How about a staring salary of $100,000 a year?
Here is Daniel Pink at The Washington Post:
Adam DiPerna always had to hold it in.
As a Spanish teacher at Gerald G. Huesken Middle School in Lancaster, Pa., he’d arrive in his classroom at 7:10 a.m. each day and cannonball into a morning that left no time for a bathroom break. He’d teach back-to-back-to-back-to-back classes until his lunch period, 27 minutes during which he also had to heat and eat the food he’d brought from home, email parents about problems and absences, and field questions from students. After school, he coached wrestling, advised the student council and chaired the GHMS world language department. Work, from grading papers to preparing lessons, spilled into the evenings and weekends he wanted to spend with his wife and three kids.
For his efforts, DiPerna — with a Bucknell University diploma and a master’s degree in education — earned less than any college graduate he knew. So, last year, after a decade and a half in the classroom, he quit teaching to take a job as a sales representative at a large packaging company, trading a life of conjugated verbs for a new life of corrugated cardboard. “I wanted to be a public servant,” DiPerna, 42, told me. “I did not get into teaching to make a lot of money. But I also didn’t get into it to barely scrape by.”
He earned more in his first partial year as a paper salesman than in his 15th year as a top-rated teacher. “I get paid more money,” he said. “And I can listen to the call of nature.”
DiPerna’s gain is America’s loss. Four years after the onset of the pandemic, students across the country are still struggling. Test scores are falling. Absenteeism is rising. Meanwhile, about 44 percent of U.S. schools face a teacher shortage.
If we’re serious about hanging on to capable educators, and attracting new ones, we should start treating them like true professionals. And one place to begin is compensation.
Why not pay America’s teachers a minimum salary of $100,000 a year?
The average annual salary for public school teachers during 2021-2022 was $66,397, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, a nearly 8 percent pay cut, in inflation-adjusted terms, from a decade ago. Salary isn’t the only reason educators exit the profession. But whether they work in suburban New York or rural Mississippi, teachers earn significantly less than they could in other fields.
Read the rest here.
That would be great for teachers in public schools, but what about teachers in Christian school? They can’t raise taxes to give them a better salary. Raising tuition would not accommodate students from low income families.