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Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2006 > May > 22 > Entry
Your classroom teacher, 20 years later
A few things have changed for the folks standing at the front of the classroom since I was in school. Are the changes good, or bad? Tell me what you think.
While I was looking over some new data out from the National Center for Education Statistics, I found this table describing the profile of public school teachers in 2001, compared to recent years. There were some interesting changes from 1981 when I was in seventh grade.
Overall, there are a lot more teachers, and teachers are older, but there are far fewer men in the classroom. Teachers are getting paid more and have less students per day, but they work more hours per week. And percent that say they would likely return to teaching is way up.
Here are the numbers:
- The percentage of male K-12 teachers has dropped from 33 to 21 percent.
- The total number of K-12 teachers has grown by more than a third to nearly 3 million.
- The average teacher has aged, up from 37 in 1981 to 46 now.
- The mean number of students taught per day has dropped from 118 to 86.
- The average hours worked per week on all teaching duties has crept up form 46 to 50 hours a week.
- The average annual salary, in today’s dollars, jumped from $17,209 to $43,262.
- The percentage of teachers who said they certainly or probably would teach again jumped from 46 percent to 60 percent.
OK, some of these I get. We know more new teachers are bailing out of the profession quickly and there’s a big chunk of baby boomer teachers nearing retirement. And we know that far more women are entering the profession than men. I suspect the pay increase is helping teachers who made it through the early years stick with the job and feel more satisfied.
But I can’t explain why there are so many more teachers than when I was in school, or why teachers are working more hours with less students.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on these numbers.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Categories: Teaching and Learning
Comments
By Oldprof
May 24, 2006 11:19 PM | Link to this
Dangerous, Dave? No, alligators are dangerous, ideas are just various degrees of wrong. If you apply the old “rule of 77” shortcut, then it takes about 7.5% inflation to double costs every 10 years. In many years we’ve had close to 5% and in some down to 3%, but the pace quickened considerable in the later 70s and early 80s when inflation went double-digit, year after year.By Dave
May 23, 2006 4:05 PM | Link to this
That rule of thumb is dangerous, because it assumes 8% inflation, and over a few decades, it gets “off”. The CPI would give us a much lower, bogus number. I think we can both agree, however, that teaching public schools has never been a highly paid profession.By Oldprof
May 23, 2006 11:13 AM | Link to this
It’s a rough estimate based on the old economic notion that inflation causes dollar values to double every ten years. The estimate is high for low-inflation decades (1990s) but low for high-inflation decades (1970s). In general, teacher salary increases have lagged slightly behind the rate of inflation, and it was furthest behind in the 1970s—which creates a larger effect in later years due to the “Tokyo Butterfly Effect”.By Dave
May 22, 2006 11:07 PM | Link to this
Oldprof, I can’t believe that the average 1960 teacher pay was equivalent to $60-80,000 in today’s dollars. What is the basis for THAT estimate?By Oldprof
May 22, 2006 8:05 PM | Link to this
Several parts of this report are wrong. The salary data is NOT in 2001 dollars, teachers in 1961 were paid around $5000 annually (if adjusted for inflation is would be around 60 to 80K today). Class size in this chart conflicts with figures from the 2006 NEA report that suggested that mean class size in elementary was 21 and in secondary was 28. Note that the link provided is confusing as to status of teachers vis a vis class size: departmentalized is not a useful categorization. All in all, one should never accept any figures of this sort uncritically; reference to multiple measures generates relatively more confidence.By Dave
May 22, 2006 11:03 AM | Link to this
Is Block Scheduling popular around here? It has you teach each group for twice as long, every other day. Same number of students, but you only see them every other day, so you teach as many students, but not as many per day.