What It’s Like to Be a Teacher in 2020 America
Teachers find themselves at the heart of the national crisis — responsible not just for children’s education and well-being, but also for essential child care as parents struggle to get back to work.
“It seems very poor policy to pay a man 20 or 22 dollars a month for teaching children the ABC’s when a female could do the work more successfully at one third of the price.”
— A school committee in Littleton, Mass., debating how to source teachers for its classrooms in 1849
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More than 150 years ago, Massachusetts lawmakers came up with a radical idea: All young people should be educated. The commonwealth passed the country’s first law requiring that children go to school, then was left wondering where to find the teachers it needed to educate all those children.
A school committee in Littleton, Mass., came up with a simple solution. “God seems to have made woman peculiarly suited to guide and develop the infant mind,” the committee wrote, in 1849. Why pay men $20 a month when “a female could do the work more successfully at one third of the price.”
Not only did women appear uniquely fitted to the work of teaching; they also didn’t have competing professional opportunities that would drive wages up — or so the logic went. “The argument was, ‘Look, women will learn to be better mothers by practicing on other people’s children,’” said Richard Ingersoll, a sociologist at University of Pennsylvania. “Proponents made the case it was a win-win.”
As other states followed Massachusetts’s lead, and public schools opened across the country, they filled with female teachers. By the late 1880s, women made up 63 percent of the country’s teachers. The profession has remained female dominated ever since.
In 2017, women comprised more than three-quarters of public-school teachers, in a profession that remains stubbornly underpaid and undervalued.
In 2018, the starting salary for a public-school teacher averaged $38,000. In more than 1,000 districts, even the highest paid public-school teachers with advanced degrees and decades of experience earn less than $50,000. A 2010 report from McKinsey looked at the state of teaching in America compared with other developed CONTINUE READING: What It’s Like to Be a Teacher in 2020 America - The New York Times