Why aren’t teacher salaries rising?It’s not for lack of money. Even after adjusting for inflation and rising student enrollment, total school spending is up by about 29 percent over the last 20 years.1It’s not for lack of money spent on teachers, either. Instructional costs, including salaries, wages, and benefits for teachers, make up slightly more than 60 percent of all district spending today, just like it did 20 years ago.2
So overall expenditures are up, but teacher salaries are actually down slightly over the same period. Today, the average public school teacher earns $56,689 annually, a couple hundred dollars less than the average teacher salary 20 years ago (in constant dollars).3
Why is this happening? This puzzle can be explained by three trends eating into teachers’ take-home pay: rising health care costs, declining student/teacher ratios, and rising retirement costs.Rising insurance costs have affected all American workers, but they’ve hit teachers even harder. For all civilian workers, insurance costs consume 8.9 percent of compensation, up from 7.5 percent in 1994. Insurance costs are rising even faster for teachers, and they now eat up 10.2 percent of total teacher compensation, up from 7.3 percent in 1994. The good news is that insurance costs have begun to moderate. In the wake of the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act, insurance costs, as a percentage of total compensation, began to decline for all civilian
workers including for teachers.4