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The latest AFT salary survey shows that efforts to make education salaries competitive with other professions face a stiff headwind—in the form of skyrocketing costs for health benefits.
The 2002-03 average teacher salary was $45,771, up 3.3 percent from the previous year, and average beginning teacher salaries rose 3.2 percent to $29,564 for the same period. But those gains are dwarfed by staggering increases in the cost of health insurance benefits—which spiked an astounding 13 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.
"Exorbitant health insurance costs are taking an intolerable bite out of already inadequate teacher salaries," AFT secretary-treasurer Edward J. McElroy warned following release of the AFT survey. "Even as teachers are being asked to do more, compensation packages are nothing short of insulting and fail to take account of growing healthcare and other out-of pocket costs to teachers."
Pressures from rising healthcare costs have certainly found their way into teachers' own pockets. Hewitt Associates last year estimated that healthcare cost-shifting to employees (represented by workers' premium costs along with insurance deductibles and co-payments) jumped about 150 percent between 1998 and 2004, the New York Times reports.
McElroy contrasted relatively stagnant salaries for frontline educators with superintendents' average salaries, which are as much as four times higher than average teachers' pay, according to the Educational Research Service. "States and school districts are crying poverty when it comes to teachers' pay, yet somehow find money for extravagant administrator salaries," McElroy observed. "Strong leadership without a quality teaching force won't improve education."
The union's annual survey also includes a state-by-state breakdown of salaries. Among the highlights:
- California, Michigan, Connecticut and New Jersey had the nation's highest average salaries in 2002-03.
- States in the lowest tier are South Dakota, Oklahoma, North Dakota and Mississippi.
- For beginning teachers, the highest average salaries were found in Alaska and New Jersey, while Montana and Arizona ranked last in this category.
- In 33 states, last year's base salary level gains for teachers beat the 2.1 percent gain in the Employment Cost Index (a measure of compensation costs that includes wages, salaries and employer costs for employee benefits). However, in the largest urban cities, the beginning salary grew just 1.6 percent in the same period.
July 15, 2004
