Quite the statement, eh? Let me explain. I’m well into my 60s and for my entire adult life I’ve heard that public school teachers are underpaid. It has been repeated as a mantra for decades.
Ignoring for a moment whether it is true or not — and the answer to that is generally, it depends — let’s accept the mantra and analyze why public-school teachers are still underpaid after all these years.
It’s not spending. As most voters know, it seems that every stinking year there is some ballot initiative or measure or legislative move to increase spending for our woefully underfunded public-school systems. It never seems to end. There doesn’t seem to ever be a point of “we’re good.”
Total nationwide spending on public K-12 education is approaching a trillion dollars! In most states, public K-12 education consumes around 50% of the entire state budget. Nationwide, we now spend an average of $17,000 per student per year. In New York it is $33,000! Yet teachers remain underpaid.
The Department of Education’s spending has gone from just under $11 billion in 1980 to a high of almost $193 billion in 2010 to last year’s spending of $158 billion. Yet teachers remain underpaid.
The number of administrators versus teachers has exploded — “The number of district administrators in U.S. public schools has grown 87.6 percent between 2000 and 2019 compared to student growth at 7.6 percent and teacher growth at 8.7 percent.” And many (most?) of the administrators make more than teachers. Yet teachers remain underpaid.
Remember when technology was going to transform public education? We’ve spent billions on classroom technology and what have test scores done? At best stayed flat, in many cases they went down.
Rather than throwing away all those billions on technology — projected to increase to over $132 billion by 2032 — which has had no discernable impact on education outcomes, why wasn’t it spent to help out the underpaid teachers? Every teacher out there could probably be making an additional $10,000 to $20,000 in annual salary. In all likelihood this would have led to better educational outcomes than wasting it on unnecessary, ineffective technology. Yet it wasn’t and teachers remain underpaid.
Here in my hometown, the local school district is spending hundreds of millions of dollars tearing down functioning schools and building new ones. They say the schools are old but in the neighborhood I live, many of the houses were built in the 1960s yet no one is tearing them down. In fact, they are in great demand.
I’ve worked as a management consultant for decades and I can assure you there isn’t a for-profit business in the country whose boss says, “Well, things aren’t looking good so we are going to have to tighten our belt. So, we’re going to tear down our building and build a new one!” Never happens because it doesn’t make sense. Yet it is happening in school districts across the land at the same time we continue to hear the sad lament that teachers remain underpaid.
NEA and AFT) have done a terrible disservice to teachers — and society at large — for decades. The unions are pretty good at getting Democrats elected but not so good at actually operating as a union for teachers.
Sadly, the unions are an integral part of the Democrat machine, not really “teachers” unions at all. Instead, they take the teacher’s money via dues — and more importantly, their incredible political power — and use them in forced servitude to the Democrat party. A machine that clearly doesn’t want to pay teachers more because they like having an army of disgruntled folks who can be quite effective at getting Democrats elected.
Get that? The evidence is overwhelming they don’t want to pay you more. They want the issue and you underpaid foot soldiers forever. As Forrest Gump would say, stupid is what stupid does.
In the for-profit world, a primary job of a union is to attempt to grab a bigger share of the profits from the shareholders and put it in their members pockets.
If the teachers unions are actually attempting to do so — and it sure doesn’t look like it — they are poor at doing much of anything in helping raise teacher’s pay. But don’t blame the unions, blame the brain-dead liberal teachers who actively support this slavery to the Democrat machine and subsequent wage depression. The vast majority of you are willing participants. When you live by the rule of the tribe above all else, don’t be crying to others because the tribe is using you all like a dirty dishrag.
You can get into a rage over the evil conservatives yet it isn’t conservatives who are holding you back. It is your blind, mistaken belief your education unions are fighting for you rather than accept the harsh, quite obvious reality they don’t really give a damn about you other than to give them political power. You seem to have forgotten the power is yours by your numbers, not theirs.
Now, I’d rather we allow the citizens who earned this money to keep it, but if we are going to spend it anyway, I’d rather raise teacher pay by tens of thousands of dollars — and as the above shows, the money is there. This at least has a chance of actually impacting kid’s educational outcomes.
But I won’t be holding my breath, because history shows public K-12 teachers are some of the stupidest creatures on the planet.
John Conlin is an expert in organizational design and change. He also holds a BS in Earth Sciences and an MBA and is the founder and President of E.I.C. Enterprises. He has been published in American Greatness, The Federalist, The Daily Caller, American Thinker, the Houston Chronicle, the Denver Post, and Public Square Magazine among others.
Image: AT via Magic Studio
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