The Quiet Devaluation
What Happens When a Profession Stagnates While Its Demands Grow
Twenty years ago, I started teaching English for R$21 an hour.
That was about US$9.50 in 2006.
This week, I found out that one of Brasília’s top English schools is currently offering new teachers R$24.
That's about US$4.50 today.
Need I say more?
I am not writing this out of bitterness. I still love teaching. But I find myself unable to look away from what that gap reveals not just about the economics of language education, but about the deeper logic of how societies value the work of teaching.
The Gap Between Demand and Compensation
There is a peculiar paradox at the heart of English language teaching in Brazil. English proficiency has never been more economically valuable. Employers demand it. University entrance systems require it. International mobility depends on it. The Brazilian market for English instruction is enormous — and growing.
And yet the people who do the work of building that proficiency remain among the most structurally undercompensated professionals in the education sector.
This is not unique to Brazil, of course. Across many education systems, there is a persistent disconnection between the social and economic value produced by teaching and the compensation teachers receive. Economists call this a valuation gap — a condition in which the market price of labor does not reflect its actual contribution to human capital development. In language education specifically, this gap tends to be amplified by the franchise model dominant in the Brazilian ELT sector, where standardization pressures and high turnover are both symptom and cause of systemic underinvestment in teacher development.
What Stagnant Pay Does to Practice
David Berliner’s research on teacher expertise offers a useful frame here. Berliner identified five developmental stages in teaching — from novice to expert — and documented that genuine expertise takes approximately seven to ten years of deliberate, reflective practice to develop. Expert teachers, in his account, read classroom situations differently from novices. They perceive patterns, make faster and more accurate instructional decisions, and adapt with a fluency that cannot be replicated by scripted curricula or rigid lesson templates.
The implication for compensation is uncomfortable: if the salary difference between a first-year teacher and a ten-year veteran is marginal, the system is, in effect, treating expertise as economically irrelevant. It is paying for presence, not mastery.
Robert Coe and colleagues, in their influential work on what makes great teaching, argue that the most impactful teaching behaviors — rich questioning, responsive feedback, the ability to identify and address misconceptions in real time — are precisely the ones that take years to develop and are least visible from the outside. They are, in other words, the behaviors that markets are worst at pricing.
The Retention Problem and Its Hidden Costs
When salaries stagnate and expertise goes unrewarded, the predictable result is attrition. Talented teachers leave for corporate language training, for test prep, for adjacent industries that pay more for communication skills. What remains, on average, is a workforce skewed toward the less experienced end of Berliner’s continuum.
This creates a feedback loop that is rarely discussed openly: low pay produces high turnover, high turnover prevents the accumulation of institutional expertise, the absence of expertise makes teaching look replaceable, and the appearance of replaceability justifies keeping pay low.
The students caught in this loop rarely know it is happening to them. They experience it as inconsistency — different teachers, different methods, interrupted relationships, the sense that no one has been watching their progress long enough to understand where they actually are.
In SLA research, Zoltán Dörnyei’s work on motivational dynamics suggests that the teacher-learner relationship is one of the strongest predictors of sustained engagement in language learning. When that relationship is perpetually reset by turnover, motivation suffers in ways that are real but hard to measure.
The Professional Identity Dimension
There is another cost that salary figures do not capture: the erosion of professional identity.
Donald Schön’s concept of the reflective practitioner describes professionals who develop knowledge through systematic reflection on their own practice — who learn, in other words, not just by doing but by thinking carefully about what they do and why. This kind of reflective capacity is what separates a technician from a professional.
But reflective practice requires time, energy, and a sense that the investment is worth making. When teachers are working multiple jobs to cover their cost of living, squeezing in classes between commutes, perpetually replacing one short-term contract with another, the cognitive and emotional bandwidth for reflection shrinks. What gets lost is not just quality of life, but also quality of thought. The practitioner survives at the expense of the professional.
Scardamalia and Bereiter’s distinction between routine expertise and adaptive expertise is relevant here. Routine expertise means executing known solutions efficiently. Adaptive expertise means developing new solutions when known ones fail. Language teaching, at its best, demands adaptive expertise constantly. In every class, every student, every unexpected breakdown in communication is a new problem. But adaptive expertise is expensive to maintain. It requires investment in development, in recovery time, in the basic security that allows a professional to take intellectual risks.
Persistent underpayment systematically undermines that investment.
What This Means for the Profession
I am not arguing that every English teacher in Brazil should earn a high salary regardless of performance or context. I am arguing something more specific: that when the entry-level wage of a profession has barely moved in nominal terms over twenty years — especially during a period of significant inflation and dramatically increased demand for that profession’s output — something structural has gone wrong. And structural problems do not yield to individual solutions.
My answer to this was to try to market myself better, though professional visibility. It was to move upmarket, though niche positioning. But these are survival strategies, and valuable ones. But they do not change the underlying logic.
What changes underlying logic, historically, is collective recognition that a profession’s compensation does not reflect its contribution and the kind of sustained, public conversation that recognition requires.
Hopefully, I can make this article is part of that conversation.