Perhaps my wife and I teach in the wrong district.
Perhaps....maybe I will take a random sample from different districts and see if the 3K+ is the norm...or if I just happen to know teachers in districts with good unions? Are the unions localized to a region or for each district. Doesn't seem fair on the surface.
The Teachers Associations are the same but most Districts don't have the tax base to negotiate that kind of raise. For the first 20 years that I taught the only raise I received was the one the State gave on the Base Salary, which wasn't much. Most of our contracts were negotiated every 3 years with the largest raise being $1000. That $1000 was all I received in 3 years.
This was pretty normal for the Southern half of the State.