I've got proof.
What's the difference between a "job" and a "career"?
A simple search yields these results:
The common denominator in all the definitions: Progress.
Let me explain to you what "progress" means for a teacher.
Step increases.
For those of you who don't know, this is what a teacher salary schedule looks like:
A teacher, right out of school with a bachelor's degree will make $39,723 (top right). In the city where I used to live, the starting salary for the city sanitation workers is $38,000 and they are not required to have a degree.
In her second year, that teacher will get a step increase (that is: move from step 1 to step 2, down one box) and she will get $745 more for the YEAR. That is less than a 2% increase. As a comparison, the SSA COLA adjustment for 2021 was 5.9%. Mind you - that this teacher will probably work overtime, every day. They will go to school sports games to cheer on their students and forge relationships. They will attend teacher induction classes. And they will do a boatload more work that I can't even think of right now. But none of that is paid. And because public schools are so underfunded, that teacher may be "voluntold" to bake cookies for the bake sale, or to make posters for the pep rally, or attend a recruitment fair on the weekend. All out of the kindness of their hearts because "it's what's best for kids."
Now if that teacher can figure out a way to get a few extra hours each week, she might go back to school, on her own dime, and start taking classes towards her Master's degree. And if she (based on this schedule) completes 18 hours, then she stands to make $41,225 in her second year (down one box and to the left one box). That's almost a 4% increase - however, now she has student loans to pay back. So is she really making any extra money? And note, we still haven't matched the SSA COLA adjustment. So IF inflation is bad, this teacher is basically barely getting by.
So, no progress here, right?
Reason #1 teaching isn't a career.
But what if that first year teacher is an AWESOME teacher? And I mean, the BEST teacher you've ever seen. Doesn't she get something? Yes, sometimes.
Sometimes, she gets the worst students. Because they need a strong teacher.
Sometimes she gets the best students, who have the worst parents because their expectations do not match reality. And any teacher will tell you, they'd rather deal with students than parents. (PS - if you are one of those parents, lay off. That one question on the test is NOT why Johnny is failing.)
Sometimes she gets asked to sit on a committee that meets every week and talks about what they want to do and then realizes they have no money to do it, so everyone just wasted a good hour
of grading time after school.
And sometimes she gets an award, like Teacher of the Year, which gets her a plaque outside her door, and maybe a nice dinner or banquet for all the other teachers who are like her. And then she gets to sit on another committee and do MORE work because she is just THAT awesome! Congrats.
But progress isn't always about pay, right? Sometimes it's about growing in your career. Learning new skills (ie: upskilling). Well, sometimes teachers get to choose the professional development (PD) courses that they want to attend. But often times, the PD is district sponsored and organized. And then the PD is based on what the district wants you to know. This can range in topics such as:
1) Whatever the new initiative is this year, that you will never do long enough to actually get good at.
2) Differentiation - that's all they talk about. I sat through differentiation PD EVERY YEAR and I don't feel like I ever got any better at it because, you know what didn't come with the PD? Extra time to actually implement the strategies they taught you. So here they think teachers aren't differentiating because they don't know how, but the real problem is the crap resources we get don't actually lend themselves to differentiation.
3) Random things that don't really make you a better teacher but may help you survive another year.
The year I decided to leave teaching - I learned more in 3 months through LinkedIn Learning, Udemy, YouTube, etc., than I learned in 14 years of teaching. I became a certified Scrum Master and was working towards my Six Sigma, Agile, and Lean certifications. I learned more about the corporate world and software development in those three months than I ever learned about being a better teacher in 14 years.
So there was basically no progress in terms of skill advancement either.
Reason #2 teaching isn't a career.
And what if I had become the BEST TEACHER EVER?
What do I get? What is the incentive to keep improving?
I don't get a raise based on my certifications - they aren't even recognized in the salary schedule unless they are earned through an accredited college and can be counted towards a degree, and we already saw what those increases were like (barely enough to cover the cost of tuition). And apart from moving into a position where maybe I train other teachers, those positions don't usually make much more than the teachers do, and they are severely limited in number. So for most teachers, there is nothing for them except to teach.
And even so, role progression in education is nothing compared to the corporate sector. Here is a typical career path for someone at my company, which I imagine is pretty standard:
- Chief
- Vice President
- Director
- Team Lead/Manager
- Employee
And I am guessing there is more than a 2% pay bump between those roles.
And for visual impact, here is the teacher.
- Superintendent
- Principal
- Vice Principal
- Teacher
Principal salaries are NOT disclosed, so I can't tell you what the pay bump is between them. But I have been told that it is a slight increase in per diem pay, and the contract is extended from 190 days to maybe 210 for VPs and 240 for principals. So principals are getting paid more, but principals also have to work nights, and weekends, and they have to be on-site all summer long (VPs usually get a month off but rarely take it).
When you have thousands of teachers vying for a handful of principalships, there are a lot of people who get left behind. And some principals stay in the same school for their entire career. So it's often 20+ years before another seat opens.
So maybe this helps qualify teaching as a career - but what if you don't want to be a principal? Then what? Not every teacher has the desire. Shouldn't there be a career path that doesn't include a role change?
So for a teacher that just wants to be a teacher, Reason #3 teaching isn't a career.
One of the last things I see in the career definition is something about long term goals. What is a teacher's ultimate goal?
1. To increase learning outcomes for the students.
2. To retire with some money.
The teacher retirement system is struggling in a lot of places, so we will leave that one alone. I will say that my 401(k) will have more money in it after 3 years than my teacher retirement account had in it after 7. While a pension is nice, it's not a big enough carrot for me to subject myself to 30 years of torture.
So what about our other main goal? Are we able to improve learning outcomes for our students?
We fight like hell all year long to move our students up. And then June comes, and they move on to the next grade. And here comes August with a whole new batch of kids, with different learning deficits and different personalities, so all the lessons we spent so much time perfecting last year, we have to totally revamp or toss. And that three-week long research paper that we did that was AWESOME, well now we have to cut it down to a week because there was a hurricane, or a snowstorm, or a parade and we lost time and we've got benchmarks next week and our kids need to be done with this standard.
A lot of people compare it to a hamster on a wheel - and I can see that if the wheel is really a concrete square, and the hamster is really small, and doesn't really get all the nourishment it should from it's food, and it's owner kind of ignores him, so he feels a little like no one gives a shit if he moves the wheel. Oh, that's burnout. And then teachers quit.
So why do teachers really quit?
Because they got sold a bill of goods. They were told that they were going to have these awesome careers - and they were going to do great things, and then they see all their friends progressing in their careers and here sits the teacher, exactly where they were 14 years ago fresh out of school.
If people want to call teaching a career, then there needs to be an actual career path that makes the job enticing for someone to want to do it. The pension is losing it's appeal. In the very least, annual raises need to coincide with inflation. And there needs to be less work. Everything doesn't need to be graded, or tested. I know this country thrives on statistics, but statistics do not tell the whole story and it's sucking the life out of teaching. There need to be more schools, and smaller classes, but guess what you need for that to happen? Teachers.
That's all I got.