Does Low Pay mean Low Grade?

Before jumping into any new profession, it is always a good idea to check out salary ranges. I'm sure everyone has heard about "living off a teacher's salary." With this said, I knew teachers were not getting paid much, but I wanted to know how much exactly. I found this chart listing the pay for teachers in Washington State. BA means bachelor degree and the number to the right of it means additional college credits beyond the bachelor degree. MA means Masters etc. With this said you can figure out how much teachers make. One word. Wow. And people wonder why our education system is a disgrace and continues to fail. Just glancing at the table, hmmmmm.. you can have a PhD with more than 16 years of experience and you are making $64,887! (and by the way Washington State teachers make more than most). Wow, now if that is not a slap in the face, I don't know what is. I was inspired to look into these salaries, not only by my own interest in becoming a teacher but also because I watched the Presidential Address last night, and it mentioned some changes in our nations educational system, one being salary. When looking at this table, a question comes to mind. Does low pay mean low grade? You hear over and over and over, how our educational system lacks in the math and sciences. Is it really a mystery why? Folks who are qualified to teach math and science would have to cut their salary in half (literally) in order to take their knowledge into a classroom. Not many people are willing to do this. It is absolutely absurd to me that teachers can teach math or science without an expertise in that field...even at the elementary level, and this is taking place in each and every school, more often than not. I think this country has a wreckless mindset about teaching and here is what it is: To teach a 5th grader, you only have to be smarter than a 5th grader. WRONG! Give me a break. Even at the elementary level, we need teachers in the classroom who know their subject...at an advanced level. Unless one knows the professional applications of a skill, I do not believe one can teach it properly. For example, I was helping my little brother with his math homework (4th grade) and he was multiplying. There was not one equation in sight. Everything was a picture, or a chart. This is fine, as there are visual learners out there...I get that, but it becomes a problem when they are never taught how to write or even understand an actual equation. Rather than ever learning how to multiply using equations, they jumped right into division, and the old ways to learn this are gone as well. He is half way through his fourth grade year, and he has yet to write a multiplication or division equation. To me, this is a disgrace, and this...upsets me greatly. Advancing in math, without this basic knowledge of how to "correctly" solve a problem is going to be an issue. Who is making up these math curriculums? Certainly no one that has ever used math at an advanced level. So yes, I do believe our education in math and science is an issue...a big one, and I do believe it starts with the preparation of our teachers. I don't agree with the majority of Obama's policies, but I do agree with him on the educational front (thus far). He states that teachers should get paid more, but he also expects more from them. We should require our teachers to know their subjects at an advanced level, and thus get compensated for teaching it. Until we require more expertise from our teachers, our students will not get the educations they so deserve. On the flip side, we need to fairly pay folks who have this expertise to teach or we will not see this necessary knowledge in our classrooms.
My hope for the future is to see the bar raised for teachers. Until this bar is raised, the bar can not be successfully raised for our students. A career as a teacher needs to be looked at differently. We need to start treating it more like a profession, including a professional level salary. I have several friends who are teachers, and they are extremely good at what they do, and they are certainly experts in what they teach. I also see them having to spend their own money to buy supplies for their classrooms. Not only are they not getting paid enough, but they are having to spend their own money to do their job. There are BIG issues with this!
Anyway, I could go on and on an on about this, but I'll hop off my soap box for now.
Thanks for listening! :)