More on Teachers

Following up on my post the other day about unlicensed teachers in Indiana, it is notable that teachers have had to go on strike in W. Virginia in order to get a 5% raise instituted over the course of the next few years.

Let's not kid ourselves: the W. Virginia teachers went on strike so that their "raise" (such as it is) at least has a puncher's chance of keeping up with inflation.

A former teacher myself, I found this infographic rather interesting:

The blue line represents the national teacher salary average; the red line underneath represents Indiana teachers' salaries. The numbers are adjusted for inflation, and you will note that a teacher's salary has lost 10% of its value/spending power since 2010.

This is simply unacceptable. I read another interesting take on the relative lack of popular interest in this increasingly troublesome problem in The Baffler. I would encourage anyone to click through and read the entire thing. A few snippets:

Why do we attend to an older white man’s naïve belief that coal’s comin’ back while we ignore an educator’s frustrations about miserable working conditions and inadequate salaries? Why can we review the causes of deindustrialization for the umpteenth time while refusing to discuss what has been sacrificed at the altar of bipartisan tax cuts?

...

the lack of coverage reflects the structural anti-labor, anti-union bias embedded in the consensusphere. The ownership class in the media certainly sympathizes with their peers in other industries. We wouldn’t want people to read too many stories about strikes and start getting ideas, would we? Striking teachers today, striking reporters tomorrow, and before you know it Americans might start asking why their wages have remained stagnant for forty years.