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When
Jared Smith moved from Orlando to Tampa five years ago, he found a
one-bedroom apartment he couldn’t afford on his salary within a
mile of his job, so he sold his pick-up truck to make first and last
month’s rent and started walking to work.
When
his colleague MaryAnn Robertson started working in Vermont in 1974,
her salary was $6,800. Along with her husband’s bartending
income of $12,000, they were able to purchase a three-bedroom home
that included a duck pond in the back. The bank even encouraged them
to buy a more expensive home.
Jared,
32, and MaryAnn, 69, are generations apart, yet they are both tied to
a system that asks more from them than what they are compensated for,
in a state that ranks 49th in the nation in average salaries for
their occupation, while week after week, they log in extra hours of
unpaid labor to meet the demands of one of the most important jobs in
the world.
They
both teach high school in Florida.
The
fact that K-12 educators in America are underpaid is well known. But
given the renewed focus on the role of teachers during the pandemic
and Florida Gov.
Ron DeSantis’ recent acknowledgment that increasing their
salaries is long overdue,
the state stands out for the unique factors and singular forces that
have kept teacher salaries so low for so long.
Over
the last two decades, Florida teacher’s pay has decreased
12.5% when
adjusted for inflation. In a 2020 study by
the National Employment Law Project, teachers experienced the
greatest decline in wages out of all the occupations included in
their report — a whopping 18.6% reduction in median hourly wage
from 2009 to 2018.
Teacher
turnover is high largely
because salaries are so low and pay raises so paltry. Average pay for
teachers in Florida decreased, ranking 47th in
2019 to 49th in 2020. Though DeSantis is set to increase the starting
pay for teachers to $47,500, there is criticism that veteran
teachers are being overlooked.
Salaries for teachers in their mid-
to late careers in
the state hardly reflect their years of experience. As a relatively
new teacher with five years’ experience, Jared sees gross pay
of $44,000. But after 34 years of teaching, 16 of them in Florida,
MaryAnn earns only about 50% more than Jared does: $67,000.
An
outspoken, creative, out-of-the-box thinker, Jared has an intense
energy — once a chef, he learned to be detail-oriented and
perfectionistic — but he tones that down when he’s
teaching his students. He also suffers from anxiety — there is
always “a lot more going on inside” — and hopes
that makes him more relatable to the kids around whom he feels more
like himself.
MaryAnn
has delicate features, bright eyes and a wry sense of humor. She
tells stories from her days as a journalist — as a theater
critic, features writer, and education reporter. She expounds on her
love of theater and musicals, and the walls of her classrooms are
filled with Broadway show posters. Like many of their colleagues,
Jared admires MaryAnn, calling her a “force of nature”
and a “paragon” of what he hopes to become as a teacher.
They
both teach at George S. Middleton High School in Hillsborough County,
Fla. They are both English teachers with master’s degrees. He
is an instructor for Exceptional Student Education (ESE); she
primarily teaches Advanced Placement (AP) students. Their moms were
also both teachers. But their respective mother’s experiences
could not have been more different.
Jared’s
mother, Marcia Barager, taught in 2009, but the pay was so low she
stuck it out for only three years; she was trying to get away from
Jared’s emotionally abusive father and establish financial
independence.
MaryAnn,
who has a calm, soothing, yet professional voice, chuckled when asked
to compare her financial well-being as a teacher to what her mother
experienced in a career that also spanned decades. Her mother,
Marion, taught from the 1940s to the 1970s and was the breadwinner of
the family, earning more than her husband, who after a significant
on-the-job back injury, sold real estate and ran a local
bed-and-breakfast from the family home. A teaching career in
Massachusetts not only enabled the family to own property, go on
vacations and have a secure retirement — when MaryAnn’s
father fell ill and was in the I.C.U. for 18 days, the health
insurance coverage provided by the then-retired Marion’s job
fully paid for all the expenses, with zero out-of-pocket costs.
