Teachers’ Low Wages Affecting Student Success
It is common knowledge that teachers are not compensated or respected the way they should be. Teachers do a lot for our society and play a vital role in molding our future generations. By looking at the correlation between the relationship of teachers pay and student success and how it affects society, we can create an important focus on the education for the future generations. Teachers are crucial to society because they have a great influence on our nation’s youth. Unfortunately, teachers in the United States are protesting for better pay because they are not able to keep up with the cost of living with their stagnant wages.
Being a teacher is already more than a full-time job. Unfortunately, on top of that some teachers are forced to have another part time job because they simply do not make enough money to survive. Researching the social relationship between students and teachers, I found there is a crucial positive bond between a student’s success and a teacher’s well-being (Collie, Shapka, Perry 2012). This in itself shows exactly how important teachers are to us in society. Teachers within the United States are not being compensated enough for their job and are subsequently seeing issues in job satisfaction, work environment, job stress, and low wages; which in turn are all affecting student success.
In “Economics of Education Review: Teacher Pay and Teacher Aptitude” by Andrew Leigh the author researches the correlation between teacher pay and teacher aptitude, which means they are wanting to see how increasing teachers pay will affect the amount of people interested in entering the teaching field. They found that there is an increase of teacher aptitude by 0.6 percent when there is a 1.0 percent pay increase (Leigh 2012). This proves that if a teacher’s pay increases, there is also an increase of people wanting to become teachers. Essentially by increasing the pay, we can guarantee teachers who are passionate in their field and not using teaching as something to fall back on. Having dedicated teachers make a difference to the students and to society as a whole .
Although it is shown aptitude is increased with pay, I’m not 100% sure that the solution for pay inequality is going to be solved simply by throwing money at the problem. I believe solving the problem is about providing teacher options and resources to become better educators. I believe that school cost for college is too high. Recently tuition has raised at a rate far exceeding inflation, and it will only get worse. I know personally I will be leaving school with a large amount of debt, much like a lot of other fellow students. I can only imagine that once teachers graduate they are leaving with just as much or more student debt. This means when they get into the teaching field they are unable to keep up with the barrage of bills, raising rentals costs, and student loan payments on top. This will only make the teachers spiral more into debt, while creating a system that encourages teachers to be uncaring in the classroom. How can a teacher focus when they have financial issues on their mind?
There has to be a better system for loan forgiveness on student loans or less intense schooling requirements for credentials for lower level grades or less school intensive subjects. I believe school districts should work with community colleges to create an associates degree credential program, which in turn would dramatically reduce the cost of tuition. It is about fixing the problem from the inside and not by school districts going into debt. Simply put the districts cannot afford to give raises to every teacher at every school. Do not get me wrong, I believe that teachers are underpaid and underappreciated but I don’t think that giving teachers a $10,000 a year raise is feasible. Gradual increases that are in-tune with inflation along with loan forgiveness and cheaper education requirements could potentially solve this issue for future teachers.
References
Collie, Rebecca J., Shapka, Jennifer D., & Perry, Nancy E. (2012). School Climate and Social-Emotional Learning: Predicting Teacher Stress, Job Satisfaction, and Teaching Efficacy. Journal of Educational Psychology, 104(4), 1189–1204.
Leigh, Andrew. (2012). “Teacher Pay and Teacher Aptitude” . Economics of Education Review, 31(3), 41–53.
