How To Pay Teachers $84,000 A Year—Without Raising Taxes

Schools are struggling to fill all their teaching jobs for the fall. Teacher morale is low. And, this summer, about one-sixth of the nation’s teachers are working in non-school jobs. It’s no wonder there’s broad support for raising teacher pay. Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers have been doing just that in the states. In Washington DC, the proposed “American Teacher Act” would mandate a minimum national salary of $60,000 for teachers.

But, at a time of staggering deficits and multiple priorities, funds are limited. Even ambitious proposals have usually delivered only modest boosts in pay. Moreover, decades of steady increases in school spending just haven’t translated into teacher paychecks.

We can do better.

For starters, those who want to give teachers a raise tend to suggest that cheapskate taxpayers are the problem. But there’s no evidence that they’re the problem. Since the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983, after-inflation per pupil spending has doubled. In 2019 (before the massive wave of federal pandemic aid), U.S. schools spent $16,774 per student.

Heck, between 2012 and 2022, even as real per-pupil spending increased by 16 percent, inflation-adjusted teacher pay fell by nearly 4 percent. This same pattern has held for decades. Why aren’t more dollars translating to more pay?

Look, the National Education Association reported this spring that, in 2021-22, average national teacher pay was $66,745 (the Bureau of Labor Statistics has it a bit higher, at $67,680 in 2021, but we’ll use the NEA figure). When teachers are asked how much they think teachers should earn, the median response is $80,000.

As I suggest in The Great School Rethink, that’s an attainable goal even without new funds. Let’s see how we might get there.

Take the current national level of teacher pay: $66,745.

Allow natural attrition to reduce the teaching force by 10 percent (given enrollment declines, this would increase student-teacher ratios by one to two kids per teacher). Putting the savings into teacher salaries would increase pay by $10,000.

Revamp benefits to reflect private sector norms, increasing salary from 66 percent of compensation to 71 percent. Such a shift would particularly help attract new teachers and career-changers. This would yield a $5,000 bump in pay.

Trim the ranks of 400,000 school and district administrators by 20 percent. This would put the administrative body count back where it was during the Obama presidency, with administrative ranks still 25 percent larger than in 2000. Use the savings to fund 12-month lead teacher positions for one in six teachers, with salary and leave bumped accordingly. Teachers could grow professionally and assume a larger role in training, curriculum development or parent engagement without having to leave the classroom.

The result: teacher salaries of $81,000 for 10-month and $101,000 for 12-month positions. The weighted average: $84,000.

Now, while this would push average teacher pay well over $100,000 in some states, there are others where it wouldn’t suffice. In those cases, new revenues may make sense, if used to fund a redesign rather than to subsidize the status quo.

This approach has many virtues. It dramatically raises teacher pay, gives educators more professional autonomy, shrinks the bureaucracy, and permits schools to hire more selectively.

How can these numbers actually add up? If raising teacher pay is this manageable, how come we haven’t done it already?

Well, keep in mind that, between 2000 and 2019, U.S. student enrollment grew by 5 percent. Meanwhile, the ranks of district administrative staff grew by 88 percent. Dollars are adding administrative bodies rather than boosting educator compensation.

Then there’s the benefit question. Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab has estimated that just 66 percent of teacher compensation goes to wages; the rest to health care and retirement costs. The comparable private sector figure is 71 percent. Closing that gap would raise average teacher pay by about $5,000 a year.

Meanwhile, teachers typically work a 190-day contract year. After accounting for holidays, leave, and such, teachers work 10 weeks fewer per year than other full-time professionals. No one wins when good teachers who want to work spend the summer tending bar.

Oh, and relative to student enrollment, the number of teachers has nearly doubled since 1970. In 1970, the U.S. had a student-teacher ratio of 27 to 1; today, it’s 16 to 1. If we’d invested in raising teacher pay rather than adding teachers, the salary and benefit savings mean that median teacher pay in the U.S. today would be north of $140,000. Yup.

Teachers deserve better pay. And we can make that happen with the dollars we have. But it requires that we choose to invest in quality rather than quantity, educators rather than bureaucrats, and take-home pay rather than bloated benefit packages.