In Kentucky, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Arizona, and Colorado, teachers have refused to teach until lawmakers agree to raise their 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, where the teachers walked out on April 26. Average teacher salary in the Grand Canyon State ranks near the bottom nationally: 45th out of 50 states and the District of Columbia, according to the National Education Association (NEA). Arizona teachers had wanted an immediate 20 percent pay increase. The statewide protest caused the closure of some 60 school districts in the state, which left no fewer than 750,000 students without schooling.
Governor Doug Ducey, a Republican, agreed to meet the teachers’ demand weeks ago, but his plan wouldn’t take full effect until 2020. That wasn’t good enough for the teachers—they wanted the full 20 percent immediately—and they walked out. On May 3, the state senate passed a bill that closely resembled what Ducey proposed: Teachers are expected to receive a 9 percent raise next year and 5 percent raises in each of the following two years. (The raises can’t, according to state estimates, take full effect until 2020 or after, without overburdening the state’s budget.) Schools were still closed as we went to press, but the teachers were planning to return to their classrooms on May 4.
In West Virginia, teacher protests in March 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 51st 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 5, or the bottom 10, engage in strikes and protests for that reason?
Of course, a simple national ranking in teacher pay doesn’t tell you much about a host of important factors: cost of living, health benefits, pensions, average class size, money allocated per student, and so on. Take cost of living. In 2016, West Virginia’s average teacher salary was $45,977, but $51,199 when adjusted for cost of living (moving from 46th place to 43rd nationally). New York had the nation’s highest average teacher salary, at $77,957, but when adjusted for cost of living it ranked only 17th.
Colorado teachers, who are demanding raises, earned an unadjusted 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 benefits packages most teachers receive. According to a study by Bellwether Education Partners, while the average American worker earns $1.78 in retirement benefits per hour of work, public school teachers earn $6.22.
This is 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 us next to nothing about true teacher costs. And funding for pay increases must come from somewhere. West Virginia governor Jim Justice, another Republican, has spoken of “budget cuts” and reallocations of state funds to make the 5 percent raise work. In Arizona, the plan passed by the legislature on May 3 is estimated to cost $300 million over the next year alone.
Whether or not teachers deserve more pay is a question for the taxpayers to whom they are beholden. They are the ones who will have to foot the bill for the increases in one way or another. We only hope they won’t fall prey to bad arguments.
