How Underpaying Teachers Became the Norm—and How to Fix It

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Join us for this investigative deep dive into the state of public educator salaries in the US. Does it pay to be a teacher? Or is there merit to the argument that teachers aren't underpaid? And how can we actually fix the issues of wage stagnation and prestige in education? We heard from more than half a dozen #RichGirlNation educators who shared the inside scoop on their own experiences.

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Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and Katie Gatti Tassin, with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is our Chief Content Officer and additional fact checking comes from Kate Brandt.

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Transcript

Transcript

Educator:

I get a lot of varied reactions when I tell people I'm a teacher. The typical response is, "Oh, that's so great of you. That's such important work. We need good teachers." A lot of people, even if they say those things and even if they genuinely feel them, feel like they'll be very grateful and appreciative of teachers until it's time to put their money where their mouth is. And then if teachers are trying to get any sort of a raise or improved working conditions, anything at all that's perceived as beneficial to them, we're seen as greedy because we should be in it for the kids and we should be willing to do whatever it takes for the kids. And so if you need to spend your own money, it's for the kids. You should be willing to do that. If you need to give up your weekends and your evenings and anything else, it's for the kids. You should be willing to do that. So anytime you ask for anything, then it's like they stop being grateful.

Katie:

If you want to wade into a hot button issue that impacts children, taxpayers, and our nation's future, look no further than the current cultural debate swirling around teachers. For my part, I always assumed there was pretty clear cut, conventional wisdom about teacher pay, that teachers are underpaid and everyone knows it. Somehow, the education system hasn't collapsed despite that and we are all hoping for the best. After all, the state of teacher pay in the US is hard to talk about at a generalized national level because it doesn't just vary dramatically by state. It can vary dramatically by zip code within cities, which makes it hard to discuss the problem holistically or even get to accurate data.

Take Greenfield and East Hampton, Massachusetts for example. They are just 26 miles apart, but the average teacher's salary in East Hampton is 23% higher, $72,926 as opposed to $59,209. The five states that pay teachers the highest average salary are Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut, all within the 73,000 to $76,000 per year range, while teachers in Arizona, Florida, Mississippi, Virginia, and Arkansas are paid around $20,000 per year less, in a range between 53 and $56,000 on average. This is partially due to cost of living. For example, a move from Jackson, Mississippi to Hartford, Connecticut would be expected to increase your expenses by roughly 20%. Still, that doesn't account for the entire difference.

And it wasn't until I began digging into this personal curiosity, why are teachers so underpaid, that I realized that assumption only represented the tip of a very contentious iceberg. So let's probe beneath the surface, shall we?

Welcome back to the Money with Katie Show, Rich Students. Today, we'll be hearing from several current and former teachers in Rich Girl Nation to humanize some of the dollars and cents.

So first things first, is education a public good? Elementary education in the US didn't become mandatory for kids until 1918, though you could have been legally excluded from school based on your race until 1954. Today, whether or not it's a, quote, public good in America is up for debate. A public good for definition's sake is characterized by a few qualities. It's a commodity or service made available to all members of a society, typically because it's considered easier to provide via the powers of scale that taxation and government create. Think things like infrastructure or clean air or fire departments. Public goods are thought to be non-rivalrous and non-excludable, meaning you can't exclude someone from using them and one person using it does not take away the ability of someone else to use it. So a popular example is a street lamp. My benefiting from the light that it provides doesn't preclude my neighbor from doing the same.

Private goods on the other hand are rivalrous and excludable. Private goods must be purchased to be consumed, and one person consuming it does prevent someone else from doing so. Private goods are associated with competition, both between providers, think Pepsi versus Coke, and consumers, like mowing down your fellow shopper for a Tickle Me Elmo in 1996. So does education more accurately fit the former bill or the latter? At the very least, you probably think of education as something that's good for the public. Education and democracy are highly correlated across countries, leading many to conclude that education is a precursor to democracy.

