“Welcome to Flingers! May I interest you in some long division?”
Last weekend, I spent some time with the folks, including a
nice dinner at a local eatery that Mom said she heard was fantastic. She got the recommendation from one of her colleagues at the middle school, so
we figured we should give it a go. Turns out, the reason why the teacher knows
so much about the restaurant is that she works there on top of her day job as a
full-time art teacher.
When we got there, we found that the teacher was not only working
that night, but was assigned to cover our table. I don’t know why, but I felt
very awkwardthroughout the meal,
especially when I had to ask for an extra soda or something. It just felt
weird, but I figured it was just me.
On the way back to the car, I explained it to Mom, who
agreed.
“Yeah, it was weird for me, too,” she said. “It’s just
strange having a colleague serve you food.”
The woman had a master’s degree and had been in the district
for almost a decade, but still couldn’t afford to live off of the teacher’s
salary. Salaries for “young” teachers, Mom explained, was about $25,000 to
$27,000 and most people couldn’t cover the basic living expenses with that kind
of salary. Say what you want to about how teachers only work nine months of the
year or anything else, but they’re required to work approximately 190
days of the year here (180 plus 10 in-service days). If you apply that
salary range to that time period and calculate it at 8-hour days, you get an
hourly wage of $16.45 to $17.76. (Anyone who knows a good teacher knows that
the 8-hour day is a myth and a free summer is a fantasy.)
This woman isn’t alone in her secondary servitude.According to a
recent survey, more than one in four teachers in Texas have to moonlight to
make ends meet.A study of teachers in North Carolina found that more and
more teachers are augmenting their salaries by taking on additional employment.
Anecdotally, Mom was able to name several moonlighting
colleagues, including a vice principal who worked third shift at a
gas station. When I was a kid, we ran into my first-grade teacher working as a
hostess at a local diner. When the Missus and I were dating, we used to go pick
up an art teacher friend of hers at a nearby country club where she
spent her summers waitressing.
When it comes to education, you are looking at a commodity
that is clearly becoming more valuable because the jobs that are being cut are
those that come from the traditional middle-class area. Manufacturing is drying
up or seeing such stark wage cuts that it might as well dry up. Physical labor
is being outsourced to places far away. The “thinking” jobs are about all that’s
left for us and yet we seem to be undermining those opportunities at every
turn.
Education is an investment in the future, which is why it’s
so easy to cut funding for it at every turn. In this day and age, in which
everything is expected now, Now, NOW, the sense that we should invest in kids
so that they’ll do better and help improve the world for the next generation is
a foreign concept to many. It’s the fast food versus sustainable farming
argument.
The less we pay teachers and the more we force them to seek
funds elsewhere, the fewer good teachers we will have, simply because they’ll
be spread too thin. Burnout and career changes are common among teachers. In fact, there isa corporate movement afoot to target teachers for a transition into the corporate sector for just these reasons.
If we want good teachers, we have to pay well or at least
well enough that we if we run into them at the local Dairy Queen, they’re not
there serving Dilly Bars.