Dear Future President,

Teachers should be getting paid just as much, or even more than athletes. Something must be done to fix the wage gap between these two occupations. How is it fair that the people who educate us five days a week for 9 to 10 months are getting paid an average of $55,000 a year, compared to Michigan’s own Detroit Red Wings player Dylan Larkin who made $832,500 in his first NHL season?

Dan Kloeffler from Yahoo states, “The US ranks 35th when it comes to math. Some educators believe those numbers would flip if teachers were paid like our favorite sports stars.” This proves that there’s the possibility that more teachers would put more effort into their jobs to help kids better understand the material they’re forced to teach, rather than handing students a worksheet and expecting it to be finished by the end of class. I’m not trying to say that all teachers do this, however it is very common.

So many teachers love to teach, but they don’t love their pay which makes them dread getting up at 5 am everyday to teach for 7 hours to kids that don’t always care whether or not they finish the semester with an A or an E. From the Kentucky New Era, Bill Cunningham says, “No one takes on the awesome task of teaching because of money. But it would say more of us as a society if we paid them more to acknowledge their true worth.” We need to start showing teachers how much they mean to us and how important they are to our everyday lives, and what better way is there to being that process than raising the amount on their paycheck.

Although many people agree that teachers should be paid as much or more than athletes, there are also many people that disagree. Michael Walden from the Charlotte observer explains why he thinks athletes are and should be paid more than teachers, “Salaries will be set by the interaction of the demand for workers in a particular job and the supply of workers able to do that job. Jobs for which there is a high demand but there is a low supply will pay the most, jobs with a low demand and high supply will pay the least, and the pay of other jobs will be in the middle.” This shows that since there are so many teachers the demand is lower and so is the pay, and since NBA stars like Kobe Bryant only come around once \in every great while, the demand is higher therefore so is their pay.

There are various ways to fix this problem, one of them even could be not paying athletes as much and giving back to the amazing teachers who have taught us not only how to find slope from a formula or how to dissect a frog, but the ones that have taught us everyday life skills.

I conclude this letter saying that the teachers that give their time and effort everyday to go above and beyond should be treated better than your favorite NBA player who can shoot a basketball from 10 feet away, because I bet if you paid teachers as much as you do athletes they would be shooting the ball from half court and making it nine times out of ten.

Sincerely,

Reese Nagy, Michigan