Still, through this lens, it's difficult to claim that we currently treat education in the US like it's a public good, despite the fact that it is paid for by tax dollars. And whose tax dollars exactly? In most US school districts, public schools are primarily paid for by property tax dollars. This is why wealthier zip codes with more expensive property values and therefore a richer tax base often have higher quality schools. Now, additional state, local and federal funding kicks in when needed, but the federal government foots less than 10% of the bill, and as property taxes vary significantly, it's probably understandable why it's difficult to make claims about the national state of public education funding. Two schools only a few miles away from one another might have radically different resources and therefore radically different student outcomes and compensation for teachers.

This often leads to a predictably racialized pattern. In 2019, a report from the nonprofit EdBuild found that 20% of US students go to school in districts that are both poor and predominantly non-white, while only 5% of students attend school and districts that are both poor and predominantly white. We will get right back to it after a quick break.

Now, if you've listened to US news recently, you've probably heard about teacher shortages. Thomas Edsall opens his opinion piece for the New York Times like this. Quote, "Here are just a few of the longstanding problems plaguing American education: a generalized decline in literacy, the faltering international performance of American students, an inability to recruit enough qualified college graduates into the teaching profession, a lack of trained and able substitutes to fill teacher shortages, unequal access to educational resources, inadequate funding for schools, stagnant compensation for teachers, heavier workloads, declining prestige and deteriorating faculty morale."End quote.

Yeah, that's a list. His description calls to mind something called a doom loop, which is a concept that goes a little something like this. The prestige of a field declines over time. Now, this could be due to shifting public sentiment or low pay or even a disproportionate number of women in the workforce. This is something known as occupational segregation where certain genders or races become overrepresented in certain fields. Now, the point is because of these changes, fewer highly qualified individuals are attracted to the field as a result, thereby hollowing out the pool of talent, which then further solidifies perceptions that the field is not prestigious or desirable or should be highly paid. And it repeats, it's a cycle.

And while prestige of a field might feel too slippery to measure, a paper from Brown University found that perceptions of teacher prestige have fallen between 20% and 47% in the last decade. They're at or near the lowest levels recorded over the last 50 years. If that seems like an unimportant or a squishy metric, consider that interest in the teaching profession among high school seniors and college freshmen has fallen 50% since the '90s and 38% since 2010, similarly reaching the lowest levels in 50 years. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of students graduating from college with a bachelor's degree in education fell from around 176,000 in 1970 and '71 to just 85,000 in 2019.

We asked teachers in our community to tell us, when you told people in your life that you wanted to be a teacher, how did they react? And while many of the responses noted that they were supported by their friends and family, there was also a large contingent of teachers who experienced the opposite.

Educator:

I had one grandparent tell me that I was quote, "Too smart to be a teacher," end quote, and I needed to do something that would allow me to support my family should we need to rely on just my salary.

The reaction was not a hundred percent positive. I was working in the tech industry before I changed careers to become a public school teacher, and I just remember telling my parents and they were pretty upset honestly. I remember my mother pretty clearly saying, "Why did we spend so much money for you for college if you're just going to be a teacher?"

When I first decided that I wanted to become a teacher, my mother, who is an educator, told me that it was a dead end job and that I should not leave a career that was more promising and lucrative. I had other friends tell me that being a teacher is something that nobody is ever going to take seriously and that I'm basically setting myself up to just be stuck in that position for the rest of my life.

No one in my friends or family tried to steer me away from teaching. However, all of my college professors did. Every single class, at the beginning of class, they would say, "Just so you know, if you're a teacher, you will not be making money." Every class, every semester until graduation, that happens. And then when you get out of graduation and you get into your teaching job or even get into substituting, there again, you will hear, "Just so you know, you will not be making much money." When you're young and naive like I was. I thought, "That's fine. I'll make do what I can. I've learned how to budget really well. I am more about the passion for this job." And that is a common topic, is people use the passion tax to justify underpaying teachers

Katie:

Passion, not prestige. As Ezra Klein recently pointed out on his show, "It may be less of a chicken or egg debate and more of a clear cut relationship between prestige and money." Prestige follows money. Occupations that are paid well become prestigious, not the other way around. So put that idea in your back pocket because we're going to come back to it.

