Teachers are underpaid, right? It’s a near-universally repeated maxim. Kamala Harris thinks so. So does Betsy DeVos. However, the reality is a bit more complicated.
For the 2023–24 school year, the average public school teacher salary was just under $70,000—well over the average for bachelor’s degree graduates ages 25 to 34 (though many teachers have master’s degrees).
West Virginia paid teachers the least, at around $52,000 per year, while California paid them the most, with an average salary of over $95,000. According to the National Education Association, teacher salaries top out at over $100,000 in 16.6 percent of districts. However, salaries have generally stagnated. From 2002 to 2020, inflation-adjusted teacher salaries declined by 0.6 percent while as per-pupil spending increased.
The reality is that teacher salaries vary widely between states and districts, especially when looking at pay adjusted for the cost of living, making it difficult to make generalizations. Adding to the murkiness, pay doesn’t seem to motivate teachers as much as many people think.
According to a December 2023 report from the National Center for Education Statistics, when public school teachers were asked why they decided to leave the profession, only 9.2 percent said it was because they needed higher pay.
A study from earlier this year also concluded that, among teachers who choose to leave their jobs, most don’t earn more in their new position. “The median employed leaver makes less than before they left teaching and their earnings do not recover nearly a decade after exit,” reads the study by University of Chicago and University of California, Irvine researchers. “These broad trends…suggest that factors other than earnings may have contributed to exit decisions for the average leaver.”
“In other words, the economic argument around the teacher pay gap has some holes,” wrote education reporter Chad Aldeman last week in an analysis of this and other studies looking at teacher compensation. “Ironically, the political and media attention focused on teacher wage gaps may also be contributing to a sense that teachers are paid less than they actually are. People tend to underestimate how much teachers actually earn, and that could discourage would-be educators from considering the profession in the first place.”
Hellbound and Down 