEd#Azwakeupandmakesomechanges
It has been brought to my attention that the issue date says 1998…this is NOT a pay stub from then… that is the date my teaching certificate was issued and I graduated from college! I assure you this is my salary for next year!!!
The median income in Arizona is $53,558, her salary is well below the median income, and so I believe she is underpaid. There are some other issues concerning her wages.
I’ll start with parents. There is no reason that this teacher should be paying for snacks for her students, or paying for any other item that a student might need. Many parents look at school as day care. Day care that includes teachers covering the cost, or taxpayer’s paying for their child’s lunches, and their personal school supplies.
The next problem concerns the school board. The time has come for outside auditors to examine their spending. Parents have no control over how their money is spent. It should come as no surprise that when the only tax that a voter has any say in, tax property bond measures concerning schools, the answer is usually no. The next question should be how many administrators does your school district need, and how much are they paid.
Teachers unions are another problem. Are they fighting merit pay, or is their time spent protecting incompetent teachers. How much are teachers paying in union dues, which are siphoned off to write checks to politicians? How much are you as a teacher paying your union leadership?
Finally, how much she spent, or how she financed her education is not my problem or any other taxpayer’s problem. There is no doubt in my mind that to obtain a teaching certificate those who wish to teach have to pay for worthless educational theory courses. Yes, they’re expensive, and they come at the expense of courses necessary that apply to the subject matter that they wish to teach.
I still believe this teacher is underpaid.
Published in General
One problem is that Arizona is for old people, not kids.
We enjoyed our drives through the bottom and top parts of Arizona a few weeks ago, but it is depressing to see the herds of old people. Being around people my own age makes me wonder if I’m becoming one of them.
The average pay for teachers in our school district is $62k, according to an article in the local paper. That’s not bad, if you ask me.
The haphazardly realized model of public schooling is nonsense. The districts are political bodies with a veneer of being “for the children,” or something. There are many wonderful people working as teachers in these systems and some of them are probably pretty good teachers. But a school that has no philosophy of education to guide it, no accountability to a market as @Spin points out, and a strangle hold on it’s audience via compulsory attendance laws and taxes you can’t divert to a school of your choice can NOT possibly work. I’ve never heard a tale of a public school that made me think, “Oh, I wish my kids had that.”
We do have our snowbirds, but there are plenty of young people here. (You must have visited Sedona; never was there a more beautiful, but expensive place, with nothing to do. Only old people with large bank accounts would live there.) AZ ranks as the 17th youngest state in the US per the last census data at and average age of 37.4. It likely challenges the youngest (Utah) in the summer when we send all the Utah snowbirds back to the mountains.
It’s already been said here, so I’ll just throw in a comment to add one to the pro-market side.
I grew up hearing my dad observe that there are three factors that determine how well you’re paid:
1. The demand for what you do.
2. How hard it is to do what you do.
3. How well you do what you do.
I don’t want to offend anyone here who is a teacher or who knows and loves a teacher — some of my best friends are teachers — but it isn’t very difficult to be a teacher, and even to be a good teacher. It’s a job that attracts a lot of people, primarily women (because, I suspect, it resonates with a natural inclination in women to teach and nurture children). It isn’t a field known for high pay, and it probably doesn’t attract people for whom money is a strong motivator.
So I guess I don’t see a strong argument for subverting the market when it comes to what teachers receive.
There is one other factor worth mentioning, and that’s public sector pensions. Public sector pensions are the silent killers of state budgets. To the extent that teachers participate in them, and can retire young with significant pay in a manner unavailable to similarly skilled workers in the private sector, it seems to me that that’s something that has to be considered also as part of the total compensation teachers receive.
Well old people pay property taxes that support schools, and they don’t have children that are using public schools. There are about 9,000+ residents in my 55 and over community. All are homes, not apartments, and whether they are snowbirds, or not, each of those homes generate yearly property tax revenue.
Well, that is certainly interesting about the below-average age. Thanks for that bit of information.
