The Politics of Impoverishing Teachers
The other day my oldest child, who is a high school senior, got a job offer! She took a HS class called “Teach for Tomorrow” and part of the deal is that you have a guaranteed job as a teacher after you finish college.
It is a job she will never take, in part because of her own ambitions, and in part because my wife and I, both teachers for 30 years, advised her against it.
Teachers in America have no reason to think they will ever be compensated fairly. For years and years, well meaning members of the public have told us “You guys should get paid more” and then they vote down every proposed tax hike that would put money in teachers’ pockets.
The overall message is “We are satisfied with the service we are getting from you for what we are paying, and we will not pay more no matter what we say”.
Fair enough.
I work for Fairfax County Public Schools, which is ( I believe) the second largest school system in the country, and our School Board has developed a nifty trick to avoid giving us raises. What they do is tell us an imminent large raise is on the horizon. Teachers get excited, but the School Board knows full well that the County Board of Supervisors is going to shoot down the proposed raises ( which were supposed to be a part of the job- you are supposed to get a “step” increase every year or couple of years in addition, which they routinely don’t give us). When the Board of Supervisors DOES shoot down the proposed raises, the School Board blames the Board of Supervisors and the Board of Supervisors blames the School Board. The result is teachers don’t get their money.
Many times, this charade lasts for 3–4 years, and teachers have to find ways to scrounge for money in order to survive economically. I , for example, have been a teacher for 31 years now, and I have never not had at least one extra job and usually two extra jobs. I know that sounds whiny, but when you take a job that promises raises and never gives them, you find yourself missing out on a lot of time with your family, which happened to me.
Furthermore, once the pay freeze gets lifted, the County acts as though they are some sort of heroic entity, touting that “WE GOT YOUR RAISES”.
The only problem is they didn’t.
When your pay is frozen for years and it finally becomes unfrozen, it is a raise in name only: you are STILL behind in the money you SHOULD be getting in accordance with what you expected and were told when you started the job. So “raise” means “slightly less behind” what you should rightfully be earning.
The final insult to teachers comes from the existence of high school sports. In most cases, high school sports are completely irrelevant to a child getting to play a college sport. For example, my kid will play softball in college, but she didn’t get that through high school ball- she got it through her club teams. The same is the case for nearly every athlete who goes on to play collegiately. The club level is where the recruitment happens, and you can ask pretty much any college coach and they will tell you the same.
To put it plainly, high school sports are an indulgence that good athletes get to enjoy at the expense of the entire tax base. If your neighbor came over an said “ Hey, how about being a sport and paying for my kid to play soccer”, you’d kick them out of your house, but that is in essence what high school sports do. Some kids won’t get to play, yet their parents still provide the money for the kids who do.
In my county, the advertised budget for the 2024–2025 school year is 3.8 billion dollars. Of that money, 20.3 percent goes to high schools, 5.4 percent goes to transportation, and 3.8 percent goes to facilities management. The athletic budget must be rolled into those three categories, which accounts for nearly 30 percent of the overall budget. Certainly athletics don’t account for ALL of that 30 percent, so let’s say the athletic budget accounts for 5% of the overall budget when you factor in field maintenance, overtime pay for drivers, gas, uniforms, wear and tear on busses etc. Five percent of 3.8 billion is $190 million. Our county has 25744 employees, which means scrapping the athletic budget and eliminating school sports COULD result in each employee getting $7380. I could use that money, and my colleagues could too!
But, my county, just like many others, has never even floated the idea of eliminating high school sports as a method of retaining and failry compensating teachers. While I understand adults not voting for tax hikes ib order to fund education (although education factors heavily into property values), I can’t understand why pointless sports are more important than paying teachers. They are though.
And THAT is why our child will never be a teacher.