Teacher and staff salaries and benefits made up 80 percent of 2010 school expenses, and a new report by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics gives a more focused picture of how teachers get paid. The Teacher Compensation Survey, part of the Education Department’s Common Core of Data includes teacher-level information from more than 1.1 million full- and part-time teachers in 17 states, as well as teacher-benefits data from six states, during the 2006-07 school year.
The median base salary for a full-time teacher that year ranged from a low of $36,450 in Oklahoma to a high of $50,535 in Minnesota. The study found the vast majority of teachers had more than six years of experience and at least a bachelor’s degree. Teachers also remain overwhelmingly white (80 percent), but the 5.9 percent of Hispanic teachers had a higher median base salary, at $42,885, than either white teachers’ median base pay—$42,400—or the $42,293 base salary for the 12.4 percent of black teachers.
