#TeacherAppreciationWeek

Moving beyond slogans and hashtags to dollars and cents

When Joe Biden was President, he often threw out applause lines like, “Let’s give public school teachers a raise.”

I always winced when I heard him say things like this. I mean, who was he talking about? Who was the “us” in that statement? The President doesn’t control school budgets. The U.S. Department of Education doesn’t employ any classroom teachers. Congress has no input on school district salary schedules.

It was just a hashtag. A slogan. A platitude.

And that’s fine, I suppose. I get why a politician would want to signal their support for teachers. But as I noted recently, average teacher salaries have hovered right around $70,000, in inflation-adjusted terms, since about 1990. While other college-educated professionals have seen their incomes go up over time, teachers have not. I’d be pretty annoyed about this if I were a teacher, and talking points won’t really solve that problem.

To actually change something for teachers in a meaningful way, policymakers need to understand the real cause for why, exactly, teacher salaries have not risen more than they have. The most logical culprit would be school spending. If school spending was flat, or down, that would help explain why teacher salaries were stagnant.

Except, that’s not it. The Reason Foundation showed last year that there was not a single state where teacher salaries had kept up with the pace of overall spending increases.

This week, The 74 released a project I worked on with Eamonn Fitzmaurice, The 74’s art and technology director to localize these trends. We wanted to see how spending and salaries were changing in school districts across the country. Unfortunately, there’s no national database of average teacher salaries by district, but we think we got pretty close by looking at average salaries for all district employees. We showed that per-pupil, inflation-adjusted spending rose 31% from 2002 to 2022. Meanwhile, the average salary paid to school district employees fell by 2.5%.

In other words, school budgets are going up much faster than salaries.

Why? Because schools have hired a lot more employees (who get to split a larger pie), and they’re facing much higher employee benefit costs, especially on the retirement side. Schools have also made other staffing decisions that carry budget costs.

But perhaps the most frustrating angle here is that stagnant teacher salaries are not happening in a vacuum. The cost of things like housing and childcare has risen at a rate much faster than inflation.

In the piece for The 74, I use the example of housing costs in Santa Monica, California:

Take housing costs, for example. Imagine someone living on a teacher’s salary in Santa Monica, California, where housing costs are some of the nation’s highest. While policymakers have delivered on the budget side, and the total amount of money allocated to the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District has mirrored the rise in housing prices, that money isn’t translating into higher salaries. The district average actually fell by 19% over the last two decades, making it more and more difficult for employees to live in the city in which they work.

Santa Monica is an extreme example of the disconnect between budgets and salaries, but we found that it was happening in 90% of school districts across the country.

What can a politician do about this problem? Well, that depends on what their job is. A local council member or a mayor or a governor should probably be thinking in terms of broader housing affordability issues in their communities rather than how those are affecting any one particular group (like teachers). It’s not just teachers who are being squeezed here, and the only real answer is to change zoning laws and build more housing.

Ok, but what about a school board member? They don’t control zoning laws or housing regulations, but they do control school district budgets. Could they make do with slightly fewer staff but give everybody else a raise? Some schools already make this trade explicitly. Could they use strategic staffing models to differentiate pay and reward the best teachers for taking on leadership roles? Could they reconfigure their benefits packages to shift more compensation toward base salaries? The research suggests workers prefer $1,000 in cash rather than $1,000 in in-kind benefits.

And this is where the rubber meets the road. These are things that school districts actually control. And if they want to raise teacher compensation and show their appreciation for teachers, they should put their money where their mouth is.