So just how much has teacher pay changed in the last couple of decades? According to Katie Riley's reporting for Time Magazine, there were roughly 3.2 million full time public school educators - which represents roughly 1% of the population - in 2018, and they earn less today on average when adjusted for inflation than they did in 1990. As of 2021, the estimated average public school teacher's salary was $65,090, and the average starting salary in the 2019/2020 school year was just $41,163. According to MIT, an appropriate, quote, "Living wage in the US is $68,808 per year in 2019 before taxes for a family of four," which MIT qualifies as two working adults and two children. So how does that stack up to what teachers in Rich Girl Nation earned when they started teaching?

Educator:

My first year of teaching, I earned $41,000. This was in 2010, and I had my bachelor's degree and I had also done a full year of student teaching.

My first year of teaching, I was making I believe $34,000 in the City of Chicago. I needed a bachelor's degree. I graduated with a double major and a minor.

I earned a whopping $47,860.

I made $41,000 my first year of teaching. That was in 2014, and I had to complete a master's degree in order to earn that income as very competitive.

This was in 2003. I think I earned $27,000 a year.

Katie:

Maybe unsurprisingly then, many teachers take a page out of Walter White's playbook. They get a second job, though maybe not selling meth. They double as real estate agents. They work at Walmart, they deliver for DoorDash, they sell products for MLMs. In the 2017/2018 school year, 18% of teachers who worked full-time in public schools had a supplemental job during the school year. Now, that's about three times higher than the 5% of the total population who worked full-time and had a secondary part-time job in 2016, and that is an important distinction between education and other fields. In 2021, educators earned 23.5% less than comparable college graduates according to the left-Leaning Economic Policy Institute or EPI. So what are the teachers that we connected with actually paid today?

Educator:

I'm now on year nine of teaching with a master's degree, and because of the district I work in, I receive a district bump. We get a higher level of pay than just the state level pay, and still, I make just under $60,000 a year. Now, in my 11th year with a master's degree plus 15 additional credits and a supervisor certificate, I make 83,000. However, my paycheck was 1,800 back when I first started and it's now 1,900 due to increased healthcare contributions, increased union dues and increased pension contributions. I basically take home about the exact same amount I did 11 years ago.

I now have a master's degree, but I'm still earning only about $55,000. I'm 37 years old and I'm not married. I'm a single income household and with inflation and everything that's happening, I really, really, really struggle to make ends meet.

Katie:

But this is where I learned that the accounting, both anecdotal and statistical, that appeared fairly straightforward to me actually generates debate. Are teachers actually underpaid? And we'll be right back after a message from the sponsors of today's episode.

Are teachers actually underpaid? I didn't think anyone questioned this reality, but it turns out there are at least two guys who are determined to, quote, discredit the myth of the underpaid public educator. Andrew Biggs and Jason Richwine. I'm not kidding, I really seem to find at least one of them connected in some way to every debunking style article that I was able to find on this topic. It feels like they have a monopoly on this side of the argument, and I was left wondering which elementary school teacher hurt them. But anyway, their findings seem to directly contradict that of the EPI.

Richwine and Biggs report, quote, "After adjustment to reflect the time that teachers work outside the formal school day, the BLS data show that public school teachers on average receive salaries about 8% above similar private sector jobs."

Huh? At this point, I'm really confused, but it's true. Time worked does seem to be a central point of contention in this debate, that between spring break and summer break and Christmas break, that teachers work for 180 days each year as opposed to 260 days, which is the common, quote, full-time worker's schedule. Here's what one teacher, Dory, shared with us about how folks perceive her schedule.

Educator:

Generally speaking, I feel like people perceive my profession as easy as well as almost like part-time I think, because the school day ends earlier, but they don't take into account that my day starts way earlier than most jobs, and I think a lot of people think that teachers totally check out over the summer, whereas I do almost all of my planning. All of my project experimentation and prep happens over the summer, so it is a year round job for me.

Katie:

Another educator, Brie, echoed Dory's sentiment.

Educator:

Your day is not eight to four. People like to say that you have off in the summers. You really don't. I don't really know a teacher that is not working unless they have a partner or they have some independent wealth that's not working over the summer, and I don't know many teachers that are not working a second or a third job outside of their school day.

