The Blame Game

As explained in Diane Ravitch's article, “American Schools in CRISIS,” educators are provided with little job security under Bush's No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Obama's Race to the Top educational reform initiatives; where teachers can be fired based on poor standardized test scores from their students (50). The majority of new teachers already quit within five years of entering the field; “demoralized” (Ravitch 50) by the effects of such high stakes and low resources (Ravitch 52). To combat this figure, many states have decreased the requirements for becoming a teacher, even allowing online licensure in Texas (Ravitch 51). To lower the standards of the “conservators of our common future” (Barber 122) is an irresponsible practice that must be reversed if students are to succeed. Barber proposes paying early childhood educators as much as lawyers to attract better teachers. Higher wages would encourage more ambitious individuals to enter the fields of primary and secondary education. Without highly-trained and intelligent educators, who are dedicated to progress and change, students will continue to stumble through a broken system, woefully unprepared for the task of becoming productive citizens.

The main idea of the article, “Ending the Blame Game”, is about how people have to take responsibility for their own happiness and how they must stop blaming other people if they aren’t happy with their own life. The author begins by stating that one person does not know how another person feels or what they need. She says that only the person themselves has the chance to take specific steps to make changes for themselves if they are unhappy. The author says that it is important to take an active approach instead of a reactive approach to other people’s behaviour. She suggests that one example of how people can take an active approach is to ask themselves what they need, want and are willing to do. The author also points out that other people

     High school teachers’ average salary varies across the world. The United States is said to be one of the richest countries in the world, yet our teachers are being paid one of the lowest amounts. The Education Intelligence Agency, author of the article “Ohio Teacher Overcomes Union’s Tolerance” published an International Teacher Salary Report ranking the fifty states by “how much the average salary exceeded per capita personal income.” According to the Education Intelligence Agency Ohio’s percentage rate is only fifty- five point one percent. According to the Education Intelligence Agency the lowest state percentage is in South Dakota at twenty- three point six percent and the highest state percentage is

America has encountered a change within the teaching profession: concerning, experience, age, credentials, and ethnic background (Feistritzer, 2011). It is almost as if the year of 2005, overturned the trend of older employed teachers (Feistritzer, 2011). A six-year survey shows that the amount of teachers under the age of thirty has increased drastically, and that most teachers have earned master degrees. Also, although teaching has been a predominately white profession, more Hispanic and African American teachers were hired between the years of 2005 and 2011 (Feistritzer, 2011).

“Teachers across 34 developed countries make about 22% less, on average, than their full-time counterparts with similar education levels who have chosen to do pretty much anything else with their lives,” (Edwards). If students are the future, why do teachers get short-changed with low salaries compared to other professionals? All teachers have a college education, yet with their low salaries, they spend many years paying off college loans. Next to the military, teachers have most important job in our country, and they are not paid for their

“The education teachers receive isn’t good for anything and that advanced degrees aren’t worth additional compensation like, say, a physician or architect would get. “The field of education is less challenging than other academic concentrations,” it says. (“Are teachers paid too much? - The Washington Post”) According to research many believe that teachers are just paid babysitters. In fact, it is a big debate among the population because many question our teachers and the job that they do. Since some of the population seem to think that teachers are just overpaid babysitters let's give them the pay of a babysitter, give them the benefits that they deserve, and give them the time off

The low pay for our educators is causing many negative effects. New York Times shows that the low income is causing sixty-two percent of teachers to have a second job outside of their teaching jobs. Just to have enough money to support their families and make ends meet. Most everyone decides to college to prevent having these struggles with money, and to avoid having to work multiple jobs, when they get older; however, not when it comes to living off of only a teacher’s income, the struggles to have enough money are interminable. This low pay is also causing most teachers to retire, and find new jobs. New York Times states, “every year 20 percent of teachers in urban districts quit. Nationwide, 46 percent of teachers quit before their fifth year. The turnover costs the

In 2013, the average annual salary of a teacher in the United States was 56,383 dollars. This is for all grades before college. it varies from an average of 75,279 dollars in New York, to an average of 39,580 in South Dakota (How Much Teachers Get Paid — State by State). That is a huge difference in pay for the exact same job. If the test results of students were equal to the teacher’s pay, we would have a much more concrete way of paying the teachers. If the state’s economy is struggling nowadays, they don’t have the money to pay the teachers what they deserve, but in this new way, they will be required to give the teachers their hard earned money. In every other job in the United States, you get paid based on your performance. With teachers, the principal does not have enough time to evaluate every teacher and pay them based on how well they did. If the teachers were paid based on the tests, there would finally be a way to evaluate how well they taught the students. The less effective teachers will be pushed out of the system, while the strong ones

