Will higher pay lure more teachers? Bill aims to boost salaries 50% by 2030

Michael Rodriguez loves teaching 7th grade at Oakland Unified’s United for Success Academy, but to help pay the bills, he’s got a side gig making branded T-shirts and hoodies for restaurants and other small businesses around his neighborhood.

“At night and on the weekends, I’ll be grading tests while I pump out 20 hoodies,” said Rodriguez, 51, who’s paid $78,000 to teach. “That’s the kind of stuff we have to do while also being expected to give the highest quality of education that we can.”

But a new proposal in Sacramento aims to put a lot more cash in the pockets of teachers such as Rodriguez: Assembly Bill 938 would boost school teacher and staff pay a whopping 50% by 2030. Jeff Freitas, president of the California Federation of Teachers, the bill’s sponsor, acknowledged it’s “a big and bold idea.”

“We make no mistake about that,” Freitas told the Assembly Education Committee this week. “But it’s exactly what is necessary at this time to tackle the problem.”

The bill this week passed out of committee — chaired by the bill’s author, Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi, a Torrance Democrat — with bipartisan support and no opposition. But that doesn’t mean it’s not raising questions, especially as California, after several years of record budget surpluses, is again facing deficits.

The state’s average public K-12 teacher salary of $87,275 is now third-highest in the U.S., behind New York’s $92,222 and Massachusetts’ $88,903. Both those states boasted better 8th grade math and reading scores in 2022 than California, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

So did Florida, where average public schoolteacher pay is $51,230. Texas, where average pay is $58,887, also had better 8th grade math scores than California last year, though reading scores were lower.

California’s average public school teacher salary also outpaces average private schoolteacher pay, which ZipRecruiter.com reports to be $34,198 statewide, $36,829 in San Jose, $36,572 in Oakland and $38,718 in San Francisco.

Teacher salaries are negotiated by individual districts and vary widely by region and the employee’s years of experience. Averages ranged from $51,592 on the low end up to $102,937, according to the California Department of Education.

Critics concede California’s higher cost of living plays a part in its higher teacher salaries but say they’d like to see a bill that ties teacher pay to improved student performance.

“California’s academic excellence for the amount of money we pay into the system is absolutely abysmal,” said Lance Christensen, who lost an election challenge last fall to state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond and is vice president of education policy at the nonprofit California Policy Center, a group critical of public-sector union influence. “Raising salary sounds great, but there’s no performance requirement tied to these things.”

Muratsuchi said that “the teacher wage gap is not just a California problem, it’s a national problem,” citing statistics that teachers earn 23.5% less pay than similarly educated peers in other fields such as business and engineering. “That is the number one reason we have not only a California teacher shortage but a national teacher shortage.”

The bill’s proposed pay increases wouldn’t be limited to teachers in particularly hard-to-fill roles such as special education. In fact, it wouldn’t be limited to teachers at all — all school staff except for administrators, which would include bus drivers, cafeteria workers and custodians, would benefit, Muratsuchi said.

The assemblyman cited the recent strike by bus drivers, cafeteria workers, teacher aides and other employees at Los Angeles Unified School District that halted student education for days as demonstrating the need for raising non-teacher pay as well. It ended with a deal giving the district’s Service Employees International Union workers, paid an average of $25,000 a year, a 30% raise.

The proposed 50% raises by 2030 would average more than 7% annually over the next seven years, roughly twice as much as a typical 3.5% annual increase. That would boost average California teacher pay to $130,000 in 2030, $22,000 more than the $108,000 it would reach with the average salary increases given now.

But Freitas said it’s needed because stories like Rodriguez’s are hardly unique.

“In every corner of the state, I hear the same desperate story from our members, teachers who live in their cars or commute over two hours each way to their schools because they can’t afford to live in that community,” Freitas told the committee.

Jenny Jordan, executive director of TeachStart, an organization that helps substitutes gain teaching credentials to become full-time educators, said half the program’s participants called finances the biggest barrier to them becoming a teacher. It’s particularly bad in the Bay Area, where teachers must compete with higher-paying technology jobs.

“I see teachers who drive Uber and Lyft on the weekends just to make ends meet,” Rodriguez said, “and teachers sharing an apartment with four other people just to make rent.”

The bill would set pay-raise targets for the state to fund and districts to reach over seven years. . But it doesn’t appropriate the funds automatically or punish districts if the goals aren’t met.

Despite the funding challenges, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are voicing support.

“As a former school board member, I still hear from my districts all the time that our teacher shortage is real,” said Assemblyman Josh Hoover, a Folsom Republican. “I know we’re going to have a lot of budget discussions this year on what our priorities should be as a state, particularly given the budget position that we’re currently in. But I think education has to be our top priority.”