At $37,580 a year, the average starting teacher salary in Maine is the lowest in New England and ninth-lowest in the nation.

As if that figure were etched forever in stone, state lawmakers have begun floating workarounds to the teacher shortage that might come close to what people in business like to call “revenue-neutral.” 

Faced with a dramatic shortfall of COVID-19-related funding, a number of bills designed to hunt people into the profession propose streamlined means of pulling retired teachers out retirement; an expedited certification process for teachers; and a new structure that would allow student teachers to skip a year of teacher training if they get a certain certificate. 

These are desperate, sweeping ideas. These are ideas that are being mooted only because financial incentives seem undesirable to those proposing them – or like a long shot. (Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis came up with a creative batch of “initiatives” last year that were similar in spirit.) And none of them will be anywhere near as effective as the real investment required to improve teacher pay.

According to a report released this month by the consultancy firm McKinsey, one-third of American K-12 educators are contemplating leaving their jobs; compensation was the No. 1 reason cited. 

To start, any loosening of requirements for teaching qualifications should be a last resort. Letting teacher quality slide takes the problem out on the pupils, who are the last group who should feel the pain. Corner-cutting in the education and training of teachers is a road Maine should not go down.

To fast-track qualifications is to further devalue the chronically undervalued role of the teacher in our communities, a role that is already under siege in other ways. The alarming findings of the “nation’s report card” last fall – with learning loss particularly alarming for Maine – show us that enough slipped from schools’ reach during the pandemic; there is no more ground left to lose.

“Education has always been a challenging profession,” Maine Education Association President Grace Leavitt told the Press Herald this week. “We need to be sure we are rewarding people with appropriate compensation.”

The challenges of 2023 are more pronounced and different to anything experienced in the preceding years. The parents’ rights movement and other political discontent under the “culture wars” heading have led to extraordinary pressure on educators and public schools.

According to a report last year from the Economic Policy Institute, the average weekly wages of U.S. public school teachers increased $29 from 1996 to 2021. The weekly wages of other college graduates rose by $445 in the same period. What the report calls “the teacher weekly wage penalty” is greater than 20% in 28 states (in Maine, it’s 24%), where teachers are paid less than 80 cents on the dollar compared to similar college-educated workers in those states.

In this way, our teachers are themselves subsidizing the education system. (To say nothing of the surveys over the past five years that have found that as many as 90% of teachers spend their own money on classroom and school supplies.)

Maine doesn’t keep track of vacant educator positions. Other states have kept track; Connecticut, for example, is out by about 1,200 teachers. A bill under consideration by its legislators would increase the average salary from $47,000 to $60,0000.

At least one Maine bill has salaries in its crosshairs. A bill sponsored by Sen. Teresa Pierce, D-Falmouth, would raise the minimum salary for teachers to $50,000 annually by the 2027-28 school year.

Improving the remuneration of teachers is good for teachers. That’s good for students, which is good for the state of Maine.

The extraordinary damage caused by failing to address this is the thing we cannot afford.

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