West Virginia teachers’ victory only underscores how profession is undervalued

The following Letter appeared in the “Opinions” section of the Boston Globe, March 26, 2018.

I love being a teacher. There’s no calling more noble. So it pains me to say that, while the recent West Virginia teacher’s strike proudly reinforced the righteous cause of the teacher, it also sadly confirmed teaching as a degraded profession. One of our great shames as a country continues to be the way we undervalue our nation’s teaching corps. According to the National Education Association, the average salary of US public school teachers for 2015-16 was $58,353, with West Virginia among the worst offenders, lowballing teachers at $45,622. That much-vaunted 5 percent raise? According to my calculations, the raise amounts to about $130 a month in take-home pay. That teachers were forced to claw and scrape for what amounts to a pittance is an insult.