Nearly 8 in 10 Voters Support Sanders Bill to Raise Minimum Teacher Pay to $60k

New polling finds that majorities of voters throughout the political spectrum assist the thought.

New polling finds {that a} proposal by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) to set a minimal wage for lecturers and lift the wages of over 1,000,000 lecturers nationwide is overwhelmingly fashionable amongst voters.

In accordance to a recent survey of 1,254 probably voters by Knowledge for Progress, 77 p.c of voters assist the proposal to set a nationwide minimal wage of $60,000 for public faculty lecturers, whereas solely 18 p.c say they oppose it. This contains practically half of respondents, or 45 p.c, who mentioned that they “strongly” assist the thought.

The proposal is even fashionable throughout the political spectrum: it’s supported by 88 p.c of Democrats, 77 p.c of independents and 67 p.c of Republicans, the polling discovered.

Sanders launched the proposal within the Senate final week. It could elevate the salaries of 43 p.c of public faculty lecturers throughout the nation and would work towards fixing issues of low trainer morale and trainer shortages.

“It’s time to finish the worldwide embarrassment of America rating twenty ninth out of 30 international locations in pay for center faculty lecturers,” Sanders mentioned. “If we’re going to have one of the best public faculty system on the earth, we now have obtained to seriously change our perspective towards schooling and make it possible for each trainer in America receives the compensation that they deserve for the enormously necessary and troublesome work that they do. No public faculty trainer in America ought to make lower than $60,000 a 12 months.”

The Pay Academics Act has seven Senate cosponsors, together with Senators Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts). Lawmakers within the Home introduced similar laws in December.

Nevertheless, although nearly all of People throughout the political spectrum assist the proposal to set a minimal lecturers’ wage, the proposals have little or no probability of passing Congress, with Republicans and conservative Democrats extra involved in preserving wages low throughout the board.

The laws comes at a time of disaster for lecturers and public schooling. The pandemic has exacerbated already present teacher shortages, whereas lecturers are dealing with relentless assaults from far proper activists searching for to destroy public faculties and severely limit what lecturers are allowed to debate within the classroom with a view to serve the best’s anti-LGBTQ, racist objectives. In the meantime, the variety of faculty shootings are reaching report highs.

Trainer pay is a serious contributor to the disaster. Adjusted for inflation, the common weekly wages of lecturers have elevated solely $29 from 1996 to 2021, whereas the common weekly wages of different faculty graduates has risen by $445 in the identical time period, analysis by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found.

This has exacerbated an already sizeable wage hole between lecturers and comparable faculty graduates. This hole has reached a report excessive — in 2021, lecturers’ weekly pay was on common 24 p.c lower than different faculty graduates, up from a niche of 6 p.c in 1996.

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