Why Teacher Pay Has Fallen Behind Other College Graduates

On the morning of September 10, 2012, the first day of a strike nobody in Chicago had seen in a quarter century, teachers in red T-shirts stood outside schools across the city while a third of a million children stayed home or went to emergency programs in churches and park buildings. The Chicago Teachers Union had not walked out since 1987. Its president, Karen Lewis, a former high school chemistry teacher, was facing off against a new mayor, Rahm Emanuel, who had come to City Hall from the White House and wanted a longer school day and an evaluation system tied in part to test scores. The strike lasted seven school days. When it ended, the union had won raises and limits on how test scores would be used, and something less tangible: a template for teachers' strikes that framed pay, class size and school nurses as one fight, waged alongside parents. Six years later, teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona and other states walked out in a wave of strikes over pay that surprised even their own unions. Behind all of it was a number that has been moving in the wrong direction for decades.

In short: Teachers earn substantially less than other workers with similar education and experience, and that gap has grown since the 1990s. Better benefits close only part of it. This post argues that the pay penalty is a main reason districts struggle to recruit and keep teachers, especially in hard-to-staff subjects and schools, and that states have shown they can close it when they choose.

Measuring the gap

Comparing teachers' pay to everyone else's is harder than it sounds. Teachers work fewer days a year, but many work evenings and summers; they get pensions and health coverage that many private-sector workers lack; and pay varies enormously by state.

The most widely cited measure comes from economists Sylvia Allegretto and Lawrence Mishel, whose work for the Economic Policy Institute compares the weekly wages of public school teachers with those of other college graduates, adjusting for age, education, experience, region and other factors. Using weekly wages sidesteps the argument about summers. Their finding is that teachers earn significantly less than comparable college graduates, and that this "teacher pay penalty" has grown from a small gap in the mid-1990s to more than 20 percent in recent years. Their analysis counts benefits too: because teachers' benefits make up a larger share of their total compensation, the overall gap is smaller than the wage gap, but it remains large and has grown.

Other researchers make different adjustments and get different numbers, and some argue the penalty is overstated. That's a debate worth having on its merits, which we take up below. But the direction of the trend is not in much dispute: since the 1990s, teacher pay has lagged the pay of other college-educated workers, and in many states inflation-adjusted teacher salaries have been flat or have fallen over long stretches.

The case that teachers are paid enough

The most serious argument against the pay-penalty finding deserves a full hearing.

Critics argue that comparisons to "similar" college graduates miss differences in what degrees teachers hold, in the selectivity of the colleges they attended, and in measures of academic skill, and that adjusting for these narrows the gap. They point to benefits: defined-benefit pensions, which few private workers have anymore, and job security that is unusual in the private economy. Some economists have estimated that once these are fully valued, teachers are paid about as much as they would earn elsewhere, or more. And they note that the number of people with teaching credentials is large, which suggests the profession is still attractive to many.

There are fair points in here. Benefits matter, and pension wealth is real compensation, though it is heavily back-loaded and many teachers who leave early never receive much of it. Comparisons are imperfect.

But three facts are hard to square with the "paid enough" view. First, the shortages are real and they cluster exactly where you would expect if pay were the problem: in subjects like math, science and special education where graduates have the most lucrative alternatives, and in high-poverty schools where the work is hardest. Second, when the pay gap widened, so did teacher turnover and the decline in people choosing to enter teaching. Enrollment in teacher preparation programs fell sharply over the 2010s. Third, when states have raised pay meaningfully, recruitment has improved. People respond to wages, even people who went into teaching because they love it.

How a teacher's salary is actually set

Most people outside education don't know how teacher pay works, and the mechanics explain a lot about why it has lagged.

In most districts, teachers are paid on a salary schedule: a grid with years of experience down one side and education levels across the top. A teacher with five years of experience and a master's degree earns the amount in that cell, regardless of subject or school. The schedule is usually negotiated between the district and the union where collective bargaining is allowed, and set by the school board where it isn't.

That structure has strengths. It is transparent, it limits favoritism, and it historically helped close pay gaps between men and women and between Black and white teachers, which were once enormous and openly written into pay scales in parts of the country. Unions defend it partly for that reason.

It also has costs. Because the schedule pays a chemistry teacher and a physical education teacher the same, districts struggle to compete for science and math graduates who can earn much more elsewhere. Because steps are tied to years, raises come slowly, and a new teacher may wait a decade or more to reach a salary their college classmates hit much sooner. And because the money comes from state formulas and local property taxes, districts in poor areas often can't afford schedules that compete with wealthier neighbors, even if they want to.

Behind the schedule sits the budget. A district's ability to raise pay depends on what the state sends and what local voters will approve. In states that cut education funding after the 2008 recession and were slow to restore it, teachers went years without real raises. Those are the states where the 2018 strikes broke out.

Love of the job is not a business model

There is a cultural story that keeps teacher pay low, and it is worth naming. Teaching is often described as a calling, done for love rather than money, and for many teachers that's true. But a calling is not a recruitment strategy.

