Earlier this week Matthew Yglesias wrote a piece on teacher salaries. He noted that:
…while New York pays 70 percent higher teacher salaries than Louisiana on average, its entry-level salaries are only 7 percent higher. That doesn’t come close to compensating for the higher cost of living. If you ask where “teacher” counts as a decent-paying job for someone just starting out, Mississippi and Louisiana look good and New York looks terrible, despite there being much higher average salaries in New York.
That observation raises a lot of interesting questions. But today I want to explore what happens when a state or district dramatically increases starting teacher salaries.
Let’s start with the state-level data. Consider the graph below. It shows the average teacher starting salary by state (left to right) versus the top salary (up and down). As the graph shows, states with higher starting salaries tend to also offer their teachers higher maximum salaries. Washington, California, and the District of Columbia pay the highest salaries regardless of a teacher’s experience level.
None of these are adjusted for cost of living. But now I want you to focus just on the starting salary aspect. I’ve added a red line to show something interesting. As of last year’s data, Arkansas schools offered nearly identical starting salaries ($50,031) as New York ($50,077). That’s a striking comparison given the huge differences in cost of living between the two states.