I was thinking my thoughts the times when we got off the interstate on the drive between Tuscon and Yuma, same as I did on that stretch two years ago. Though I wouldn’t hesitate to go to Yuma again if we needed to go across the border for expensive dental care. And we do enjoy the scenery. We take the northern route across Arizona when we drive back home.
Yeah but that’s true of most employees in the economy. You don’t interview or hire the UPS driver who delivers your package, the cook at the local diner, your airline pilot, or the software engineers who wrote the software you’re using to read this web page.
I think there is missing information in her post. Specifically on that point: in our small Seacoast NH town, her cited salary is for a new hire with no significant experience. Is she graduated from college in 1998 she has had time for more than 15 years of experience in another profession. And, an experienced teacher would have established better mechanisms for supplies for her classroom. Her post reads as from someone who is surprised at her status – and disappointed. I suspect she is either returning to teaching after some change in her life or has taken up her “backup” job after a change in her life. Missing information.
I can think of a couple of tales, but they shouldn’t change anyone’s mind.
George Lucas’ HS alma mater’s AV department/class allegedly gets a regular upgrade from him and is often times better equipped than the nearby university.
There is a HS in CA that has a paleontology museum built into it and the kids do some of the work there.
I imagine there are some pretty impressive magnet schools around. The fact remains that K-12 in the aggregate is mis-funded, mis-managed, and largely misses the mark.
I sort of admire teachers who buy supplies or food for kids who don’t show up with them.
But it is distinctly enabling.
Whether it’s the kid who loses stuff or the arguably unfit parent(s) who don’t buy the stuff in the first place, no one reasonably expects the teacher to fund these things. Send notes home about supplies. Call social services. Find out if anyone will donate – I can imagine any number of stores would do it – they probably have more than they want leftover after their back-to-school sales (obviously a lot of parents aren’t buying). I imagine Kiwanis/Elks and their ilk might pony up. Might even buy sheet music if you slapped their logo on the program along with a special thanks – hell, invite ’em to the show.
Not enough information to make an evaluation.
According to AZ Central, she teaches in the Paradise Valley Unified School District. This is located in Phoenix and Scottsdale. Somehow this school district does not appear in the state Transparency database, nor does she. According to Glass Door, the range of reported salaries runs from 36 to 40k.
So the possibility that she’s being less than truthful is non-zero, but probably not far off the reality.
According to their financial reports -they’ve been closing schools schools for nearly a decade, and property values have been falling like rocks. It is nonetheless one of the best districts in the state and voters in the district have approved bond and tax increases to operate the schools and improve facilities. About 60% of the district’s funding goes to instruction -which is usually mostly teacher compensation. About 10% of that has to be used to fund the pension fund (that seems low, but I don’t actually know what the ARC should be). It is 69% funded which is low, but better than a bunch of others.
37% of their students are on free or reduced lunch. Their teacher student ratio is 1/18. That is apparently high for both Arizona and the nation.
I gotta say -I’m flummoxed. It’s a good district, but its funding looks like a poor district. Usually those don’t go together.
My best guess is that they are paying low because they can’t afford to pay higher -even with generous taxpayers -and getting away with it because teachers can live in Scottsdale rather than Phoenix.
As to whether she is overpayed or underpayed -I don’t know.
A good teacher is worth vastly more than the typical teacher pay. A good teacher is also about as rare as a leprechaun. Don’t get me wrong. It is hard to be a good teacher. I couldn’t do that job. The problem is, neither can most of the teachers who hold that job. Perhaps many of them would do better if merit was rewarded. Unfortunately, there is a huge bureaucracy, known as teachers’ unions, that exists to make sure that never happens.
On the other hand, the technology now exists to replace many teachers (the bad ones, I hope) with computers and videos. I look forward to the day when one good teacher will displace a thousand bad ones, and expect the pay will be commensurate.
Yes, that argument about old people is a weak one. Now, if that commenter had said that older adults who don’t have kids in school are resistant to property tax increases, that would be fair.
I spent 40 years in Orange County, CA and only one child attended public school. The other four all went to private schools, but I paid my taxes.
I wonder what the burden of illegals with kids in school is in Arizona, especially Tucson.
So I agree with a lot of what you say, and I don’t particularly care to take offense, but I’d suggest this isn’t strictly relevant to your point and probably doesn’t help your case.
