PayScale is a service that offers salary and compensation profiles for a wide range of jobs, and they’ve just added a service called GigZig that tries to predict career paths and subsequent pay scales.¹ It’s been a while since I’ve complained about financial compensation in the world of education, so I thought I’d test out GigZig with teacher salaries.

First, I wanted to see what my GigZig future would be if I were to remain a secondary school teacher:

According to GigZig, staying in my current profession isn’t going to help me out financially over the next five years, and did little to help me over the past five. And my advancement options are: more of the same, or administration.

I plugged in a few more careers, just to see what I’d get …

• Call Center Trainer (that job I took right out of college): Now = $37K / 5 Years = up to $50K (an increase of about 25%)
• Registered Nurse: Now = $53K / 5 Years = up to $70K (another increase of about 25%)
• Barista (those guys that get your coffee at Starbucks): Now = $18K / 5 Years = up to $40K in retail (an increase of nearly 50%)
• Network Technician: Now = $37K / 5 Years = $50-70K (an increase of 25-50%)

The numbers themselves are not what’s interesting to me, but rather the disparity between the possibility for advancement within the same field in other professions as compared to the teaching profession. A new teacher in Prince William County, fresh out of college, can expect to make about $40K. If I returned to the classroom this year, it would be my 10th year–and I hold a Masters in English and National Board Certification. I would be making around $60K … about a 33% increase … but that’s over 10 years (not 5) and with additional degrees and certification.

This is GigZig’s projected salary range for a teacher with a Masters degree and 9 years of experience (so I’m doing a little better than the average in PWC, mostly thanks to the National Board bonus of $5K):

If I needed more money (say, to support a family, or because I live somewhere with a high cost of living), my only option would appear to be to leave my primary work as a teacher and advance to administration. Now, I agree that an administrator’s work and a teacher’s work should not look all that different, but that’s simply not the case right now. So, I either leave the world of public education or I become an administrator. Staying in the classroom, from a financial perspective, is simply an unwise move. That’s a shame.

Professors have it a little better …

… but not by much.

I also took a peek at the “compare” tab, which showed me what the average George Mason University² grad is making in a variety of fields:

Then I got frustrated and wrote this blog post.

And before anyone even thinks something like “but it’s not about the money,” let me just say: PLEASE! First, teachers are (or should be) professionals, and should not feel guilty about seeking appropriate, professional-level compensation. Second, this country pays for what it values, and it is overwhelmingly clear that education is low on that list … far below sports, entertainment, consumer products, and litigation.

The two possible responses to this:³ stay in the system and work from within to improve it, or abandon the system and hope either for its replacement by something better or its improvement in response to the crisis caused by a mass exodus. After nine years, I’m going to try option B for a while.

1. I found GigZig through TechCrunch [back]
2. where I earned my MA [back]
3. To be clear, the financial state of education was low on the list of reasons I left the classroom, but the other problems I encountered in public secondary education combined to convince me that staying wasn’t the right move for me at the time. [back]

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