Teacher pay high enough?

Reader comment on: The Teacher Pay Primary

Submitted by Miller Smith (United States), Apr 8, 2019 18:31

I work as a teacher for 30 years and Prince George's County Public Schools Maryland, a majority-black suburb of Washington DC. The pay there is not high enough. How do I know?

We have permanent substitutes in classes in every High School in middle school and elementary School across our County and have done this kind of behavior for the last 20 years. Why do we do this? a complete lack of qualified applicants. Most of the time we even lack an unqualified applicant.

one would have to raise the pay significantly higher than $13,000 per year in order to get at least one qualified applicant for each open position out of the 9000 teacher cadre we presently have.

We also suffer 16% turnover as the people we do recruit don't stay long, not even long enough to get tenure. They leave very quickly.

Just look at it from the business model so many capitalist seem to love. If you have a job that needs to get done and no one is applying, what do you need to do?

Well, Prince George's County Public Schools started recruiting teachers from the Philippines.Prince George's County Public Schools was able to demonstrate that there was no qualified American that could take the job or was willing to take the job. And we can't even get enough Filipinos as we still have hundreds of permanent substitutes.

So what price would we have to offer to get at least one qualified applicant for each position? our Union has asked this question and so have the researchers of the State board of education in Maryland of people all over the United States and in the metropolitan Washington DC area as well. They have made it very clear that a 50% increase would be enough to get them to apply. We can't afford that.

So there's no point in even raising the pay when nobody will take it.

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Other reader comments on this item

Title	By	Date
⇒ Teacher pay high enough? [321 words]	Miller Smith	Apr 8, 2019 18:31
Merit Pay [87 words]	Stuart Dunn	Mar 29, 2019 05:32
Not all states are the same in teacher pay [138 words]	AM	Mar 28, 2019 21:43
Competence [61 words]	David Lang Wardle	Mar 28, 2019 17:26
Why is this even an issue? [18 words]	Andrew Terhune	Mar 28, 2019 17:14

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