Teacher Salaries Can Motivate You To Work Harder

 Money may not being happiness, as the saying goes, but it definitely works as a big motivator in your place of work. In the field of education, teacher salaries are no exception. While efforts are always on the making for making teacher salaries competitive to retain good and dependable talent from decaying, a ‘good’ salary is nearly subjective and will always invite debate. Merit Pay – a system introduced as an educational reform in the US is closely linked to teacher salary. It results in very high motivation levels in teachers with an output of highly professional performance. It could be considered as a tool to make teachers not just attend class room lessons to earn their stable salaries, but to think out of the box and do something creative, which can add value to their teaching, so as to be eligible for monetary rewards. 

According to report published by the National Education Association of America however states that the teacher salaries have not been able to keep pace with the rate of rising inflation. While inflation rose by 3.1%, teacher salaries increased only by 2.3%.  This according to the report is applicable to 41 states in America including the District of Columbia. In fact, an average teacher salary has actually decreased in Maine, West Virginia and Alabama.  

There was a time in history that private school teachers earned less salary than their counterparts in public schools. Situations have since then changed. Today, both types of schools pay nearly equal amount of salary to their teachers. Even the pension amount of both types of schools is at par. If you are considering salary structure of boarding schools, these schools require the teaching faculty to stay within the premises. On an average 25 to 30% of our salaries are spent on housing expenses. So this could be considered a valuable perk for teachers living in campus.   

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, teacher salaries range from $26,000 to $71,000 for public school teachers. If you take into account the inflation rate to be around 5% annually, this could become $27,300 to $74,550 in 2007.

Getting authentic information about teacher salaries is difficult for the simple reason, that most data is closely guarded. Vehement points of view, as can be expected, are expressed from both sides of the table, and the debate continues. But if you consider perks like housing subsidy, pension plans, medical insurance and other benefits as part of the salary package, a teaching career can be quite lucrative.