Why Have Teacher Salaries Remain Essentially Flat Since 1990? Its Demographics.

A study that compared the average teacher salaries nationwide, between 1990 and 2010 have found that teacher salaries have remained essentially flat during the study period.  In 1990 the average teacher salary was $53,028 and increased to only $54,819 in 2010, an increase of only 3.3%.  By contrast, inflation rose 67% between 1990 and 2010, which should result in an average teacher salary of $88,500 dollars.  Why the difference?

The answer is the demographics of the teaching profession.  Back in 1990 teaching was considered a long-term professional career with the average teacher working 15 years and that there were more 20 year teachers than new teachers in the nation's public schools.  However, that all changed with people like Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, and Eli Broad and the deep pocketed education reform organizations who demonized and blamed teachers for society's ills.  The buzz word was "teacher accountability" and all students could succeed if only they had a "quality teacher" in the classroom.  This resulted in States developing teacher evaluation systems, complete with "junk Science" called the Value Added Method (VAM) that was supposed to measure student growth and assign a value to a teacher's effectiveness.  The VAM errors were so bad that many States are revising or abandoning  their hastily developed teacher evaluation systems.  Unfortunately, the damage to the education system has been already done.   Teacher experience, once prized, was considered unnecessary as administrators wanted young and cheap teachers who were easier to control. In places like New York City, hiring experienced teachers came with a financial liability to the school.  Many long-term teachers have resigned or took early retirement due to the added stress and unfair evaluation metrics being used to grade them.  The result is an emerging teacher shortage nationwide as fewer prospective teachers are going into the profession and less teachers are staying long-term.

The chart above shows how the demographics have changed during the era of education reform.  Before education reform the majority of teachers stayed for 15 years and longer and were fully vested in their students educational goals while  getting a livable wage and a secure pension,  Now that education reform has done its damage to the teaching profession, students are subject to high teacher turnover, an unstable school environment, and reduced educational achievement as new teachers struggle to learn and teach the curriculum.  The bottom line is that the students are simply guinea pigs to untested.programs, unnecessary field tests, and a steep learning curve for the "newbie" teachers.

Is it any wonder that the average teacher salary nationwide has remained essentially unchanged?  The majority of teachers are now "newbies", with one year of experience and what was once a long-term professional career has become a stepping stone, to a career outside the classroom.  How that is good for student academic achievement is beyond me.

The New Recipients Of My 2013 Golden Turkey Award.

Yes, its Thanksgiving and the time for me to issue my annual "Golden Turkey Award".  Who are the most deserving recipients of the award this year?  There was quite a bit of competition this year.  Christine Quinn, Chancellor Dennis Walcott (past winner), President Obama, Meryl Tisch, the idiots at Tweed, and of course Mayor Bloomberg's failed education legacy (past winner).  However, I have identified the three most deserving individuals that are my recipients this year because of their failure to understand the New York City Public Schools.

First, and foremost is the Commissioner of the State Education Department, John T. King who has proven to be inept at his position and alienated everybody he encounters, except the Governor.
Mr King has imposed an unworkable "teacher evaluation system" complete with "junk science" and was bitterly disappointed when only 1% of the teachers statewide were rated "ineffective".  To ensure that doesn't happen in New York City, he imposed a more stringent "teacher evaluation system" and to make sure that more teachers are rated "ineffective", the "junk science" scores alone can be used to determine a teacher's rating.

Now he has tried to impose high stakes testing throughout the State from Kindergarten to high school and demands the use of "common core" even when the materials and teacher training are lacking.  He tried to impose restrictions at public meetings that backfired in his face.  Moreover, his "I'm always right" attitude has even turned off many of his allies.  Finally, his insistence in keeping inBloom inc. has made him a "laughingstock" of the country as all the other States have either dropped or are dropping the company.

Second, is the Federal Education Secretary, Arnie Duncan, the basketball playing buddy of the President, who has shown to speak out of both sides of his mouth and in his latest gaffe has complained that "white suburban soccer moms are discovering that their children are not as brilliant as they think".  Only to apologize the next day. 

Arnie Duncan's education legacy as head of the Chicago School System was of failure and his tenure as the Education Secretary is no better.

