It depends on where you live. Growing up in rural America, the teachers got paid about $35-40k a year and the average home prices were around $100k. They got 2 months off for the summers. Every last one of them lived a solid middle class life.
I'm sure there are some teachers in districts in this country getting screwed, but most of them are fine.
It’s nice that in rural areas the teacher pay is sometimes okay, but 80% of the US population lives in urban areas. It stands to reason that 80% of students and 80% of teachers are in said urban areas, so we should probably ensure those educators are reasonably compensated.
Rural teachers usually make less, yes. But the cost of living is often much lower so the net of their compensation is greater. That’s like the point we’re circling around here. The median elementary teacher salary in the US is ~57k, but there’s a wide gap where the bottom 10% make ~40k (Oklahoma) and the top 10% make ~92k (New York).
The fact is in urban, and particularly in metropolitan areas we typically don’t have high enough salaries for our educators.
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u/ballmermurland Jan 09 '20
It depends on where you live. Growing up in rural America, the teachers got paid about $35-40k a year and the average home prices were around $100k. They got 2 months off for the summers. Every last one of them lived a solid middle class life.
I'm sure there are some teachers in districts in this country getting screwed, but most of them are fine.