Teachers should be paid more because they are overworked, under-supplied, and underpaid. This is leading to a shortage of teachers. Teachers are getting less and less funding. They are having to buy their own supplies and aren’t able to buy what they need. I sm someone who has seen this impact first hand; teachers are breaking up fights, spending at least fifty hours a week grading, planning, and emailing, all to have that work go unappreciated.
Because of an archaic and outdated federal regulation that excludes teachers from critical wage and hour protections, over a million classroom teachers are significantly underpaid. Teachers are living with their parents in the early years of their career to be able to save enough money to live on their own. On average teachers spend around $470 dollars a year on supplies for the classroom. All of that money goes unreimbursed. In 2019–20, 95% of public school teachers nationally spent their own money on classroom supplies without having been reimbursed, and, in every state, more than 9 out of 10 teachers incurred these unreimbursed expenses.
Despite being excluded from the FLSA’s protections along with high earning doctors and lawyers, teachers make just 80.8 cents on the dollar compared to similarly educated professionals. The average median salary for K-12 teachers in the 2019-2020 school year was $63,645; comparatively, the median salary for doctors was $208,000 in 2020 while the median pay for lawyers in 2020 was $126,930.
