Every spring, the National Education Association publishes “Rankings and Estimates,” an annual publication whose centerpiece is a ranking of average teacher salaries by state. For decades, it has inspired ominous headlines in every media market in America, warning that public schools in states that don’t pour money into teacher salaries are doomed. Don’t waste your time reading it.
One notable feature of the report is that NEA researchers offer few details about how they arrive at their figures. This is a clear violation of basic professional standards in education research. The American Educational Research Association Code of Ethics directs researchers in the field to “permit the open assessment of data and other relevant materials and verification of findings” once findings are publicly disseminated.
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Yet, the NEA offers no opportunities for others to assess its dataset, methodology, or calculations. Anonymous NEA researchers offer only a few vague, throwaway sentences and clarifying information for state education agencies willing to provide it.
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One revealing episode occurred in 2022 when the NEA reported an average teacher salary figure for North Carolina that was significantly lower than the average salary reported by finance staff at the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. After questions arose about the discrepancy, union researchers revealed that they no longer included bonus and vacation pay in their calculation, a methodological change that was not previously disclosed and penalized North Carolina exclusively. Even worse, they used their “new” methodology to retroactively lower the state’s average salary and ranking for the previous two years.
AERA ethics guidelines are clear about the responsibility of researchers to disclose conflicts or possible conflicts of interest. Unsurprisingly, “Rankings and Estimates” includes no such disclosures. The NEA lobbies aggressively at the local, state, and federal levels to raise teacher salaries, often citing its own research to do so. Thus, there are obvious incentives for NEA researchers to provide low-ball estimates of average teacher salaries in service of its political agenda.
The NEA’s decision to estimate average salaries without including the costs of benefits is equally problematic. Focusing on salaries alone purposefully sidesteps the fact that benefits add tens of thousands of dollars to the underlying cost of employing an educator.
Consider that the typical 10-month teacher compensation package includes health insurance, liability insurance, retirement or pension contributions, bonuses, annual leave pay, professional development allowances, and, in some states, Social Security contributions. The rising cost of healthcare, in particular, is one of the primary reasons why school districts and states have fewer dollars to commit to higher base salaries.
These objections to the NEA’s teacher salary estimates may seem merely an academic squabble. After all, why would elected officials or taxpayers worry about the underlying assumptions and methodologies used in a report that they are unlikely to read?
The problem is that the NEA’s problematic research drives real-world policy and budgetary decisions. Nearly every mention of improving a state’s “teacher pay ranking” relative to other states cites NEA research as the basis for those comparisons. The stigma of a state ranking in the bottom 10 in average salary (let alone occupying the last spot) generates a landslide of bad press and finger-pointing, depicting elected officials as uncaring elitists who do not care about the plight of one of America’s most important professions.
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None of this should suggest that we should not pay teachers more or improve the benefits they receive. But we must assemble the highest quality and most comprehensive data before we demand that elected officials make consequential budgetary and policy decisions that affect hardworking taxpayers. This means selecting a team of qualified and independent researchers, perhaps led by the federal Institute of Education Sciences, who prioritize accuracy and transparency. This also means adopting an approach that acknowledges the immense variations in teacher salaries within states, the ever-increasing burdens of healthcare and retirement costs, and the relationship between compensation and regional cost of living.
In the end, the NEA’s “Rankings and Estimates” is not a good-faith research enterprise but a tool of political gamesmanship, usually at the expense of Republicans who oppose the union’s left-wing agenda. Americans should treat NEA teacher salary data and rankings for what they are — politics masquerading as research.
Terry Stoops is the Director of State Affairs for Defending Education.