Katie:

This was the pattern that emerged in the feedback we heard, that, sure, the official hours might be something like eight to three during the school year but that's not reflective of how much work the job actually requires. Here's what seventh and eighth grade English teacher, Robin, shared.

Educator:

The large majority of my workday, from 8:20 to 3:25, is essentially spent in service to my students, helping them, guiding them, and providing individual help, all while building a relationship and rapport, incorporating social-emotional learning and being culturally responsive. At 3:25, the students go home and I usually stay at school until 5:30 or six o'clock at night two to three times a week to catch up on planning, grading, writing goals for my special education students with IEPs, creating or altering behavior plans, entering data, updating seating charts, posting assignments on Google Classroom, making copies, contacting parents, or some other administrative type work that helps me run my classroom.

I am in my 11th year and at this point in my career, staying late until 5:30 or six, two to three times a week helps me to hardly take any work home. When I first started teaching, the amount of work I did outside of my contractual hours was extremely significant, to the point where I'd be grading papers at the Thanksgiving table.

Katie:

This left me thinking again of the research that said teachers earn on average more than other, quote, similar college educated workers when adjusted for hours worked. And I started wondering, what private sector job even compares to being a public school teacher? Surely not my fake email job. So I emailed the authors of the paper to ask, how are you qualifying a comparable private sector job? And to my great surprise and delight, they emailed me back and they told me that the private sector professional category they used consisted of college educated individuals working in the occupations with codes between 10 and 3540 in the American time use survey.

Dear listener, let me tell you, this was a wide breadth of jobs, everything from financial managers to marketing professionals to legislators to farm managers to statisticians to counselors and librarians. It was not intuitive to my untrained eye why these were the positions chosen to compare to educators, and salaries were not listed for these roles so I'm not entirely sure how the data sets are being combined to spit out the outcome that teachers, when controlling for time worked, are paid 8% more than these, quote, comparable private sector professionals. And I'm not saying the research isn't accurate. Just that I could not make sense of how they were reaching this conclusion, but hey, I'm just a chick with a podcast.

Another common explanation offered as to why teachers aren't underpaid is teacher pensions. States offer pensions to teachers, also known as defined benefit plans, where a retired teacher would receive pension payments after they leave the workforce. Again, these vary widely by state. Only around half of new teachers stick around long enough to retire with any pension, and of the ones who do, more than half of them don't even break even with their own contributions from their salary while working, meaning the total amount of their salary diverted to pensions is less than the total pensions they receive in retirement. A little back of the napkin math would reveal that this means just one in four teachers ends up benefiting from their pension, and some states like Texas don't allow teachers to participate in or collect social security benefits with a few exceptions in various districts.

And this tracked with what we heard from our guests. Nearly all the educators we spoke with said their states automatically require them to contribute to a pension, one that they're likely never going to receive unless they continue working for between 22 and 40 years in some cases. And these aren't small potatoes. Based on what people shared with us, automatic paycheck contributions can be in the hundreds of dollars and then they'll often still need to fund other retirement vehicles on top of this, knowing that they may not continue to teach for decades and therefore may not actually receive the pension.

So speaking of other retirement vehicles, as if that is not bleak enough, one thing that we came across in producing this episode was an SEC lawsuit that centered on investment salespeople targeting teachers in their 403(b) accounts. So while most workers in the private sector have access to 401(k) plans that by law are required to provide a, quote, prudent mix of investment options, most teachers are offered the lightly regulated 403(b) plan. When Congress introduced the 403(b) in 1958, they were viewed as a way for teachers to supplement their pensions and the only permissible investments you could make inside of them were annuities. You couldn't buy stocks by way of mutual funds in a 403(b) until 1974, and as of 2016, more than half of all 403(b) funds were still locked up in these complex financial instruments that are, importantly, unjustifiably expensive.

