Low Teachers In America Essay

Words: 1752
Pages: 8

Historical Research In order to fully understand this issue, one must look at the historical background of low teacher salary in America. In the mid-19th century, most women who worked at all stayed home and produced their own goods to be sold, accounting for two out of three working women in 1837 Massachusetts (Temin, 2003). With few opportunities to earn a living and a need for teachers, teaching was an appealing option to the women who had the capacity to do so. Another reason why the role of teaching was open to women was because of gender roles and the belief that women, the motherly, loving figures, were more suited to teaching children and instilling them with strong values and morals (“The Feminization of Teaching”, 1997). Meanwhile, men primarily composed the teaching workforce, although there were women present also (“The Feminization of Teaching”, 1997). An opposite scenario began to form from 1940 to 1960 as the concentration of women teachers increased while the number of male teachers decreased, further increased in following years because of the Civil War (“The Feminization of …show more content…
However, like many issues that plague America, no one plan will be a perfect solution, and there have good and bad aspects of the attempts of others to finally expunge this problem.
With a problem such as a low teacher salary in the United States, the obvious solution would seem to be to increase the salary somehow, and that is exactly what they did in San Francisco Unified School District, or SFUSD. The SFUSD created an act called the Quality Teacher and Education Act, or QTEA to attempt to attract a larger quantity and a higher quality of teachers by creating a salary increase for all teachers ranging from $500-$6300 and an incentive of $1000 for new teachers taking up a position in a hard-to-fill subject (Hough