Anne Lutz Fernandez reacts to a new report showing that the penalty college grads pay for going into teaching instead of some other field is larger than ever.
Public school teachers once took home salaries in line with workers in similar professions. Through the eighties and into the nineties, they paid a small penalty for choosing to teach; in 1993 the average salary of teachers was about 5% lower than that of others with college degrees. A new report by economist Sylvia Allegretto at the Economic Policy Institute reveals that three decades later, that penalty has grown to nearly 27%—an all-time high.
This penalty has worsened as teacher salaries began a prolonged stagnation.
There are those on the right who argue that this gap isn’t all that meaningful. A recent piece in Reason tries to downplay the impact of the teacher pay penalty by pointing out that averages obscure state-by-state differences. It’s hard to see how this helps their case, though, when teachers pay a penalty in every state and when more than a dozen states across various regions—New Hampshire and Colorado, Oklahoma and Oregon, Georgia and Arizona among them—pay penalties worse than the national average.
Opponents of raises for teachers frequently claim that teachers’ benefits balance out their low pay, but Allegretto’s analysis shows they don’t. When total compensation packages are accounted for, the teacher pay gap is reduced, but only to 16.7%.
Then there’s the argument that teachers aren’t motivated by money. From Reason:
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 closer look at the NCES data reveals that excluding those who leave for personal reasons such as retirement or health, needing or wanting better pay is one of the most important factors in teachers leaving the profession, second only to wanting a job in another field (which itself could involve pay considerations).
For over a decade, I’ve been talking to teachers about why they teach. Their first answer is never about pay. It’s about the joy in seeing the light of understanding in a student’s eye, the pride in hearing from former students about their impact, the desire to contribute something positive to community and country. We can thank goodness that so many derive this satisfaction from their work.
Read her full post for more details.
