Little progress on teacher salaries leaves the profession at risk

Twenty years ago, a teacher with 12 years of experience earned about $17,000 a year--a figure criticized by the authors of A Nation at Risk. By 2001, according to the latest AFT teacher salary survey, the average salary had risen to $43,250.

Sounds like great progress, right? Only until you start adjusting for inflation, comparing the figures to those of other professions and looking at how spending on teacher salaries has progressed in relation to overall spending in the nation. Unfortunately, that sort of deeper analysis indicates that low teacher pay remains just as much a problem today as it was in 1983.

In the past few years, some states have made a concerted effort to raise starting salaries to attract new teachers, but across the spectrum--from novices to 30-year veterans--teacher salaries lag behind those of other professionals. "We're basically flat or just marginally above where we were" in 1983, says Jewell Gould, AFT director of research and a longtime observer of salary trends. "We haven't closed the gap." (See the accompanying chart on page 13.)

For example, the most recent AFT survey shows that the $43,250 teacher salary mentioned earlier compares unfavorably with a range of mid-career, white-collar occupations: $52,664 for accountants, $71,155 for computer systems analysts, $74,920 for engineers and $82,712 for attorneys.

"Partly because of the failure to raise salaries," Pam Grossman of Stanford University points out in a review of A Nation at Risk in the Harvard Education Letter, "teaching as a career option continues to compete with more lucrative careers that also require a college degree, while standards for entry into the profession are being lowered in response to teacher shortages."

In its recommendations, A Nation at Risk called not only for higher pay but also for salaries that are "professionally competitive, market sensitive and performance based." Clearly, pay is still not professionally competitive. On the second issue, school systems are notoriously slow in responding to market conditions. An effort to boost new-teacher pay might take a year to push through a state legislature; private sector firms, meanwhile, would long since have boosted their pay to attract new hires in a tight job market.

The issue of performance-based pay gets more complicated, depending in large part on how "performance" is defined. There have been efforts in the past 20 years, especially in some urban districts with strong AFT local unions, to pay teachers more for taking on extra duties, such as mentoring or peer evaluation, and certainly for earning advanced certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (see related story on page 12). But attempts to evaluate teachers, sort them into different performance categories, and then give them different pay based on what category they fall into--essentially merit pay--have been tried and have failed in almost every instance.

As Gould points out, such efforts have not worked, in part, because they fail to capture what it means to be an accomplished teacher.

Given the less-than-rosy salary picture, teachers obviously enter the profession for reasons other than money. So working conditions like class size and decent, well-equipped buildings--not really addressed in A Nation at Risk--have become vital in the effort to retain teachers. A new study by Public Agenda shows how strongly teachers feel about this. Not surprisingly, three-quarters of them say they are "seriously underpaid." While a slim majority say increasing salaries would be "very effective" in improving teacher quality, 86 percent say reducing class size would do the same thing.

On their own, states and districts can't afford to pay for such costly initiatives as class-size reduction and school construction and renovation. In the 1990s, the federal government for the first time provided substantial funds in these specific areas, but the current administration has since abandoned any such initiatives.

The reduction of federal support in these areas comes at the same time state financial woes are threatening the modest progress that has been made in increasing overall education spending. The states' accumulated budget shortfalls are approaching $100 billion, and the Bush administration has shown little willingness to provide federal support to help states deal with their fiscal crises.

Much more information about teacher salaries and working conditions is available online at www.aft.org/research/index.html.

Back to:  A Nation at Risk--Work in Progress