Scott Dauenhauer, a financial planner who works with public school teachers, told the New York Times, "It's a wealth transfer from those who don't know any better to Wall Street." The Times' reporting found that many teachers are pushed to invest in expensive and complicated variable annuities rather than the cheap plain Jane index funds that we talk about on shows like this one. The fees for these annuity products in some cases exceed 2% of the overall balance and carry lofty surrender fees for getting out of them, in excess sometimes of 5% of the total balance. An analysis found the teachers were even charged up to 6% each time they made a deposit, and that's to say nothing of the expense ratios on some of the mutual funds they were invested in, some of which exceeded another 1%. We are talking about a difference of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost gains over a lifetime of working and contributing. One teacher, Brooke, also took notice of the issues with her 403(b).

Educator:

Unfortunately, the teachers at my school have been preyed upon by financial institutions in our area that offer 403(b)s that have high fees, and there is no teacher education about this at my school. The institutions come to our schools and they'll offer free items like donuts or tickets to a Yankee game and get people enrolled, and then there are huge fees in order to get out of the program. So it's a huge issue in my area and in the profession in general.

Katie:

Last year, the SEC ordered a financial services company called Equitable - formerly AXA, but wow, the irony of the name change, good Lord - to pay $50 million to harmed investors after finding that, quote, "Equitable gave investors the false impression that their quarterly account statements listed all fees paid during the period. The SEC's investigation found that in reality, the statements listed only certain types of fees that investors infrequently incurred, and that more often than not, the statements had $0 in listed fees."

This actually raised a flag for us because we noticed that when we spoke with Rich Girl Nation teachers, we heard some of them mention this company specifically.

Educator:

For my 403(b), if the stock market is up more than 10%, then Equitable eats the rest, so any more than 10%, they take it. And if it's down more than 10%, they swallow that loss. Not the greatest and I'm really not a fan of it.

Katie:

Did you catch that? It sounds as though Robin's 403(b) through Equitable is invested in a complex annuity product, but tell me if this sounds fair to you. If the market is up more than 10%, Equitable gets the additional gain, and if it's down more than 10%, they, quote, swallow the loss. So we tried to clarify by reading the actual plan documents ourselves to make sure that we were understanding Robin's description of her plan, and we still couldn't really make sense of them. So like any good investigative journalist wannabes, we've reached out to Equitable for comment, and we cannot make this up, they cited HIPAA as the reason why they could not tell us more information about how the plan worked.

But okay, let's assume her description is correct. Well, investors, you might wonder how this works out for you. In the last 20 years, the stock market has only finished the year down by greater than 10% twice. How many times has it exceeded 10% gains? 12 times. That's two years where they've been taking a loss on your behalf, so sweet of them, and 12 where they're capturing gains that should have been yours. Think about 2013, 2019, 20,21, years where the market finished up nearly 30%. You barely benefited from those gains. It's criminal.

While the tax savings generated by deferring taxes on contributions might be valuable, it is crucially important to check the fees you're paying in these accounts, and if they're ludicrous or only allow you to buy expensive insurance products, many experts often suggest opting out entirely and that a regular IRA could be the better path.

But ultimately, most of the arguments against higher teacher pay boiled down to free markets, baby. They're going to pay teachers as little as they can get away with, and teachers clearly don't mind because there's no shortage of teachers. As Richwine and Biggs wrote, "Wages aren't determined by years of schooling, but by the supply and demand for skills." And there's no short supply of educators, except there might be now.

A lot of post 2020 reporting has focused on the idea that there are fewer teachers in the labor force leading to teacher shortages. Now, The Atlantic's Derek Thompson dug into that reporting and found that the more troubling part of the teacher shortage conversation was specific to a lack of, quote, qualified teaching professionals, a trend that's unfurling against this backdrop of declining economic incentives. We've already talked about how the number of people interested in becoming teachers is on the decline and some states have taken a quintessentially American approach to solving that problem - offshoring. From 2015 to 2021, the number of international teachers employed by US districts jumped by 69%, from 2,517 to 4,271 to give a sense of scale. And most have come from the Philippines, Spain, Jamaica, China, and France.

