It’s time the country pays teachers what they earn
The truth about public education in America isn’t that our schools are failing our kids. It’s that we are failing our teachers.
As statewide strikes in West Virginia and Oklahoma have shown, our teachers have had enough, and they deserve better.
Over the past four years, I’ve volunteered weekly at my kids’ neighborhood school with around 30 other guys in a program we started. It’s called Snowden Dudes.
Our goals are to increase the male presence in the lives of our children and help students who enter kindergarten without having attended pre-K catch-up with their classmates.
Each volunteer tutors two students in one of five kindergarten classes once a week for 30 minutes, working on letter recognition, phonics, and sight words. In my weekly half hour, I have gained a glimpse into students’ lives and seen our teachers in action.
At Snowden Elementary, we are
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proud of the racial and economic diversity in our community. We have the kids of professors and professionals, but our kids also come from families who struggle to get by.
Most kids I have worked with come from lower income families, which is no surprise given our electorate’s decision to forego universal pre-K funding six years ago.
Recently, one little girl told me how she and her mom would spend the night in their car. Of course, she is not alone.
Many kids bear the unmistakable signs of poverty, showing up to school sick and hungry. And those are just some of the issues that kids bring to school each day.
Our response should be to make schools ground zero in addressing poverty’s symptoms. To address hunger, Shelby County Schools provide free breakfast and lunch. School staff provide referrals for shelters.
When schools address these challenges, our teachers become not only our educators, but our social workers and counselors. Given these responsibilities, we should treat our teachers like the professionals they are.
Instead, we mandate constraining, ever-changing curricula along with weeks of standardized test prep. We give teachers more requirements and objectives, but not the resources and tools to meet them.
Nowhere is our failure to acknowledge the importance of a teacher’s work greater than in their low compensation.
The average teacher salary in Tennessee is $48,456.00 per year. Adjusted for inflation, Tennessee teachers’ salaries have decreased by more than $4,000 since 2003. Nationwide, during the same time period, the average teacher salary has decreased when adjusted for inflation by nearly $2,000.
It is well past time to pay teachers a salary consistent with the importance of their work and reflective of their skill set.
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Bryce W. Ashby is an employment attorney with Donati Law, a father of two (soon to be three) Snowden Greendogs, a volunteer tutor at Snowden Elementary, and a mentor at Grizz Prep.