Unfortunately, for most States and School Districts around the country, salaries are very much part of why both schools and teachers in the classrooms are struggling. I've spent five years in secondary classroom teaching assignments, three years in post secondary positions, and another eight years evaluating educators and prospective educators for a half dozen states. Nothing close to the salary you listed in your question has been available to me or any of my direct peers, and the suggestion from Donna about incomes teachers might earn in the St. Paul Schools is close to unimaginable. The mid-80 thousand-dollar salary range suggested there is greater than I earned during my public and elite private secondary school teaching assignments combined, which included coaching stipends and athletic leadership roles on top of classroom teaching responsibilities. Today, with a Master's degree and three-plus years of post-graduate work beyond that, I could earn in the mid-30 thousand-dollar range in the school systems around the Denver metro area. In the latter half of the past decade, the largest and, at the time, highest paid school district along the front range raised starting salaries for new teachers to better than $30,000.00 for the first time in Colorado, according to proud media releases. When I left Texas around a decade ago, salaries above the mid-to-upper 30 thousands were reserved for and paid to only a select few educators. That's changed to be more reflective of a reasonable, livable wage since that time, and with my level of experience and education, I could be in line to earn in the mid 40 thousands in the Lone Star State now, if only teaching jobs were in any way available.
Included in the problem across the Southwest is that educators who don't speak Spanish will be promptly and immediately relegated to the bottom of any pool of applicants. Non-Spanish speaking educators can forget about employment in the public schools in any of the Sanctuary Cities, since the demographics in those cities have shifted to where Hispanic students make up sizable majorities of the student population in the classrooms. Employing English only speakers necessitates hiring a separate translator who will make 80-90 percent of what the teachers make without any of the credentialing requirement.
Few here on Y!A could be expected to grasp what years in the field have made evident – that in the states where I was employed to lead evaluation projects for educators and prospective educators there were more than twice as many licensed teachers on the States' rolls who were credentialed, of appropriate age, and by all measures available to teach than there were classroom teaching jobs, according to State records. Just before the turn of the millennium, Texas Education Agency (TEA) officials acknowledged having over 51,000 certified, available teachers on the TEA rolls, according to our liaison, Dr. Paul Grubb, while the State recognized barely more than 20,000 actual, verifiable teaching positions within the school districts and registered private schools recognizable to the TEA. If you add to that current policies in place in many states, where alternate licensure programs such as Texas' Education Service Centers, or the Rocky Mountain based Denver Teaching Fellows recruit candidates non-stop, there is an ample supply of educators who’ve never been required to go through full university level teaching programs who will be hired at reduced wages with special, restrictive contracts for several years while they’re expected to be brought up to speed for classroom teaching. All of that barely differs from the typical hiring process of illegals across the Aztlan targeted states and is one more way the public sector has sold out to accommodate the outsiders. More information is available on that topic from a former political leader who spent nearly a decade as a classroom teacher in the book “In Mortal Danger.”
While serving to implement various states' teacher evaluation programs through the 90's for National Evaluation Systems, which has since been taken over by British education giant, Pearson Education, my judgment and skills were applied for evaluating professional knowledge and expertise for tens of thousands of prospective educators. That included serving as part of the design team and a long-term facilitator and multi-subject leader for the Professional License Assessment for Colorado Educators (PLACE) Exam that’s been in place for the better part of two decades now. I held a similar role in training other professional educators to replicate my work and wrote detailed scoring rubrics for both California and Massachusetts State Departments of Education. The point I am trying to make here is that I have some expertise in this field that appears to be distinctly lacking in the range of answers posted, thus far.
I don't wish to dispute that there are a few select states that pay better than what is reported as the per-capita income for wage earners across the country, but those states and teaching positions are far from the norm and the income may still not rise to an average, per-capita calculation for the state or local district where pay scales are compared to other earners in the community. Perhaps an example of the disconnect between teacher compensation and professional preparation or performance that’s markedly different from public sector earning potential could be recognizable through salaries based on educational achievement levels, such as Master's degrees and post-graduate work, which typically boost earning potential by no more than $300.00 to $500.00 in compensation above base wages for the contract period. Doing simple math, that level of reward would then repay typical costs incurred for ongoing education after a daunting extra 20-25 years of additional service in the classroom. Please let me offer, as well, that I’ve not yet worked directly with an educator who’s earned a salary that's reached the average of what I've seen reported on government wage sites nor private sites such as salary.com, and my exposure and involvement with other professional educators has extended into many hundreds over the years.
I’m well aware that my familiarity with the intricacies of teaching as a profession and potential for earning capacity is not comprehensive. My extensive knowledge is more regional but does include a few satellite states from distant parts of the country. Nevertheless, the suggestion that limiting and potentially lowering teachers' salaries would serve to enhance any part of the education process shows considerable misunderstanding of the institution currently in place. Few individuals go into teaching with aspirations or any sort of expectation for earning serious money. Among the unsettling issues weighing on educators our universities turn out is that during unprecedented periods of growth from the mid-90's to early 2000's, many of the subjects students earned certification in had limited enough openings in the schools to where 20-30 percent of the graduates were unemployable in the field, despite years of study and massive higher education costs incurred. Leaders of the various State Departments of Education I worked with were surprisingly forthcoming with their admissions about the limited employment opportunities at the time. Under the current economic conditions, the numbers of graduates unable to secure positions with the schools is bound to have increased to more disturbing and career threatening levels for anyone in the field.
If you have a gripe or genuine concern over how your individual state is handling compensating teachers, please handle it directly there and don't try to suggest teachers as a whole are overpaid. Most of the country will simply see your complaint and concern as petty for individuals who routinely come in at the bottom of any scale for earning capacity for college educated individuals. Include in that the multicultural demands placed on classroom teachers and requirement for most to be bilingual to teach in increasing numbers of states, and educators find themselves in a very bad place by virtue of political decisions and mandates they have no control over whatsoever. Please reconsider your thinking on this extraordinarily important topic.
This has already been a lengthy response on my part, so I won't belabor details regarding comments I might be willing to make over the quality and apparent capability of candidates for teaching licensure in the various states, other than to offer that there were distinct differences amongst groups of candidates tested and teaching levels of prospective educators who were evaluated under our program. Of course, as many in our Y!A community might envision, there were inescapable incidences of training papers, teaching tapes, and knowledge-based assessment criteria that were approached differently and scored less stringently as a result of directives from leaders in the various Departments of Education that appeared unmistakably political in nature. For some of us, that AA based component was a bit disturbing over what was regarded as a subtle shift from acceptable performance criteria for otherwise carefully defined scoring metrics.
http://finance.yahoo.com/college-education/article/110196/20-worst-paying-college-degrees-in-2010?mod=edu-continuing_education
http://www.payscale.com/mypayscale.aspx?pid=abb2e37c-82ad-405d-9ffa-82742df41327
http://financiallyfit.yahoo.com/finance/article-109295-4790-4-does-a-masters-degree-pay-off?ywaad=ad0035