“Let’s give public school teachers a raise,” President Joe Biden said in his State of the Union address on Feb. 7.
Other Democrats have taken up the drumbeat, even suggesting a $60,000 national minimum salary for educators.
The idea has gained support from education advocates. Yet even some who advocate for increasing teacher compensation believe a national minimum for teachers is not the right approach and could have serious unintended consequences.
Reps. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.) and Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) introduced the American Teacher Act on Feb. 9, which would provide support for schools to offer a minimum annual salary of $60,000 for public schoolteachers.
The bill was co-sponsored by 46 House Democrats.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) announced he would introduce comparable legislation in the Senate in a Feb. 13 press conference. Sanders proposed to fund the measure by increasing taxes on those inheriting more than $3.5 million, a move he said would garner $450 billion over 10 years.
“The situation has become so absurd that the top 15 hedge fund managers on Wall Street make more money in a single year than every kindergarten teacher in America—over 120,000 teachers,” Sanders said. “This is an engine-is-on-fire, call 911 moment.”
The general public seems to agree. A 2022 poll by EducationNext found that 71 percent of respondents believed school teachers should be paid more.
A Wide Range
Sanders said starting pay is less than $40,000 a year for teachers in 40 percent of America’s school districts. However, those districts generally have an enrolment of fewer than 1,000 students and include few teachers.For example, the starting salary in one Iowa school district is $33,500, which is being paid to just one of the 10 teachers in that district of 175 students.
About 27 percent of the nation’s school districts enroll fewer than 600 students according to 2015 the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).
Meanwhile, the nation’s 500 largest school districts employ 40 percent of the country’s teachers. And those districts tend to pay much better than their smaller, rural counterparts.
New York City Public Schools offered a starting pay for first-year teachers with no experience ranging from $61,070 with a bachelor’s degree to $68,252 for those holding a Masters’s degree in the 2020-2021 school year.
Other major cities have comparable starting salaries.
Los Angeles County school teachers were eligible for a starting pay with no experience of $53,119 for the 2021-2022 school year.
Atlanta’s first-year teacher pay began at $51,048 for the 2022-2023 school year. Starting pay in the Dallas-Fort Worth area ranged from $57,400 to $62,000 depending on the school district.
New Mexico, which has been rated last in education by U.S. News and World Report, has a minimum teacher salary ranging from $50,000 to $70,000 per year depending on licensure.
The top pay for highly certified and experienced teachers in some larger districts is well over $100,000 per year. Nearly 20 percent of teachers in New York state earn six-figure incomes according to the Empire Center.
The average pay for elementary and secondary school teachers in the United States is $69,810 a year according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s about the same as aviation mechanics, insurance agents, and video and film editors.
Yet that average varies by state and district.
A Mississippi teacher holding the highest level of certification and 32 years of experience would earn less than the national average salary.
Average teacher pay in Indiana is $53,997, and $41,113 in Iowa. The average teacher pay in Oklahoma is $43,238.
Also, it has not kept pace with other professions.
Teacher salaries declined 2.2 percent after inflation between the onset of the Great Recession and 2018 according to Michael Hansen, a senior fellow at the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings.
Targeted Approaches
While teacher compensation should increase, a targeted approach would be more effective, according to Hansen.“Raising teacher salaries in general, yes I do feel that’s important,” Hansen told The Epoch Times. “Ensuring that they’re all getting a minimum of $60,000? I don’t think that’s necessarily critical.”
One problem with implementing a national minimum is that the cost of living varies from one community to another. And many states consistently raised teacher salaries while others have chosen not to do so.
“So the question becomes is the federal government creating a perverse incentive by giving the largest rewards to the states that have under-invested in their education for so long?”
Aside from the difficult policy questions, Hansen believes improvements to teacher pay should target specific needs in the education system.
We need to be paying teachers much more in hard-to-staff settings, including schools serving students from impoverished backgrounds, which are typically in inner city or rural settings,” Hansen said.
Those teaching STEM subjects, and special education, and having certification in teaching English language learners should be better compensated as well, he said.
“In my view, we should be rewarding teachers for being top performers,” Hansen said, citing a variety of possible metrics evaluating teachers—including student test scores, observations of instruction, parent communications, and even arriving on time.
Schools that have consistently rewarded teachers based on the quality of their work did better in maintaining educational objectives during COVID-19, Hansen said, citing recent research on school districts in Washington, Dallas, and Tennessee.
“These are some of the places that have been associated with the smallest COVID [learning] losses. And they’ve also been the ones leading the pack in terms of prioritizing teacher quality over other considerations.”