When
MaryAnn had her two children in 1978 and 1986, her teacher’s
health insurance in Vermont covered every penny. She also had six
weeks’ paid maternity leave that didn’t come out of her
sick leave fund. MaryAnn moved to Florida to help take care of her
parents in 2004 and has lived in the state ever since.
Nowadays,
the health insurance package offered to Florida teachers is so
barebones that employees must add options to meet basic needs.
MaryAnn knows co-workers with children who can’t afford the
family plan. If new mothers haven’t accrued enough sick leave,
they take their maternity leave without pay.
Throughout
the state, as well as the country, school districts have sought to
shift health care costs to the employee. “So teachers are
paying for their dependents’ coverage and part of their own —
which means you literally have families who pay well above $1,000 a
month for health insurance,” says Andrew Spar, president of the
Florida Education Association. “And of course, that comes out
of their very low wages.”
According
to a 2020 study published
by the RAND Corporation, workers like MaryAnn in the 75th income
percentile would be earning 35% more if salaries matched real per
capita GDP growth of 118% from 1975 to 2018. MaryAnn’s $67,000
would actually be closer to $100,000. Moreover, teachers in the U.S.
are paid far less than people in other jobs with the same level of
education.
The
idea that teachers’ pay is low because they work shorter hours,
with classes ending by mid-afternoon, and get to enjoy an annual
three-month vacation is far from reality. MaryAnn teaches eight hours
a day, then works an additional three hours every day to prep and
grade, plus more on weekends. But she’s paid only for 40 hours
per week.
Like
many teachers throughout the country, MaryAnn and Jared moonlight
or work
additional jobs to
make extra money to pay their bills. MaryAnn also usually teaches at
least four courses per semester at Hillsborough Community College
throughout the year and in the summer has worked as an adjunct
professor at the University of South Florida. Jared says he struggles
to make ends meet and lives “1 to 1” from paycheck to
bills. The only disposable income he makes is from his side hustles,
photography and videography.
While
Florida is at the bottom of the country for salaries for experienced
teachers, it’s starting salaries are middle of the pack. Before
DeSantis’ increase, Florida ranked 30th in the nation for
average starting salary at $38,724 for the 2019-2020 academic year,
according to the National
Education Association (NEA).
But what did the actual increases and bonuses look like for these
teachers? Newer teachers got a $350 raise per paycheck, others only
$37, and some veteran teachers — nothing. MaryAnn says she was
among the teachers at the top of the pay scale who received a
one-time bonus of $250 at the end of the pandemic year “for
just hanging in there. It was a joke.”
The
cost of living in Florida is not as low as one might assume from the
salaries, says MaryAnn. “We expect teachers to be saints,”
said Richard Ingersoll, a professor of education and sociology at the
University of Pennsylvania, “that teaching is a labor of love,
and somehow we justify that saints don’t need to get paid,
saints don’t have mortgages.”
Education
experts primarily blame state lawmakers for teacher wage stagnation
in Florida, since they determine how much of the revenue gained by
property taxes goes to schools.
The
U.S. is one of the few developed countries that leaves public school
education under the control of states and school districts and
that ties
its school funding to local property values.
The more affluent a neighborhood, the higher the property taxes, and
the more
can be allocated to
public education budgets. And Hillsborough’s property taxes
don’t yield, for example, what Miami-Dade’s waterfront
real estate does, says Robert Kriete, president of the Hillsborough
Classroom Teachers Association.
School
districts are at the mercy of state legislators and their governors.
While lawmakers don’t determine millage — the calculation
of property tax liability — they are the
ones who can approve increases, which many are reluctant to do in a
state that prides itself on its reputation for low taxes and has been
busy cutting
taxes for the wealthy and corporations,
further decreasing potential funds for school budgets.