For most of the twentieth century, school districts relied on a pool of talented women who were shut out of most other professions. As that discrimination eased and women entered law, medicine, business and engineering, the profession lost a captive labor supply, and districts did not raise pay enough to compete. That is part of why the gap is widest now. The persistent idea that teachers should accept less because the work is meaningful is a holdover from that earlier era, and it falls hardest on a workforce that is still mostly women.

Low pay also changes who can afford to teach. A young graduate with student loans, or one who supports a family, may love teaching and still not be able to take a job that pays well below what a classmate earns in an office down the street. Many teachers take second jobs. In some expensive metropolitan areas, teachers cannot afford to live in the districts where they work. Every one of those pressures pushes people out of the profession, and those who leave tend to be replaced by less experienced teachers, which hurts the students in the schools that can least afford churn.

What happened when teachers struck

The 2012 Chicago strike set a pattern that spread. The teachers' strikes of 2018 began in West Virginia, where teachers in all 55 counties walked out over pay and health insurance costs and won a raise from a Republican governor and legislature. Oklahoma and Arizona followed, along with walkouts in other states. Many of these were states where strikes by public employees were legally restricted or where unions were relatively weak. Teachers organized through social media and won public support partly because parents knew their children's teachers and trusted them.

These strikes won raises, and in several states lawmakers who had resisted increases for years suddenly found the money. That is a lesson about power as much as about pay. Teachers' salaries are set by elected officials who respond to pressure, and for a long time the pressure on them ran mostly toward holding down taxes. When teachers and parents organized together, the politics changed.

The 2018 walkouts also changed how many voters saw teachers. Polls during that period showed broad public support for higher teacher pay, including among Republicans, and candidates in several states ran on it. A cause that had seemed to belong to unions alone turned out to have wide appeal once teachers made it visible.

When red states and blue states both raised pay

Some of the most significant recent raises have come from Republican-led states, a reminder that this is not a purely partisan issue.

In 2023, Arkansas passed a broad education law under Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders that raised the minimum teacher salary to $50,000, among the higher minimum salaries in the region. The same law created an education savings account program, and many progressives opposed it for that reason. But the raise for teachers was real, and teachers in the state's lowest-paying districts saw substantial increases.

In Maryland, the Blueprint for Maryland's Future, a long-term plan passed by the Democratic legislature over a gubernatorial veto in 2021, set a goal of raising starting teacher pay to $60,000 and of building career ladders that reward experienced teachers who take on leadership. Other states, from New Mexico to Texas, have also raised salaries in recent years, using different mixes of minimum salaries and across-the-board increases.

The lesson: closing the gap is a choice states can make, and several have made it under leaders of both parties. What's often missing is the political will to keep raises going rather than treating one increase as the end of the matter.

The students who pay for shortages

When a district can't fill a teaching job, the cost does not disappear. It moves to children.

Vacancies are filled with long-term substitutes, some without training in the subject they're covering. Classes are combined, so a teacher who planned for twenty-five students has thirty-two. Courses like physics or a foreign language are cut because no one is available to teach them. Teachers with emergency or provisional licenses fill the gaps, often learning on the job in the hardest schools.

These effects fall unevenly. Wealthier districts can pay more and draw experienced teachers from their neighbors. High-poverty schools, which already face higher turnover, end up with the most vacancies and the least experienced staff. The pay gap between teaching and other professions turns into a quality gap between rich and poor schools, which is exactly the inequality public education is supposed to reduce.

Here is the argument for closing the gap

This is the opinion part, and we'll make it plainly.

If the goal is better schools for children, especially poor children, the single most important resource is a stable, experienced, well-prepared teaching force. Research consistently finds that teachers are the most important school-based factor in student learning. You cannot build a strong teaching force while paying teachers substantially less than other college graduates and expecting them to stay for the love of it.

Closing the pay penalty does not need to happen all at once. States can set statewide minimum salaries tied to the cost of living; target raises to hard-to-staff subjects and schools; build career ladders so teachers can advance without leaving the classroom; protect the benefits that make the job sustainable; and fund it all through formulas that send more money to districts with the most need. Unions can bargain for those things, and parents can help win them, as Chicago and West Virginia showed.

Progressives should also be honest about a trade-off. Money spent on raises is money not spent on smaller classes, aides or new buildings, and some states have chosen class-size reduction over higher pay. Both matter. But in a profession losing people at the entrance and the exit, pay is where the leak is largest.

What you can do

Teacher pay is set by school boards and state legislatures, often in budgets that pass with little public attention.

• Ask your state legislators what your state's minimum teacher salary is, how it compares with neighboring states and what they plan to do about it. Find them, along with their phone numbers and latest votes, at the representatives lookup.
• Go to a school board budget hearing and ask how many teaching positions are vacant and what the district is doing to fill them. Vacancies are the clearest sign of a pay problem.
• Read about teachers' unions and their campaigns on the workers and unions topic page, and see the newest NLRB-counted union elections on the labor page.
• Put teacher salaries in context with the inequality page, which tracks real wages over time, the minimum wage, and the wealth shares of the top 1 percent and the bottom half.