Giving Compass' Take:

• As teacher salaries slip and costs-of-living rise, the profession becomes financially untenable for those accustomed to a middle-class life. 

• How can districts adequately compensate for the work that teachers do? How can philanthropy help to increase public support for teachers? 

• Find out more about the decline of teacher pay. 

In Arizona and other states where teachers have recently gone on strike, pay is a central issue: the average American teacher earns five percent less than he did in 2009. (In Arizona, the average teacher salary fell from fifty-three thousand to forty-seven thousand dollars in that time.) But the protests are about more than salaries.

In recent years, educators have been blamed by politicians and parents for an array of social problems, from bankrupt municipal pensions to low graduation rates in poor neighborhoods. Standardized testing has constrained teacher autonomy and creativity, and charter and private schools have competed more aggressively for government funds. The strikes are thus partly about reclaiming a sense of professional pride and middle-class stature.

Few would dispute that the Arizona schools are in crisis. Per-student spending has fallen fourteen percent in the past decade, and some two thousand classrooms have no permanent instructors. Between 2010 and 2015, Arizona’s rate of teacher turnover was twenty-three percent in traditional public schools and thirty-three percent in charters, according to Jeanne Powers, an associate professor at Arizona State University.

Read the full article about teachers in the middle class by E. Tammy Kim at The Hechinger Report.