Let’s have a show of hands.
How many of you, when you think of people who have had the most influence on your lives put at least one teacher in your top ten? I have at least three.
A lot of people in a lot of roles in our society do not deserve our praise; they deserve our awe. As schools begin classes in whatever form, teachers join first responders of all stripes and health and mental health workers of all kinds, public safety employees, and men and women in uniform who “provide for the common defense” on the platform of heroes.
When it comes to recognizing all of these folks at the most basic level, however, we talk a good game but we don’t play a good game. We saw a recent survey by Business Insider that should bother all of us. A lot.
Since then we’ve seen a report from the state auditor that buttresses what BI told us.
Business Insider is a German-owned website that focuses on business and economic issues.
The folks at BI have looked at figures from the U. S. Department of Education and the census bureau for the school year 2018-19, the most recent year for which data is available. It finds the average Missouri teacher was paid $50,064 that year.
The national average was $61,730.
Missouri ranked 44th. The lowest-ranking went to Mississippi, which paid its teachers $45,574. West Virginia is 49th at $47,681.
The only thing that keeps Missouri from being West Virginia in the rankings is that our average teacher salary is a whole $46 a week more than the teachers there.
$46.
What’s worse is that when our average teacher salary is measured against inflation, our teachers have lost more than six percent of their purchasing power because of inflation in the last twenty years.
This isn’t news to our much-praised but barely-raised teachers. But it should be disturbing to those who expect so much of them.
Spare me the excuse that you can’t solve a problem by throwing money at it. The problem is the money. We need to throw $11,000 a year at our teachers just to get them to the national average.
This is a matter of recognizing the important role people play in building or maintaining our society. And in times like these when we are asking—and when some are DEMANDING—that these good people face the possibility that they are stepping into harm’s way every day they open their classroom door, recognizing how far below the national average they are in pay and doing nothing about it is demeaning.
Then when their school district doesn’t have enough money to provide their classrooms with enough basic things such as paper and pencils, we expect them to guy their own.
Now we have a virus threatening their well-being and the well-being of their students that has led to terrible cuts in state funding for education in this fiscal year. Legislation is being introduced in the General Assembly this year that will undermine state support for our schools and our teachers even more.
What is an appropriate salary for our teachers? Don’t look to this otherwise all-knowing oracle for an answer. We had two children in our house for about eighteen years. We can’t imagine having twenty or thirty children in one room for six or eight hours every day of the week—children who bring multitudinous health and personal issues with them from home.
We pat our hometown public servants on the head and tell them they’re doing good. But we don’t appreciate them enough to pay them salaries that at least keeps up with inflation.
Such is the lot for anyone who sees public service—teachers, police and firemen, healthcare workers, sewage plant operators, government employees—you name it. “What’s in it for them?” you might ask. If you have to ask you’ll never understand the answer.
Sometimes being a low-tax state is nothing to brag about.
If you want to see how the states stack up in the teacher salary study, go to:
https://www.businessinsider.com/teacher-salary-in-every-state-2018-4#38-indiana-14
A month or so ago, State Auditor Nicole Galloway announced a study by her staff confirmed Missouri’s abysmal standing in education funding. She confirms Missouri ranks 49th in state support of elementary and secondary education. The report comes just two years after the auditor’s staff found more than two-thirds of local school districts have put increased financial burdens on local taxpayers in the last decade because the state (i.e., the governors and legislatures) budget for education has not kept pace with education’s costs.
We’ve cited before one of the favorite jokes of long-dead comedian Myron Cohen about the man who found a naked man in his wife’s closet one day and asked him, “What are you doing in there?’ And the man said, “Well, everybody has to be somewhere.”
Missouri is somewhere when it comes to funding for education, one of the things that is often spoken of as a key to the state’s economic health. But Misouri’s “somewhere” in this case, as in so many others, is nothing to be proud of.