Although
the Biden administration is hoping to curtail teacher shortages and
support teacher training in the American
Families Plan,
it doesn’t address low teacher pay. Save for “No Child
Left Behind,” which focused on test-based accountability,
federal involvement in education is constrained by the Constitution,
which makes no mention of education and therefore assigns
responsibility for schools to the states. (The federal government
has, however, used the carrot of funding and the stick of lawsuits to
promote equal protection for students against discrimination, most
prominently in desegregation battles).
Decentralization
of the education sector is one of the reasons why states
vary so widely when
it comes to teachers’ pay and student outcomes. Annual state
spending per student was $24,040 per student in New York and $9,346
in Florida. Jared says that his classroom has a television set older
than his high-school students.
In
March, about a hundred Hillsborough
teachers were laid off due
to budgetary problems. According to MaryAnn, they were “let go
very unceremoniously with anonymous emails that weren’t even
personally addressed.”
Some
state lawmakers actively oppose funding for public schools, says
Kriete, who notes that several of them have pulled him aside, telling
him off the record that they don’t believe the Florida
government should pay for free and high-quality public education.
“They don’t want to pay for teachers’ retirements.
They don’t want to offend anybody in the education field, but
they would just like [education] to be completely privatized here in
the state of Florida.”
Though
teacher unions in the state have played a powerful role in convincing
DeSantis to support pay increases, the fact that Florida is a
right-to-work state weakens the unions financially. Research shows
that right-to-work
laws tend
to hamper both union and non-union workers’ ability to secure
better wages as well as employee protections and job benefits.
Middleton,
where Jared and MaryAnn teach, is one of over 250 schools in the
Hillsborough County School District, the eighth largest in the nation
with over 200,000 K-12 students. It’s a district with lots of
movement — both teachers and students transfer constantly. The
dynamic perpetuates a vicious cycle: Low salaries don’t attract
teachers who stay in the job; poor retention and high turnover
negatively impact student performance, which lowers a teacher’s
performance evaluation, which results in no raises, which depresses
pay. And even if a teacher’s evaluation is high, the raises are
not nearly enough to keep them on the job.
The
pandemic generated a greater
social and cultural appreciation for
teachers because parents were suddenly forced to juggle remote work
and homebound schooling. However, that support hasn’t been
evident at the legislative level: DeSantis has
opposed teacher unions’ demands for across-the-board pay
raises,
Florida’s House and Senate have pushed back on Biden’s
American Rescue Plan that provided $1,000
federal stimulus bonuses for
teachers, and state lawmakers have long promoted merit
pay for
teachers, though it has proven to be an ineffective tool for
increasing student performance.
Overall,
the driving force has been an
overemphasis on budget austerity,
even when it comes to essentials like public education, going back to
the recession when then-Gov. Rick Scott cut $1 billion in state
education funding.
“What
I find odd is that there seems to be a disconnect between what the
public sees and believes in,” said Kriete. “We do know
that our community supports our teachers, and our communities
believe in public education.
But the legislature doesn’t seem to want to show teachers
respect that comes with the dollars — to give them a better
wage for the important, very difficult job that they’re doing.”
A
leisurely summer is unlikely for MaryAnn and Jared, only two of the
millions of teachers who deserve a break from an especially difficult
year. They can
hardly afford one.
MaryAnn is teaching three classes at the community college this
semester, and spent a week in June reading 700 essays for the AP
English exams. Jared is helping build a menu and kitchen staff at a
local restaurant, hoping to get his skills back in shape before he
starts a culinary arts program at the school.
When
I was a cook I had no problem with free labor,” said Jared. “I
would come into the $6 million kitchen and work an hour early and
leave an hour late. And I had no problem with it, because I was
learning something every day. But when it comes to teaching, you’re
not learning something every day, because you’re coming back to
the same exact set of issues every day. And nothing is changing. The
figureheads, the bureaucrats change, but the situation stays exactly
the same. It’s you and your kids, and you do the best you can.”
This
commentary was originally published
by Capital
& Main
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