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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.
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Also, If she paid $80k for her degree she probably didn’t get it prior to 1998, at least not unless she went to an ivy league school to become a teacher, which would be kind of stoopid.
It used to be young people went to a normal school to get a teaching certificate after their high school graduation. Laura Ingalls is an example and so was my son’s third grade teacher. Didn’t know it until she told me that she didn’t go to college. For many young adults it was a first job , or a job until they got married. A lot of young men were one room schoolteachers, and in modern times it has been predominately female at the elementary level. It is the most family friendly job I can think of.
John Taylor, in his book “Weapons of Mass Instruction”, has stated the actual time it takes someone to learn to read is much less than people believe. He was NY teacher of the year and quit because he couldn’t stand being part of the system anymore. He also wrote the six-lesson schoolteacher essay.
The system we have in place (to paraphrase Hayek) is almost anti-education.
My Grandma was a college educated teacher at the turn of the 2oth century, taught in a one room school house, lived with one of the families, and quit when she got married.
I agree it has been over professionalized at the primary level anyway. Problem behavior has made teacher’s lives much harder, and I don’t think they are equipped to handle it.
Well done to your wife. That’s the kind of education I had myself, and it has served me well.
Even apart from all our contemporary complications, what makes teaching as a career different is that you are teaching other people’s children. Have you ever happened to read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s account of her first time teaching school, to five whole students? It was another world, but you could hear some of it today. The behavior she had to deal with was comparatively mild, but she was much younger and less prepared. She was a hardy soul and figured it out, but some didn’t even then.
I just think that saying that teaching isn’t all that hard anyway doesn’t really reflect what most teachers deal with today. But I agree with this — if I were a school board member or state legislator or congressman, I wouldn’t be asking teachers whether they make enough money. I’d be asking them what wastes their time and energy.
Leigh, thanks for your thoughtful comments. Shifting gears…
My youngest, the last one at home, is 18 and about to graduate from high school: she’ll go off to college in the fall. I’ve spent a lot of time these last couple of years thinking about what I miss and will miss about raising children. I think the single thing I miss most, particularly about young children, is reading aloud to them.
I spent countless evenings on our farm in Missouri, sitting by the wood stove, reading to the kids. We read the Little House books — yes, I remember Laura’s account — as well as the Little Britches series, Boxcar Children, the four books of the Lord of the Rings series, Narnia, and more others than I can remember. Most of them I read twice, once to the older three and then, a few years later, again to the younger three — usually with the older ones listening in.
I’ve loved essentially everything about being a parent, but reading to the children was certainly among the most wonderful bits of it — and certainly among the things I’ll miss the most.
This is how I was taught to do subtraction in public school in the 80’s, and honestly it makes more sense to me than what he described as “the old way.” Not really sure what all the controversy was about.
AMEN!
I’m not sure that homeschooling my girls wasn’t at least as much about my enjoyment of parenthood as it was their education.
Doug, I don’t think that’s quite right. The idea of common core math, and of the “new math” before it, was to teach kids how numbers work rather than just teaching a mechanical formula for getting the “right answer.” This is especially true in an era when everyone has a powerful calculator in their desktop computer or in the phone in their pocket. Yes, you could teach kids a laborious process for deriving a square root with a pencil and paper, but why? They’ll never do it again, and will quickly forget the process. The problem with common core math was not in the concept, but in the pedagogy. The teachers themselves didn’t really understand it, and the language used to explain it was so pompous and confusing that it sounded ridiculous. But if one of the kids actually understands it and “excels” in it, then I would be very happy to have that kid grow up to design bridges.
I think it is mostly the Ed school professors who are bored with simple tools like Phonics. Why be an academic of you can’t come up with a new way of doing things ? Unlike bridge engineering, it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t work.
The Common Core math came out of the University of Chicago study that found that students who had done well in arithmetic were reaching ninth-grade algebra and getting lost. The researchers found that the students had not been introduced to the vocabulary of algebra early enough. Many of these same students eventually found their footing and did reasonably well in geometry in tenth grade, and they did quite well in Algebra II in eleventh grade and trigonometry and calculus in twelfth grade. The researchers said that mathematics education needed to prepare students for algebra younger than they were at that time.
This research morphed into the Everyday Mathematics program. When it was first introduced in the 1980s, the curriculum writers knew that it would slow progress through basic arithmetic for a while. They believed the students would catch up by the start of high school and then do better eventually.
Teachers complained that it was a wordy program rather than a problem-based program. There was some truth to that.
Some kids did really well with what used to be called Chicago Math. Some did not. Over time some of the textbook publishers believed that they had worked out the kinks in the program. Most teachers still do not like the Chicago Math approach to teaching. You won’t find it in many private and charter schools.
Whether or not to use the Common Core and its Chicago Math program is truly a local issue. The Common Core is a curriculum geared to a standardized test that the Department of Education put together as part of the No Child Left Behind law and initiatives. The U.S. government said to states, “We have education grants available to states that have standardized testing.” For obvious reasons, the feds did not want to give education money to states without some proof of improved learning results. The feds said the states could use theirs or use their own. The federal standardized tests were written in conjunction with a curriculum called Common Core. No state was compelled to use the Common Core or the standardized tests.
Unfortunately, many states did not have any standardized tests of their own, and they didn’t want to spend the money to develop them. So they adopted the ready-made, off-the-shelf curriculum and testing the feds had developed.
Parents who do not want their kids to have the Common Core curriculum need to band together and force their state legislatures to return the grant money to the feds. States should be running their own education programs.