Teachers Are Winning Raises. They’re Still Losing Ground.

Teachers in the massive Los Angeles Unified School District celebrated in April after winning a 14% raise on average over two years, the result of arduous negotiations and the threat of a coordinated strike by three unions representing distinct types of workers within the district.

It was a critical step forward for LAUSD educators, albeit on a contract that expires in June of 2027, meaning negotiations on another deal aren’t far off. But even with hard-fought wins at the bargaining table, teacher pay in the L.A. area isn’t keeping up with the rising cost of living — and it continues to fall behind the salaries of similarly educated peers who are choosing different, better-paying professions.

That dynamic is hardly exclusive to Los Angeles. Across the country, pro-educator groups say, the so-called teacher pay gap is real — and it is expanding.

“It’s one thing to get educators into the profession, but to be able to keep them, we need to be paying them what other professions outside of education are making,” said Dale Templeton, director of collective bargaining for the National Education Association, the country’s largest union at about 3 million members.

That isn’t happening. According to the most recent data from the Economic Policy Institute, the gap between average public school teacher pay and that of comparable college graduates working in other professions hit a record 27% in 2024. In 1996, the furthest year back before an interruption in data gathering, that gap sat at only 6%.

There are a number of factors at play, including reduced state funding for public education in many states and the burgeoning job market for educated women, who in past decades might have chosen or stayed in teaching in the absence of alternatives.

But the bottom line, Templeton said, is that public schools are increasingly straining to attract and retain top talent — and straight economic pressures are often the reason.

“It is about public dollars and it’s about funding, and this is where we need to be putting the funding,” Templeton said. “It’s our educators who impact what’s happening in that classroom.”

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Researchers at the Economic Policy Institute began tracking the teacher pay gap more than 15 years ago, drawing on available data going back decades to better understand the rising disparity in wages for public educators. The results have been sobering.

For those teaching kindergarten through 12th grade in America’s public school systems, the past several years have seen a significant fallback relative to other job choices they could make. For the decade ending in 2024, the EPI found, teachers’ weekly wages actually declined nationally by more than $46 once inflation was factored in.

In that same span, weekly wages for similarly educated peers in other professions rose by more than $220. In 2024, public school teachers earned about 73 cents for every dollar earned by their peers in other jobs.

Hilary Wething, an economist and researcher at the EPI, said the institution applies multiple controls to its studies to be as certain as possible that it is comparing like categories. One of the most significant of those comparisons is among college-educated women, as more than three-fourths of all K-12 teachers in the U.S. are women.

The biggest reason for teachers’ widening pay gap, Wething said, remains the funding mechanism for public education, with state and local budgets tight and K-12 funding almost constantly being shorted over the past 15 years.

“Especially in the wake of the Great Recession [at the end of the 2000s], we saw austerity measures at the state and local level to constrict funding across the board,” Wething said. “Of course, education was a part of that squeeze.”

Another primary dynamic, though, is the increasing opportunity for women to pursue other, better-paying careers, including jobs that weren’t as readily available to them 25 years ago. Wething mentioned the tech, engineering and medical sectors as some of those that have opened up the financial playing field to more college-educated women in recent years.

That doesn’t mean women aren’t pursuing teaching jobs; on balance, the ratio of women to men educators in K-12 schools has remained close to 3:1 for decades. But for many school districts, attracting and retaining the best of that teaching talent is becoming more difficult.

“Because so many occupations were closed to women in the past, you were able to attract and keep a really talented workforce for lower pay,” Wething said. “Once occupational segregation improved and opportunities for women in other fields increased, as we’ve seen throughout the 2000s, pay for those positions has been rising. Teacher pay just hasn’t caught up.”

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To both the EPI and the NEA, unionization remains one of the keys to pushing teacher salaries higher and trying to stave off the effects of inflation and alternative careers. In addition to basics like wage hikes, union negotiating has resulted in improved benefits in many school districts, including Los Angeles.

The value of those benefits is significant. But even factoring the “benefits advantage,” as the EPI calls it, public teachers’ total compensation gap with their peers in other professions remained 17% in 2024.

For the nation’s youth, the stakes feel enormous. Across the country, test scores have been in a steep decline for years, according to a recent report by the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University. That decline was true across racial and geographic lines, and at rich and poor school districts alike.

One answer, according to the NEA: Pay teachers enough to keep them in their jobs, doing what they do best.

Templeton noted in the NEA’s report that teachers in states with collective bargaining are faring much better than those in states where such bargaining does not occur, with annual salaries nearly $16,000 higher. More than a third of the nation’s public school districts also have starting teacher salaries of at least $50,000, a goal that the union has been working toward expanding.

It’s a start. But until state and local budgets grow to include more funding for public education, schools on a district-by-district basis are likely to continue to struggle to attract and retain top talent who increasingly have other attractive choices to consider, especially in the face of escalating costs of living.

“In these other professions, they’ve been able to keep pace or stay in front of inflation,” Templeton said. “In public education, it’s just not happening. And that’s one of the things we’re trying to change.”

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