Earlier this year, Envision Utah announced that it was going to study the teacher shortage and come up with recommendations. Envision Utah released the results of their study. Pay teachers a starting salary of $60,000. Veteran teachers would be paid as much as $110,000. Estimated cost? $500 million! Annually!
And how is this visionary? You can’t tell me that there wasn’t anyone in the room that looked at this idea and said, “This has absolutely no chance of passing?” Where is the innovation? There was no thinking out of the box. I had expected more, given the brain trust that made up the group that Envision had put together to try to solve the problem.
Teachers don’t want more money. They want more support. They don’t want to be the ones that are continually given new jobs to do, have their hands tied in trying to do the new jobs and not be given an increase in pay for taking on these new responsibilities.
The “teacher shortage” has been caused by a deficit in the personnel infrastructure in Utah’s education system. There are too many people telling teachers what to do and not enough supporting all that they need to do.
Students arrive at school each day with so much baggage. Teachers are expected to deal with all of that for every child and teach curriculum. A secondary teacher could have over 200 students. It isn’t possible. What they could use is support.
Students need to be biliterate. In English and in the language they speak at home. They can teach others at home how to speak, read and write English. It is what my father did with his parents, who came from Poland over 80 years ago.
A social worker in every building, or two, depending on the size of the school. A nurse for every school. A file server for all English language learners. A file server for all special education students.
End state-mandated testing. This is not an indicator of the effectiveness of the teachers. Especially if you consider how little time there is to teach after doing all of the other things that teachers have to do. Students need support like teachers do. If students are supported more and teachers have fewer extraneous responsibilities I suggest the outcomes will improve.
It has always been so easy to just pile on to teacher’s plates every time a new problem for students come up. “Just have teachers do it” is a common solution. State legislators all over the country decry federal government unfunded mandates but have no problem passing new requirements on to educators. This is why teachers burn out. Every year it is one more thing. For 2020, the Utah State Board of Education is going to require that all teachers to training on professional behavior.
Don’t get me wrong; if a teacher behaves badly they should be disciplined. But, every time a teacher is given a new responsibility it comes with a very minimum of training. And it should be noted that teachers do not commit all of the terrible behavior put upon children.
Granted, these solutions is going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars, every year. Paying teachers more is going to be as expensive. But it will do more to solve the teacher shortage than just paying teachers more. And it will provide well paying jobs to lots of people.
We must accept that education costs money. Pennies invested provide dollars of return. Utah used to be sixth in the nation for education effort. Now it is approaching 40th. Another race to the bottom?
And the tax reform commission wants to eliminate the restriction on income tax revenue being used only for education, cut the income tax and significantly expand the dependent deduction 5 times its current level.
Supply side economics doesn’t work. There are 20 trillion-plus bits of evidence. It is time to start paying up. A tax on the wealthiest would mean Jeff Bezos would only have $70 billion to $80 billion. I think he could get by.
And while we are at it, raise minimum wage too. Parents can’t be home to help their children if they have to work so many jobs.
How much longer are we going to wait?
Nicholas M. Bielaczyc
Nicholas M. Bielaczyc has taught in the Salt Lake City schools for 25 years.