It can be easy to be a bad teacher. I’ve seen that. (Some weak teachers are just out of their depth, and are miserable). Schools vary from state to state and district to district. But teacher overwork and stress are a very common reality and not because of laziness or incompetence. Apart from the contemporary paperwork load, it’s stressful in the best situation. There’s an aspect of live performance while making a lot of last-minute judgment calls, and (at least for elementary teachers) the need to always be alert, to be aware of what is going on in the room — that’s what good teachers do that makes it look easy; they stop many problems before they start. And then you come to know so many tragedies in these little lives, and you can’t solve their problems, but you can make just enough difference that the responsibility weighs on you at 2am.
Personalities differ and some people can blow these things off easier than others, but it does take a toll.
For some experienced teachers in certain settings it’s less, but most good teachers are working well over 40 hours a week, and they aren’t working 9 months either.
I don’t have any insight on pay in Arizona. I do think there’s something of a disconnect in that teachers are expected to pay for a costly degree and often told to think of themselves as professionals and dress and act accordingly — and it does work better when teachers do conduct themselves as professionals — and the pay doesn’t always seem to match.
This is even more true of private school teachers; they just tend to be more willing to view it as a calling apart from money. There are a limited number of such people, I think.
I don’t have easy solutions, but I think we’d benefit if our system had more opportunities for professional advancement of some kind for good teachers (not just “merit pay”). Something to give a recognition and opportunity and a way to strive for that better salary besides the picket line.
Too bad our schools have gone to an industrialized system, too.
The teachers’ colleges were a better deal and we should probably go back to that. Education majors now are the bottom quintile in college students. When I was in college, a long long time ago, most elementary education majors were young women who were planning to work while their husbands got a career going. Women had fewer options and Education got the benefit of those limited choices.
That has changed.
No way, Mike. We may not know how many
illegal alienshappy fun undocumented eager assimilaters there are, but the internet assures us that they all pay taxes.How I feel. The teachers in my area have a 1004 hour a year contract. Michigan teachers are pretty well compensated overall, but are really ticked about the new law pertaining to retirement funding.
When a teacher compares themselves to other professionals, it amuses me that they choose accountants, engineers, etc., not the parochial school teachers down the street. I know our church didn’t pay too well, and we could barely afford benefits. I can only think of one public school teacher that said he had it pretty good.
But somewhere out in the real world……………
When are we going to ask fundamental questions about taxation? What do they want?
FWIW, I know someone who has a nice house in Sun City Grand in Suprise, AZ. His real estate taxes have more than doubled over the last eight years. I don’t see what he got for it at all. Nothing was improved or expanded around where he lives.
Many of the people in my family have been teachers.
Growing up in such a family dramatically distorts one’s few of the nation’s economy, concealing the economic hardships that other families experience.
I don’t have a lot of sympathy for government workers.
I remember a few years ago as a self-employed person that my gross income fell by about 33% one year and another 33% the year after that. I basically went from having my best year to having just about my worst year with a 12-month period in between. My net income was essentially zero that third year — I was working for free that year.
I don’t think that most government workers understand such economic shocks to one’s personal income.
Teachers have other benefits such the ability to work during the exact hours that their children will be in school and at home during summer vacation. There is a certain amount of stress and constant pressure in the teaching profession, but how bad can any job be that is indoors in an air-conditioned and heated room that does not require constant heavy lifting and mechanical dangers. (Some schools have inadequate heating or cooling, but I think that is the exception.)
Perhaps teachers, college professors, nurses, and doctors would be paid more, if each place didn’t have a thousand useless administrators such as Michelle Obama’s over $300,000-a-year non-essential hospital job. The school district where I lived built an administration building about 35 years ago. I think they have expanded it two or three times — while the district has been losing student population. Like most colleges and hospitals, largely government funded, that administration building looks like it is expanding like that Death Star from Return of the Jedi.
We spend more per pupil on K-12 education then any other society, and we get a piss poor product for our involuntary “investment”.
