Betsy DeVos and the Koch brothers must be so proud: Michigan teacher salaries down 16% from 2009
It’s taken years of concerted effort but, at long last, Betsy DeVos and the Koch brothers can finally claim victory: Teachers in Michigan are now paid less today in both real and corrected-for-inflations dollars. In 2009, the average teacher salary in our state was $63,025. In 2017, the most recent year for which we have data, the average was only $61,908. Adjusted for inflation, that’s a whopping 16% drop in just 8 years.
What happened between 2009 when the country was just emerging from the worse economic castastrophe since the Great Depression and 2017 when the economy had been on an upward climb since President Obama took office? Well, Michigan voters elected a governor who mistakenly believed he could run a state government like a business and a state legislature that was gerrymander-packed with anti-union corporatists who passed a massive tax cut for corporations, took billions of dollars from school funding, and spent enormous amounts of energy demeaning teachers by blaming them for poor educational outcomes that were the result of elements completely out of control (poverty, education disinvestment, and parental disengagement, for example.)
So now that the corporatist “education reformers” have gotten their way, putting teachers in their place by reducing their pay and slashing their benefits, things must be humming along pretty well, right? Actually, not so much. As anyone with a couple of brain cells to bang together could have predicted, Michigan now faces a teacher shortage:
Michigan is battling a persistent shortage of teachers early in the school year, prompting CONTINUE READING:Betsy DeVos and the Koch brothers must be so proud: Michigan teacher salaries down 16% from 2009 | Eclectablog