Finally, I bring you the clueless Campbell Brown who falsely claims that teacher's found guilty of "sexual misconduct" are being allowed to teach in the classroom.  Of course what Campbell Brown either fails or doesn't want to understand that accusations of "sexual misconduct" is not evidence.  Therefore, in the warped world of Campbell Brown any accusation that an investigator substantiates must be true and no damn evidence is needed.  In other words "due process rights" and the assumption that a teacher is "innocent until proven guilty" that is part of our country's history is foreign to Campbell Brown's assumption that any suspicion of "sexual misconduct" is good enough for her to have the teacher terminated.

I guess Ms. Brown would be happier if our justice system was more like Nazi Germany's or the Soviet Union under Stalin.

The "Restart/Transformation" Schools Are Shortchanging The Students By Not Giving Them A Proper Science Education.

I have been to three "Restart" Schools this school year and one of my ATR friends have been to a "Transformation" school and we both found that the four schools are shortchanging the students by not providing a proper science education and jeopardizing their ability to obtain a "Regents Diploma".

All four schools only give four, not five classes of science weekly. These schools shortchange the students who take Science by one class weekly. This means that more pressure is put on the teachers to keep the students on task since the Science curriculum is based upon five classes weekly, plus a laboratory period. This requires that enrichment lessons to make science more interesting has to be abandoned as the teachers strain to fit five days of work into four, not an educationally sound plan. Especially for struggling students. Worse yet, many of the teachers teaching Earth Science, the second Science needed to get a High School diploma, are not certified in the subject. Many of the Science teachers teaching Earth Science are Living Environment teachers and are required to teach the Earth Science classes which is not educationally fair to the students. Especially, the ones who want the more valuable Regents diploma. Furthermore, all these schools appear to have vacancies, either hidden or announced and have failed to fill them. The question is why?

You might ask why would the "Restart/Transformation" schools shortchange the Science students and not fill their other vacancies? Don't they need to show academic improvement to survive? Wouldn't extra teachers help student academic achievement? You would think so. wouldn't you? However, it is really about the budget for these principals. First, by shortchanging the students one class weekly, the school does not have to hire two Science teachers and by having uncertified Science teachers teaching Earth Science, they don't have to hire hard to find Earth Science teachers who tend to be highly paid. The schools know that they only need to achieve a 60% graduation rate and reduce the dropout rate by 5% to meet the federal funding requirements so if the students are failing their courses, just give them "credit recovery programs" for the last month to get them to pass and not dropout. Knowledge, what knowledge? Who cares if these students are not "career or college ready"? That's society's problem. For the school it is meeting the 60% graduation rate and reducing the dropout rate by 5% by any means possible.

As for the long-term future of these students? It is not the school's problem once they award the academically challenged students their bogus diplomas. "Children last. Always".

The Phony Graduation Statistics Are Apparent In An Increase In Students Who Need To Take Remedial Courses In The City's Community Colleges.

We now have even more evidence that many of our high school graduates are not ready for college as the percentage of high school graduates needing remedial course work has increased 3.2% to an astounding 74.4% and this would be even higher if CUNY used the national average of 45 passing rate on entrance exams in math rather than the "dumbed down" 30 used for determining if an entering student needs remedial course work. The New York Post, of all the media outlets reported on the disappointing numbers in an article that further puts to rest any real academic achievement during the failed Bloomberg/Klein Administration. In fact, shockingly, the New York Post Editorial Board actually blamed the New York State Education Department for "dumbing down" tests while giving the Mayor and the ex-Chancellor a free ride from the blame that allowed for this educational travesty.

This is just another result of how both the State and the City has cheapened academic achievement and are graduating students that are not capable to do college course work and even hold a white collar job. The failure of the City and State to provide a solid and well-rounded education for the students under their authority seems to be generally ignored by the majority of the media and should be called what I really think it is, a "junk education" .

Now as these students graduate and have graduated with suspect diplomas, due to phony credits and "dumbed down" tests what will happen to them in the real world? Furthermore, as these people become adults and have children themselves, will the next generation of students fall into the same trap of limited academic achievement and graduating with a diploma that is not worth the paper it is printed on? I hope not.

At one time New York State and City set the gold standard for educating their students now both the City and State Education Departments have lowered these standards to the point that both the New York State tests and the New York City High School diplomas are a joke. It is a real pity on how both the City and State has weakened academic achievement to the point that it really is "junk education".