Don’t meet me in St. Louis
St. Louis is a great city — but its public school system is deeply troubled, and as teacher Peter Greene writes below, its teachers are “at the epicenter of just about every kind of assault on public education going on these days.” Here, from Greene’s engaging Curmudgucation blog, is a primer on what has befallen the St. Louis public schools for years now. Greene is a veteran teacher of English in a small town in Pennsylvania, who writes about a wide range of education issues.
By Peter Greene
St. Louis teachers are currently caught at the epicenter of just about every kind of assault on public education going on these days.
Their immediate concern is easy enough to spot. St. Louis teachers have remained frozen in time, sitting on the same step of the salary schedule for six years. In other words, if you were hired as a first-year teacher for St. Louis schools back in 2009, you are still making a first-year teacher’s salary today. The school district’s salary schedule shows that the steps have been adjusted once in that time span. So if you started in 2009 at $38,250, you’re now making $39,270. This is of course problematic because it would take $42,404just to keep pave with inflation. Meanwhile, as of two years ago, the mean wage for an elementary teacher in Missouri was $48,460. The union did reject the offer, but there’s not much more they can do. Teacher strikes are illegal in Missouri.
So St. Louis teachers have been taking an inflation-created pay cut every year, along with the added insult of remaining in the same place on the salary scale. The district has offered a 3.5 percent raise over a year and a half, with no prospect of advancing. (Also, just in case that’s not insulting enough, I just discovered that Missouri allows anyone to look up individual teacher salaries.)
You’ll be unshocked to learn that St. Louis teachers have been heading out the door in record numbers– in many cases within their very first week of school. This is not just a St. Louis thing; Missouri has been battling an inability to attract and retain teachers for years, to the point that they actually put together a group to study on the problem. It’s enough of a problem that a “non-profit” group is on the scene trying to help. Even Teach For America has been in St. Louis, but has not even met its own goals for putting its quickly trained teachers in St. Louis classrooms. And while there’s no reason to think that St. Louis teachers are mercenary and money-grubbing, when you are having trouble feeding your family and another district will offer you over $20,000 more to work there, who wants to tell their children, “Sorry, no meat this week because I want to keep being noble.”
Meanwhile, there are folks who claim that St. Louis schools are extra tough because of discipline problems, and there is clearly some sort of problem with the administration of discipline in Missouri school. A report released last spring shows that Missouri suspends African-American youths at a higher Don’t meet me in St. Louis - The Washington Post: