Still Doing the Math, but for $100K a Year
ROCHESTER
THIS is a great economic time to be a veteran public schoolteacher. Valerie Huff, a math teacher at East High here, a tough urban school, made more than $102,000 last year.
“A good salary? I wouldn’t disagree with you,” Ms. Huff said. “Took me a long time to get there.” She started teaching in 1978 for $11,250 a year and, in those early days, worked a second job, bartending, to make ends meet.
But in the late 1980s, teacher salaries took a jump across the country, and they just kept improving, to the point that now, with the economic collapse, a lot of people who sneered at teachers, wish they had it so good.
Health insurance? “My health care is free,” Ms. Huff said.
Security? “Long as there’s kids, I have a job.”
Pension? “Guaranteed pension. I hit the magic numbers last June — 55 and 30.” That’s 55 years old with 30 years of experience, at which point teachers across New York State can retire with an annual income of about 60 percent of their top salary — likely to be between $60,000 and $70,000 a year in Ms. Huff’s case. If she’s fortunate enough to live 25 more years, that’s the equivalent of sitting on a 401(k) of about $1.5 million.
At a time when many of her generation are wondering if they will ever be able to retire, Ms. Huff said, “I’m not sure if I’ll retire this June or next.”
Marie Costanza, 53, another 100K teacher here, said people are suddenly looking at her and her teacher-husband differently. “Friends in the corporate world who used to belittle teaching — they’re panicky, they don’t know what to do,” said Ms. Costanza, who made $6,850 starting out in 1977. “My husband and I have had private conversations about how nice it is knowing that we have our security.”
Before this recession hit, said Gaya Shakes, 56, 101K, “people would be like, ‘Oh you’re just a teacher.’ Now you hear, ‘How do I get on the substitute’s list? ’ ”
Nor is Rochester an aberration. Adam Urbanski, who is head of the teacher’s union here, estimates that 40 percent of school districts in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey pay as well as or better than his district.
Veteran teachers who add to their pay by working summer school and mentoring new teachers can lift their salary into the $120,000 to $130,000 range, and their pensions to around $75,000 a year, Mr. Urbanski said. Ms. Huff said she would have preferred taking recent summers off, “but I did the numbers for retirement and I couldn’t say no to teaching summer school.”
Even teachers in New York City, who have long lagged behind their peers in wealthy suburbs, have made significant progress, with a starting base pay now of $44,500 and climbing to $100,000 after 22 years, said Brian Gibbons, a spokesman for the city teachers’ union.
Of course, the numbers look so much better now because most everything else is looking so much worse. The latest Bureau of Labor Statistics report showed that virtually every economic sector — except education and health — cut payrolls.
Whether this reflects the start of a reordering of things — President Obama has promised to upgrade government service, and his stimulus package earmarks large sums for education — or is simply a short-term diseconomy, is hard to say. It is entirely possible that when businesspeople sitting on school boards all over America begin comparing teachers’ pensions with their own depleted 401(k)’s there will be a backlash at the negotiating table.
Either way, Rochester is a good spot to view the change. In 1986, the maximum salary here was $36,500. The next year, Mr. Urbanski negotiated a landmark contract that raised top pay to $70,000, the best for an urban district in the country at the time. In return, a new category of lead teachers worked longer hours and 10 extra days a year, a tougher screening process was established to weed out bad teachers, and traditional seniority rules were dropped so the best veteran teachers could be assigned to the most troubled schools.
The contract became a model of union/management cooperation, with Mr. Urbanski and the superintendent at the time making speaking appearances all over the country. It also helped set off an upward salary spiral.
For a veteran teacher like Ms. Shakes, who is African-American, the journey to 100K has been remarkable. She grew up in Oviedo, Fla., the daughter of a domestic worker and construction laborer, graduated from a still-segregated Crooms High in Sanford, Fla., in 1970 and was part of the first wave of African-Americans to enter mainstream colleges, winning a scholarship to Vanderbilt.
She picked teaching, in part, because, she said, government jobs like public education “opened opportunities not otherwise available to us.” Even after she earned a doctorate from the University of Rochester, she continued teaching high school for two reasons: The schools here are two-thirds black and, she said, “our children need advocates”; also, that 1987 raise.
“For the first time, I didn’t have to worry about day to day,” she said. “I was able to buy books when I wanted, music when I wanted, I had money to travel.”
She makes more teaching in the public schools than she could as a college professor, she said.
This is what Mr. Urbanski was aiming for when he negotiated that landmark contract. His goal was to give teachers the professional status of doctors, architects and lawyers. He hoped to attract and retain top people, who would be dispatched to the toughest schools and make a difference.
But while this generation of baby-boom teachers has witnessed remarkable transformations in their lifetime — in women’s rights, in civil rights — the waves of education reforms aimed at remaking our urban schools that they have been dispatched to implement have repeatedly fallen short.
Ms. Huff has taught both basic math and calculus at East High, a failing school under the federal No Child Left Behind law, considered by many here to be the city’s most troubled. As I walked in the front door one frigid day last month, ambulance attendants were rolling out a young man on a gurney and wearing a neck brace.
MS. HUFF’S eighth period has just five calculus students — normally not enough to justify a class — but the administration keeps it going so these children have a shot at competing with top students elsewhere. No sooner had they sat down and finished their daily warm-up quiz, than there was a loud clanging. “A pull,” Ms. Huff said. “Let’s go.” Someone had yanked the fire alarm. Ms. Huff led her students through halls that were chaotic. Several times when she tried to quiet students from other classes, they swore at her.
For 15 minutes she and her calculus students — none of them with coats — stood in a parking lot battered by a fierce wind off Lake Ontario. Everywhere, kids could be seen leaving school for the day, but all the calculus students returned, took their seats, and just as Ms. Huff started teaching, there was another false alarm and they had to march out again.
By the time they were allowed back, the period was over. “We need to do all the problems in 4.4,” Ms. Huff told them. “You have to get this done. We’ll try again tomorrow.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 8, 2009
New York City teacher to reach the maximum salary, $100,000. It is 22 years, not 30.
The Generation B column last Sunday, about public school
teachers, included incorrect information from a teachers’ union
spokesman for the number of years required for a