The true cost of being a teacher
7 teachers tell us what they buy for their classrooms, and how.
When you walk into a public school classroom, what do you see? Posters on the walls, baskets of scissors and glue sticks and pencils, dry erase markers, copied and stapled worksheet packets, shelves and bins of books, decorations commemorating the seasons, sometimes bean bag chairs or floor pillows, definitely some kind of big rug for the younger grades. There’s often furniture and a mini-fridge, there are tissues and Clorox wipes and sometimes a class pet.
Schools don’t typically supply this stuff. Teachers do. 94 percent of US public school teachers spend their own money on school supplies. The amount per year varies; what districts and schools provide (or, better put, don’t provide) varies.
So too do teacher salaries. The National Education Association highlighted a $40,000 discrepancy between what the average teacher makes in New York versus what one makes in Mississippi, where the average salary in 2018 was $44,926; New York’s top salary ranking drops to 17th, however, when adjusted for cost of living. Put simply, teachers are underpaid, and many are leaving education at an alarming pace. The NEA found that one-fifth of new teachers leave education within three years, and in urban areas, the percentage of teachers who leave within five years is close to half. According to the Pew Research Center, one in six teachers work second jobs.
The fact that teachers buy stuff for their classrooms is another way to say that we fail to provide teachers with the resources they need to teach our kids. That lack of resources feels to some educators like insult to injury, not just that they need to spend their own money to do their job, but that their low pay makes it hard to even afford to do their job.
School supplies are just the start of it — let’s talk about further education and professional development, about college application fees, about extra sandwiches, about books, about winter clothes, about eyeglasses, about curriculum (yes: curriculum — many districts forgo textbooks, or supply decades-old textbooks, or provide only the most bare-bones of worksheets, leaving it on teachers to cobble together their own instructional materials).
We talked to seven teachers across the country to learn what they spend their own money on, how they try to save, how they strategize any school allotments, and more. We learned CONTINUE READING: DonorsChoose, Teachers Pay Teachers: How school classrooms get supplies - Vox