Are teachers really underpaid?

Teachers are underpaid, right? It’s an almost universally repeated maxim. Kamala Harris so he thinks. Just like Betsy DeVos. However, the reality is a bit more complicated.

For the 2023-2024 school year, the average public school teacher salary will be just under $70,000 – well over The average age of bachelor’s degree graduates is 25–34 (although many teachers have master’s degrees).

The lowest teacher salaries were paid in West Virginia, about $52,000 per year, while the highest were in California, where the average salary was over $95,000. According to Teacher salaries top $100,000 in 16.6 percent of districts, according to the National Education Association. But salaries have generally stagnated. Between 2002 and 2020, inflation-adjusted teacher salaries fell 0.6 percent, while spending per pupil increased.

The reality is that teacher salaries vary widely by state and district, especially when looking at cost-of-living adjusted salaries, making it difficult to make generalizations. Adding to the confusion, salaries don’t seem to motivate teachers as much as many people think.

As of December 2023 report According to a study conducted by the National Center for Educational Statistics, when public school teachers were asked why they decided to leave the profession, only 9.2 percent answered that the reason was the need for a higher salary.

A study earlier this year also found that most teachers who decide to leave their jobs do not earn more in their new positions. “The median number of teachers who leave their jobs earns less than they did before they left, and their earnings do not recover nearly a decade after leaving,” the study said. test by researchers from the University of Chicago and the University of California, Irvine. “These broad trends…suggest that factors other than earnings may have influenced the average leaver’s decision to leave.”

“In other words, the economic argument around the teacher pay gap has some holes,” education reporter Chad Aldeman wrote last week in an analysis of this and other studies on teacher pay. “Ironically, the attention politicians and the media have focused on teacher pay gaps may also be contributing to the perception that teachers earn less than they actually do. People tend to underestimate how much teachers actually earn, and that can discourage potential teachers from considering the profession.”

But if politicians really want to raise teacher salaries, typical measures like raising taxes and increasing per-pupil spending are clearly not working. Although spending on schools has increased significantly increased Teacher salaries have barely budged in the past 20 years. That extra spending has gone mostly to hiring more administrative staff — and hasn’t necessarily translated into better student outcomes.

“It seems like the biggest driver is the school districts. hiring more people, but not primarily new classroom teachers,” says Neal McCluskey, director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute Reason“The largest relative increase was for ‘teaching aides,’ who assist teachers in the classroom. While teachers made up 53.4 percent of all public school employees in 1990, they made up just 47.5 percent in 2022. Aides grew from 8.8 percent of the workforce to 13.3 percent. It’s unclear why this happened, but it could have been due to teachers asking for help, legislation requiring more services for children, or a number of other possible factors.”

The question of whether teachers are underpaid is not easy to answer. But if you want to know why teachers at your local public school aren’t getting higher salaries, the answer may lie in the influx of non-teachers onto the district’s payroll.