In Kentucky, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Arizona, and Colorado, teachers are refusing to teach until lawmakers agree to raise their abysmal pay. Some have stormed statehouses, others have closed their schools and walked out. The mainstream press affords them lavish and highly sympathetic coverage, and Americans are naturally disposed to admire teachers. But is the striking teachers’ plight really so dire?
Consider Arizona. Teachers there say their pay is too low. Average teacher salary in the Grand Canyon State ranks near the bottom: 44th out of 50 states and the District of Columbia, according to the National Education Association (NEA). Teachers want an immediate 20 percent pay increase. Tuesday was day 4 of their state-wide protest. It’s caused the closure of some 60 school districts in the state, which has left no fewer than 750,000 students without schooling. Governor Doug Ducey has agreed to meet the teachers’ demands by signing a bill that will raise vehicle fees, but the governor’s plan wouldn’t take full effect until 2020 in order to avoid overburdening the state’s budget. That’s not good enough for the teachers, though—they want the full 20 percent now—and so the strike continues.
In West Virginia, meanwhile, teacher protests helped to generated a 5 percent pay increase for state employees across the board. Protesters—with the media’s help—made much of the fact that West Virginia’s average teacher salary stands at $45,555, or 49th in the country.
The trouble with pointing to a state’s rank in teacher pay as a justification for protests is that it would justify perpetual protests and perpetual pay increases. It is an inescapable matter of logic that some state has to be ranked last, second to last, third to last, and so on. Must the bottom five, or the bottom ten, engage in strikes and protests for that reason?
Of course, a simple national ranking in teacher pay doesn’t tell you a host of important factors: cost of living, health benefits, pensions, average class size, money allocated per student, and so on. Take the cost of living. West Virginia’s average teacher salary goes from $45,555 to $51,199 when adjusted. Colorado teachers, also demanding raises, earned an average salary of $51,808 in 2017—31st in the country. Does the same “close to last” justification hold in the case of Colorado?
Take-home pay—how the NEA calculates salary—doesn’t include the outsized state benefits packages most teachers receive. According to one reliable estimate, while the average civilian worker earns $1.78 in retirement benefits per hour of work, public school teachers earn $6.22 an hour in retirement compensation. That’s not to say that teachers in some places shouldn’t be making more than they are, but simplistic arguments about rankings, though endlessly repeated by gullible news media, tell one next to nothing about true teacher costs.
Whether or not Arizona’s teachers deserve more pay is a question for the Arizona taxpayers who will will have to foot the bill for the increases. We only hope they won’t fall prey to bad arguments.
