Research Paper about Teachers' Salary

📌Category: Education, Life, Personal finance, Work
📌Words: 607
📌Pages: 3
📌Published: 16 February 2022

Teacher wages have been declining since 1979, and there have been little to no efforts to combat it. This decrease in teacher pay has had many adverse effects, such as a decrease in the quality of education and decreased teacher retention rate. Now we are faced with a nationwide problem affecting the education system and our next generation of children. And if we don't act quickly, the education of our successors could be permanently compromised.

In a study done by Eric A Hanushek, Simon Wiederhold, and Marc Pipunic, They tested 6400 teachers on their math and reading skills. They also looked at student achievement data from the Program for International Student Assessment. They compared the teachers' skills to that of other countries' teachers, and they also looked at the average scores of students on the Pisa compared to the average skills of the median paid teachers in their areas. They found that increasing the teachers math skills by one standard deviation also increased the students' scores on the Pisa by almost fifteen percent of a standard deviation. And that increasing teachers' language skills increased scores by a slightly less but still significant amount. They also found that the effect of teachers' intelligence on students was even more noticeable among low-income home students. The study found clear, conclusive evidence that an increase in teacher pay resulted in higher levels of cognition among hired teachers. And they suggest that increasing teacher pay is one significant way in which we could increase the number of possible teachers and by association the quality of the teachers we can choose from. They also noted that we pay our teachers 22% less than comparably educated working college graduates in America. So in America,  we not only pay teachers less than teachers in other countries, but we pay them marginally less than other college graduates with comparable degrees. This has severely limited our options when hiring teachers due to the small pool of people who want to become teachers. And as our teachers' intelligence goes down, so does that of our students. This creates a cycle in which we become less and less capable as time passes.

What compounds this issue is the retention rate of teachers that we already have. Approximately a quarter of all teachers that start in America quit the job within two years. And after five years, the teacher retention rate drops below half. Many cite their reasons as stress and workload, but they all share a distaste for the abysmal pay they were given. To give an idea of the level at which teachers' pay is inferior to other professions, consider the following. In Texas, the average teacher starting salary is $44852 for a bachelor's degree and $47491 for a master's degree. Comparatively, the average starting salary for these types of degrees is $47,654 for a bachelor's degree and $63340 for a master's degree. This means that teachers with a bachelor's degree are making almost 9.5% less than other occupations that require a similar level of education in Texas. The same stands for those with a master's degree making 25 percent less than their counterparts. We need to decrease or eliminate this difference in wages, or being a teacher may become a rare occupation leading to teacher shortages and a drop in our country's level of education.

To obtain funds to increase these wages, however, several things will need to be done. Firstly a slight increase in taxes in the affected districts would raise a substantial amount of required money. Additionally, funding for other programs would need to be somewhat limited. Some of the programs would include band, football, and other highly funded groups or activities. While this may sound bad at first, the decrease in the budget wouldn't be catastrophic. If the cut is issued similarly among all of the affected programs, its effect on their capabilities would be hardly noticeable while still regaining a large amount of the school's budget.

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