The issue of teacher shortage today is continuing to grow. The effects of the achievement gap are reaching the teachers, not just the students: “...good administrators and teachers, who are doing their best under difficult circumstances, will be driven out of the profession…,” (Boyd-Zaharias 41). The achievement gap is part of the reason teachers feel they are underpaid, which happens to be one of the leading cause in teacher shortage considering, “Teachers were paid two percent less [than comparable workers] in 1994, but by 2015 the wage penalty rose to 17 percent,” (Long). Being a teacher requires passion in order to stay in the field, especially if the money in teaching is decreasing. Money is an important aspect for people when it comes to their careers, therefore, fewer people want to become teachers. This lack of teachers and the lack of college students studying to become a teacher leads to unqualified teachers and larger classroom sizes (Ostroff). Both of these causes are eventually affecting students’ learning environments. I chose this issue in education for my project because I have personally felt these effects, and I know others who have as well. As a future educator, I want to see better wages and better benefits, but this can only happen with qualified, passionate teachers. I plan on being one of them, and I plan on sparking a change. I am a future educator fighting to end teacher shortage.

Teachers have and will always have a big impact in everyone’s life and if not everyone, well, at least they did for me. They teach you everything you need to know about a subject and valuable life lessons, so why are they not paid sufficiently enough to make a decent living? Teachers salaries have always been low and I believe it is the time that changes. Being a lawyer, doctor, or engineer is great, but none of that would be possible without the insight of a teacher, I will inform you in this paper on why I believe there is a need for action. I will go over the background of teacher’s salaries, my ideas on what would be best for teachers not just in Texas, but nationwide, and pros and cons on the issues and ideas at hand.

This is another factor which could lead to high teacher turnover in the United States. The current teacher average salary has just gone higher by less than 4 percent from the salary of nearly two decades ago. This way, the teachers are not able to cope with the high inflation and escalated cost of life with this pay. This makes teachers to have high mobility rate in search for better jobs or the so called greener pastures.

With beginning teachers usually earning entirely less than other college graduates, the profession is at loss of top-notch, quality people who tend to find jobs seeking more money. Almost 50 percent leave the profession within 5 years, lured by higher pay and prestige elsewhere in the booming U.S. economy (World, 1999, par. 7). Starting teachers average a $25,735 salary in the United States compared to an engineer earning $56,820 or a physical therapist earning $56,600 (Engineer, 2000, par.1). And what signal does it send out about the value of good teachers and a good education when a 45-year-old teacher with a master’s degree earns $45,000 a year and a 25-year-old out of law school often starts at $80,000, considering a six year education for a master’s degree and a seven year education for a law degree (Greenhouse, 2002, par. 4)? A teacher is also given no compensation for the long hours spent basically in overtime work. The teacher’s day does not end when they leave school because if lesson plans, grading, or planning is not completed, it will have to be finished on their own time. Accountants, paralegals, and engineers all are compensated and get paid overtime for work that does not get completed in a regular day or if they want to stay and

The pervasiveness of blaming the victim extends all the way from the general public to the judges who preside over rape cases. There is a consistent propensity to assume guilt on behalf of the victim which helps support Mendelsohn’s theory and gives his ideas scientific merit. In a case study of a student who brought the issue of a personal experience with sexual assault to the Dean of students, the victim was

The article, The Effects of School-Level Victimization on Self-Blame: Evidence for Contextualized Social Cognitions, the researchers, Schacter, H. and Juvonen, J. (2015) examined school-level victimization as a moderator of associations between the peer victimization and the changes in two different types of self-blaming attributions; (characterological) and (behavioral) across the first year in middle school. They predicted that being in school with lower level of victimization would strengthen the victim’s sense like “it’s me and I cannot do anything about it”—charaterological self-blame. They also predicted that when peer victimization is not rare, bullied youth would be increasingly likely to attribute their experience to their behaviors like “being in the wrong place at the wrong place”. The moderator effects of school context ere tested by modeling cross-level

Lurking over our great country is a troubling issue that is plaguing the professional educational workforce. When compared worldwide, American teachers work the most hours, yet are paid in the lowest brackets when related to the top 32 nations (Teachers Pay). In addition, when you compare a teacher’s salary to other four year degree salaries, teachers are among the 5 lowest paid degrees (O’Shaughnessy). Not only are the salaries among the lowest in the American workforce, a typical teachers at home workload exceeds all other professional jobs by 20% (Current). Furthermore, teachers were only given a 2.3% salary raise in 2009. Yet the rate of inflation rose to 3.1% causing a loss in purchasing power and creating a hardship on the