How Do You Live on a Teacher's Salary?

Surviving on a teachers salary

I completed my MA in teaching in 1998 from an Ivy League university. Many of my classmates went into debt quickly after we graduated. The City of New York did not pay us as much as we owed in student loans and we quickly learned we could not live the lives of our counterparts who had graduated with MBA’s, MD’s and JD’s. Some qualified for debt cancelation in city schools. I did not. I left the USA for Asia and found a better position there where I could be paid on par with other professionally educated workers. Other cultures valued teachers more that America did. I just accepted it as part of the American perspective. Many of my friends went to Europe.

It may sound sad, but the USA pays its teachers comparatively lower than any country in the industrialized world. These hard economic times are of our own creation-- had we made the teaching profession a desirable one, as the Scandinavians have done, we'd enjoy a much higher standard of living, as they do. The USA consequently does not even rank once in the top 20 countries in the world in any area of basic education: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Student_Assessment)

We are paying for our errors form the 70-80’s now. Those educated in those times are taking positions in the working world now. As Until the USA wakes up and fixes the educational system, any economic fix is a temporary one. We will all suffer together because of this lack of attention to the minds of our future. There should be no need to "inspire" financial genius for those in the education profession. No need more than any other industry anyway. Practicing licensed teachers know, that like any other field, Law, Medicine or Business, the practice of teaching is one which requires carefully applied sciences, critical reflection and at the least, professional licensure. With the licensure process as watered down as it progressively becomes every year, we kill the future of the country. The answer to 50% unlicensed teachers in many of America’s school districts is not an easier test! Would you want to make the medical boards easier because so many doctors fail? Then why do they make it easier to be a teacher? Make it harder to be a licensed teacher, even harder to gain tenure, and pay more for those who attain these levels. That is our only choice.

Until then, our best teachers will leave to teach European and Asia. Any financial inspiration teachers need will be supplied, unfortunately by someone else and someone else will reap the benefit. So who really looses when we don’t pay our teachers?

When American-educated teachers find good reasons to leave the USA and teach in other countries, as above, it's a sign that our politicians, school boards, school administrators, and government education bureaucrats have calcified into a form of uselessness. We ought to literally put all of THEM on a form of "No Child Left Behind" measurement that exposes THEIR lack of "Adequate Yearly Progress" amd culminates in THEIR replacement.

Then we should recruit back to the USA all the teachers who have left here and successfully taught abroad, paying them whatever it takes to bring home world-class common sense and truly reform our schools.

We Americans have fancied ourselves best at everything for so long, we are having a very hard time 'fessing up to the fact that we're not.

How Do You Live on a Teacher's Salary

My father was a teacher at a technical school in Wisconsin for about 30 years. We did alright money wise; my brother's and my college education were 100% paid for, we each were bought our first cars, and we were paid for our good grades on report cards. My mother was a home economics teacher, but later became a social worker. Both of my parents are now retired and have comfortable lives based on the savings from a teacher's and social worker's income.

My mother-in-law was a licensed nurse practioner who is now a housekeeper at a hospital in WI. She is able to live on only $16,000 which is about $54,000 less than what my husband and I make.

I will agree that teachers need to be paid more, but with saving and correct spending, a budget can be stretched. My father finally retired because he was pressured to lower his standards when it came to grading exams. My father's credibility as a teacher to install knowledge was being usurped by management. As an employer you expect an applicant to have a certain amount of ability and training inorder to do the job. Management asked my father to pass students that didn't know the rudiments and that would have been an insult to his teaching cred. I'm surprised my father lasted as long as he did as a teacher. It was a thankless job most of the time; the students expected to pass every exam even though they obviously didn't know anything; his daily open hours for extra help saw no students; homework was turned in months too late and he was being asked to lower the grading standards. In smaller communitities employers know who teaches what classes; my father did the right thing to save his integrity.

An American teacher should not have to go abroad to make a living and we need to take pride in our education. The thought that students have to bring in the supplies for teachers and other students amazes me! There are no more textbooks just packets. Our education system is pretty sad.