“The United States spent more than $11,000 per elementary student in 2010 and more than $12,000 per high school student. When researchers factored in the cost for programs after high school education such as college or vocational training, the United States spent $15,171 on each young person in the system — more than any other nation covered in the report.”
School supplies should not be an issue.
Nor English… nor math… nor history…
Speaking as one of those teachers down the street, I don’t think private school salaries are a fair comparison or reflect real market value, actually (though I doubt most public school teachers think this through). Private schools are competing with a free product — or to be more specific they’re actually asking people who are already paying to support the public schools to abandon what they’re already paying for and pay all over again for something different.
We don’t have a true free market for teacher salaries. We have absolutely no idea what Americans in the 21st century would ultimately be willing to pay for education if it weren’t publicly funded. We have no real idea what education would look like at all.
My understanding is when she left University of Chicago Hospital in Chicago they never replaced her.
That’s how essential her job was.
Chicago Tribune
Michelle Obama’s pay-for-play position at the University of Chicago Hospital has been eliminated. You know … that position that was created exclusively for her in which her salary did that sudden jump from $121,910 in 2004 before her hubby was senator, to $316,962 right after her hubby became the senator.
Guess now that Michelle Obama’s hubby isn’t a senator who will bring in million dollar earmarks for the hospital, the hospital doesn’t have to ‘pay for play’ and pretend to need her around anymore.
Michelle Obama had been on unpaid leave from the position for a while. Considering that the made-for-Michelle position only existed briefly, it is safe to say that it was a position that remained void of someone actually doing much work in it at all.
Chicago politics as usual. And the Obamas’ are up to their eyeballs in it. Both of them.
I agree. We have no idea what people will pay, or what it would look like. And the education system does not want that. There is a man running for Governor in Michigan that is running on single payer health care, and outlawing schools for profit. I’m pretty sure he’ll have the education sector support.
The charters and homeschoolers are changing the dynamics bit by bit, but they are not magic bullets either. No matter what, 1/2 of children will be below average. Meeting children where they are at and adapting the system to the child seems better than making the child conform to the system, but that is what we have.
I have family members that are teachers, and I just avoid talking about education with them. Work ethic is individual, and there are the best in all fields. There are people all over that are underpaid and under appreciated. But I don’t believe in the $15.00 min. wage either. I do believe all workers should be appreciated, by maybe calling them by name when they are wearing a nametag, or identify themselves. I try to do that, and I think it is appreciated. My name is Pete, may I take your order? Hi Pete, I’d like the #2 meal. It is really quite easy. Or remembering a lot of them don’t make the rules, and don’t deserve to be treated poorly.
Leigh, my point was that, if a lot of people are able to be good teachers, then that’s going to tend to depress the wages of teachers, simply because that’s how economics works.
I agree with you that there are bad teachers, and quite a few of them. But I don’t think that’s because teaching is difficult. Rather, I think it’s because we’ve turned teaching into something it isn’t — a complicated, individualized business. We’ve loaded teachers down with paperwork and compliance burdens, much as we have medical practitioners, and with the same effect: less time spent doing their actual jobs, and more time jumping through hoops.
We have had very good curricula available for primary instruction for decades, but teachers continue to try to create their own. I think those who believe teaching is hard are correct, if the job involves essentially reinventing the job of teaching, or embracing the latest fad handed down from the bureaucracy.
My late wife homeschooled our six children, the older three through highschool and the younger three through grade school. She did it using readily available resources, such as the works of E.D. Hirsch and John Saxon, and with the help of a well-stocked home library full of mid-20th century young adult literature. It wasn’t complicated, and we were very pleased with the results. No education degree was required, nor a lot of paperwork.
I believe we have turned what should be a fairly straightforward job that can be done successfully by quite a few people into a challenging, high-stress “profession” that requires a combination of a saint and scholar to do it well. We then lard it down with bureaucrats and red tape and esoteric theory and federal oversight and all the rest — and then try to throw money at it until it works. And it doesn’t.
If you don’t like the job go somewhere else.
If you can’t go somewhere else retrain.
Performing arts are a different kettle of fish. I’d be surprised if the average math teacher is having to spend the summer re-working their lesson plan every year.