Our education system will soon collapse. Here are the reasons why.
First, teachers are leaving the profession in unprecedented numbers and few students are preparing to become teachers. In 2021 alone, 600,000 teachers resigned from private education and 900,000 resigned from public education.
Since 2010, total enrollment in teacher preparation programs nationwide has declined by 33%, while the number of students enrolling in other bachelor’s degree programs has increased, according to the Center for American Progress.
Most parents surveyed by PDK International in 2018 indicated that they don’t want their children to become teachers. Current and former teachers don’t want their children to become teachers either; whereas, in the 1970s and 1980s, the children of teachers were more than twice as likely as other children to become teachers themselves.
Second, teachers make low salaries for their education and experience, have difficult working conditions, take a significant amount of work home, must spend their own money on books and supplies and have little respect from lawmakers, parents and those in other professions.
Nationwide the average teacher’s salary is $63,645; in Utah, $57,487 with a typical range between $50,183 and $66,379. The non-profit Education Resource Strategies reported that average teachers’ salaries have remained flat since the 1990s after controlling for inflation; and, in most states, K-12 teachers’ salaries fall below the living wage – with teachers who instruct our youngest students earning well below that.
The Economic Policy Institute reports that teachers earn 19% less than similarly skilled and educated professionals. The EPI compared teachers’ and other professionals’ salaries on a weekly basis, and so took into consideration the weeks during the summer for which teachers are not paid.
The EPI found that teachers spend their summers doing professional development and preparing for the upcoming school year, while employees in other fields receive training and preparation with pay on the company’s time. The EPI also found that teachers are not compensated for the work they do in the evenings and on weekends, or for their many responsibilities beyond their teaching assignments.
Third, the teaching profession has traditionally been filled by generations of women who have been willing to do an enormous amount of work for low pay — and that is going away. For example, many women from the Silent Generation, Baby Boomers and Generation X saw themselves as “second income earners,” as did the legislators allocating funds for education. In the 1970s, 33% of women who enrolled in colleges majored in education. In recent years, that percentage has dropped to 11% and is continuing to fall. Women, who currently make up 90% of elementary teachers and 60% of high school teachers, do not have women or men rising to take their places.
Women from Generations Y and Z insist on salaries commensurate with their experience and education. They want a work-life balance, never to be found in education. And they want respect. They will not become teachers, or if they do, they will not stay. And who can blame the women (and others) of Generations Y and Z for wanting something more.
What will happen to our education system, already filled with substitute teachers and under-qualified personnel, given the huge exodus from the profession, few teachers being prepared for the profession and upcoming generations of women who are appropriately refusing to subsidize an unsustainable and poorly funded system?
To ensure that we continue to have teachers, the Utah Legislature would need to provide funds to pay teachers 20% beyond current salaries, with reasonable increases annually, and funds to improve working conditions. New teachers will expect a workload that is reasonable – so more, not fewer, teachers will be required to reduce class size and improve conditions in schools.
Behavior specialists, social workers, nurses, instructional coaches, counselors and other support personnel will need to double and triple in number to meet students’ needs and reduce the workplace requirement on teachers to be everything to everybody in their schools.
The time of reckoning is at hand. Leaders must either make an unprecedented investment in our education system now or watch as the current system sinks into the abyss of history.
Cynthia Kimball Phillips
Cynthia Kimball Phillips is a secondary teacher of English language arts, history, Latin and ancient Greek at the Weilenmann School of Discovery, Park City.