Yet another poll has found that most Americans say teacher pay is too low:
A survey conducted in early May for The New York Times by the online polling firm SurveyMonkey found that nearly three in four adults — 71 percent — considered teacher pay too low, while just 6 percent felt it was too high. And two-thirds said they supported increasing the salaries of public-school teachers even if it meant raising taxes.
Backing for teachers cut across demographic, regional and partisan lines. Even a majority of Republicans — 56 percent — said they would favor raising taxes to increase teachers’ pay. Recent surveys from NPR and The Associated Press produced similar findings.
A poll in North Carolina had similar results.
It’s objective fact that teachers are underpaid, but this is not a country where objective fact and majority opinion are reliably aligned. And these poll results show that the wave of teacher activism, from West Virginia to Kentucky to Oklahoma to Colorado and Arizona and back to North Carolina, hasn’t turned the public against teachers—far from it. Now people just need to remember this when they’re voting in November.