Teacher salaries have long been a topic of angst for teachers, district leaders, and policymakers.
Education Week has documented that discourse from its earliest days of publication. One of our earliest opinion pieces, in 1982, featured the Los Angeles teachers’ union saying that low salaries were driving teachers from the profession.
Much has changed from the early 1980s, but salaries remain a perennial topic of debate. Do you know how much has changed for teachers’ base salaries?
Use your best guess to draw a line showing about how much teachers earned on average between 1990 and 2020. Keep in mind the salary numbers are adjusted for inflation. Then, you’ll see what the national data actually show.