(C) Common Dreams
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Teacher ‘Pay Penalty’ Reaches Record High [1]
['Tim Walker']
Date: 2023-11
Despite the progress many states have made in the past two years to address teacher pay (and the educator shortage), a new analysis serves as a stark reminder about how far we still must go for the profession to be at least marginally competitive with other professions. Prospective teachers do not expect to become wealthy, but the choice to enter the classroom is costing them more and more every year—and that's bad news for teacher recruitment and retention.
According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), the teacher "pay penalty"—the gap between the weekly wages of teachers and college graduates working in other professions—grew to a record 26.4% in 2022, an increase from 23.5% in 2021.
In 1996, the pay gap was only 6.1%.
This means that, on average, teachers earned 73.6 cents for every dollar that other professionals made in 2022—significantly less than the 93.9 cents on the dollar they made in 1996.
Historically, women educators enjoyed a wage premium. However, pay parity was lost in the mid 1990s – likely as other professional opportunities emerged – and the pay penalty for women teachers has widened ever since, reaching 21.3% in 2022. For men, the pay gap widens significantly to 36.6%, which the EPI report notes, goes a long way in explaining why so few men choose teaching as a profession.
“Over the past two decades, teacher pay has fallen further and further behind similarly qualified professionals,” said report author Sylvia Allegretto, a senior economist at the Center for Economic Policy and Research and research associate at EPI. “These worsening trends have become a significant and growing challenge for the teaching profession. Providing teachers with compensation commensurate with that of other similarly educated professionals is necessary to retain and attract qualified workers into the profession.”
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[1] Url:
https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/teacher-pay-penalty-reaches-record-high#:~:text=This%20means%20that%2C%20on%20average,educators%20enjoyed%20a%20wage%20premium.
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