Hawaii decides to prove that paying teachers more money helps end teacher shortages

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For decades now, state legislatures and local municipalities across the country have sought to find ways to retain teachers. They have done this by mostly blaming teachers for not wanting to teach in hostile, underpaid work environments. As you might imagine, this has not yielded positive results. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the country’s trends of inequality across the board. Every facet of our country has watched our purposefully neglected infrastructures deteriorate while the richest 1% of the population absorbs more and more wealth.

Every corner of the United States faces teacher shortages, and that has been no more acutely felt than in the special education world. Children with disabilities are guaranteed access to fully licensed special educators by our laws, but are facing a lack of qualified educators. As a result, many districts have opted to allow untrained and unqualified teachers to teach instead of figuring out ways to attract more qualified teachers back into the profession. The practice of handing out “provisional licenses” to unqualified special education teachers has gone on for years, and has always been criticized as a weak Band-Aid solution.

Recently, two states have decided to try something novel: Offer up meaningful salary raises that might bring up a special education teacher’s standard of living to moderately decent. Guess what?

NPR has been reporting on the issue of special education teachers and the shortages seen across the U.S. According to the report, 48 states have reported special education teacher shortages over the last year. However, in the last couple of years, Hawaii and Detroit have added meaningful salary bumps. Unlike most areas of the country, they have seen their losses contract. In 2020, Hawaii lifted special education teachers’ salaries by $10,000 a year.

Before the incentive, in October 2019, almost 30% of the state’s special education positions were vacant or staffed by teachers without appropriate licenses, district data shows. By October 2021, that number dropped by half, to about 15%.

Detroit recently added $15,000 more to special education salaries this past year, which “district leaders say it is already helping.” Shockingly, districts that have not significantly lifted salaries for teachers have not seen any reduction in their special education teacher shortages. It is almost as if paying highly qualified teachers something resembling what they are actually worth to our communities, and more importantly our children, has shown that it works.

RELATED STORY: Are you sick of highly-paid teachers?

The Republican Party has been waging a war on teachers for decades now. Sometimes supported by conservative Democrats, the war is one of attrition. To be a teacher is a calling, but after being underpaid, abused both emotionally and sometimes physically, all in the most hypocritical of ways, the final insult is always economic. Teachers have always been underpaid and undervalued in our economic system. The last few years of accelerating income inequality has simply made being a teacher economically untenable.

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According to the National Education Association (NEA), one of the issues states face is that the federal government, tasked with covering 40% of any extra cost incurred for providing special education services, doesn’t ever come close to that number.

Since 1981, the first year for which full funding was 40 percent of average per pupil expenditure, the federal share has remained less than half of the federal commitment based on regular appropriations. Each year the federal government fails to fully fund Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, it shifts the costs for educating students with special needs to states and school districts.

Since 2020, the NEA says the federal government has only funded 13.2% of its promised 40% share. This is reportedly the lowest percentage since 2000. The funding gap—meaning the amount of millions of dollars the federal government has failed to cover for special education students—in Hawaii over the 2020-2021 school year? $95.1 million. Michigan? More than half a billion dollars.

Opponents of paying special education teachers more money say that everything gets more expensive. That’s the entire argument. But even that shitty argument, made while signing off on tens of billions of dollars more defense spending than even the military is asking for, isn’t really true. Special education teachers are not a large percentage of any district’s staff and, depending on the results for many students, can help lead to reductions in their costs going forward.

Some students with special needs will always need special education instruction. Others may only need it for a time. Either way, it requires qualified educators with experience and time spent learning about and developing entirely different sets of educational tools.

The cost of Hawaii’s pay increase this past year cost them $20 million—under 1% of their annual education budget. This isn’t nothing but it is nothing when it comes to protecting the children. You know, the children that right-wing shitbags are pretending are being groomed for sexual nefariousness and deviant behavior, by … teachers?

Atlanta’s Fulton County School system is now offering up to $7,500 in various incentives to get special education teachers signed up for the coming school year. Those incentives include not simply the teachers themselves, but also for paraprofessionals who assistant and help support full-time special education teachers. The need for support in shouldering the burden of teaching our children is something that we can all empathize with if we really search our souls for more than 10 seconds.

The moves by places like Hawaii have been predicated on using federal COVID-19 relief funding for now. It is hopefully something that other districts will get their legislatures and municipalities to work with—the hope being that legislators will be pressured later by voters to make these funds permanent in state budgets.