The Teaching Penalty

We Can’t Recruit and Retain Excellent Educators on the Cheap

By Lawrence Mishel, Sylvia Allegretto, & Sean Corcoran

“How to Make Great Teachers” was the headline of the cover story of a recent issue of Time magazine. Forgive us for wondering why there wasn’t a subhead with three words that say it all: “Pay teachers more.”

We learned, in our recent analysis of pay scales for professionals, something that won’t surprise teachers, parents, school administrators, and, we would hope, education policy experts: Public school teachers earn considerably less than comparably educated and experienced people, and less than people in occupations with similar educational and skill requirements, such as accountants, reporters, registered nurses, computer programmers, members of the clergy, and personnel officers.

Compared with these professionals, teachers earn, on average, about $154 less a week—or 14.3 percent less—than people in these other learned, but not unusually lucrative, professions. This teacher pay penalty, in effect in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, ranges from more than 25 percent in 15 states (Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia) to less than 10 percent in only five (Montana, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wyoming). Nowhere in this country, however, do teachers earn more...