So, okay, the problem at hand is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The pandemic acted like an accelerant for chronic long-term issues in public education, teacher pay has stagnated and the prestige of the field has declined. So let's say you are a high achieving 18 year old high school senior headed off to college and taking out the average debt load of $37,000 to do so. If someone asked you what you were considering studying and you said you were debating between law, accounting and education, the third option would probably stick out like a sore thumb, because while all three fields typically require a four-year bachelor's degree as well as some type of advanced degree, the first two are compensated very differently. I guess educating our future generations just doesn't pay very well.

The solution then seems pretty obvious, right? Higher salaries for more effective teachers are the solution. Just raise the pay and prestige of teaching and boom, problem solved. But is it? Does higher teacher pay net better student outcomes? Because here's where we reach a really frustrating part of this story. As a reminder, most public funding from education comes from property taxes, and what do people do when they receive notice that their property taxes are going up? Well...

Speaker 3:

So let me ask you this. Do you think, because I know that you've been helping people in recent years to actually protest their appraisals, do you think that we're going to see a record number of protests this year just because so many people are seeing such increases?

Speaker 4:

Geez, I sure hope so. I really think that this is one of those things that you should be doing it every year. You don't need to protest your property taxes every year, but you should review them and you should make sure that that increase isn't disproportionate to what the market's doing. Because even with this crazy market that we've been seeing, when we list homes, they sit out there for a day or two before they're sold, and that market is something that's really going to push those property taxes up as well.

Katie:

So yeah, nobody likes paying higher taxes, but the money to pay teachers more has to come from somewhere, so if you're someone with a 2% property tax bill every year, you'd be forgiven for wanting to make sure that higher salaries actually correlate with better outcomes. There are a few ways this has been tested, most controversially with pay for performance models, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like - tying teacher bonuses and financial incentives to student performance. According to Education Week, quote, "In 2007, the New York City Department of Education and the United Federation of Teachers began a three-year pilot of the school-wide performance bonus program. The program provided financial rewards to educators in high needs schools that met annual performance targets determined in part by student growth on standardized tests," end quote. So what happened? Well, it didn't produce its intended effects. Student achievement didn't improve at any level, nor did it impact teachers reported attitudes or behaviors.

Crucially, the RAND Corporation's coverage of the pilot found that there was a lack of buy-in and understanding in schools about how the program was supposed to work, so it's difficult to say what's really to blame. None of the teachers that we heard from across the US had been in systems that tried this out, but believe me, we asked. So instead, we'll need to rely on published findings.

Across the board, pay for performance results are mixed, which might say more about how difficult it is to test this theory than the validity of the theory itself. After all, simply raising salaries for, quote unquote, good teachers for a year or two isn't likely to affect the makeup of the field itself or attract more qualified educators. The decline of pay and prestige has been a slow drip, and so two will be building it back up. One through-line does seem consistent though - the conclusion that better educators create better educational outcomes. The question then is whether or not there's evidence that more money attracts more qualified teachers. Beyond that, it's difficult to establish a causal link between higher teacher pay and better student performance because schools with higher teacher pay usually also have smaller class sizes, something that's associated with better outcomes, more resources in general, or a tax base full of richer people who might be more highly educated themselves.

Where correlations between teacher pay and student outcomes do exist, they are, quote, modest. According to a paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research called Do Higher Salaries by Better Teachers? Quote, "The empirical evidence on the link between teacher quality and pay is however decidedly mixed, raising doubts that there is a strong relationship between the two." End quote. A 2006 study in Illinois tested the hypothesis that higher pay led to better outcomes for three years, and the results were mixed. In third grade, for example, higher student achievement was linked to districts with lower salaries on average, while eighth grade outcomes supported the hypothesis. Higher pay and better student outcomes were linked for that age group.

Zooming out to the global view, student test scores are higher in countries where the teachers have more advanced skills, according to a 2020 article from the Journalists' Resource. Now, as we've noted, simply paying people more does not increase their skill levels, but higher pay in a field might attract more highly skilled individuals over time. After all, that's how other important fields attract highly skilled individuals. Simply paying a doctor more doesn't make her a better doctor, but the fact that doctors tend to make a lot of money and benefit from a sense of prestige tends to attract even more smart, ambitious people to the field. And as most people who listen to a personal finance show probably know, pay is a consideration when you're choosing a career path. So we asked Rich Girl Nation teachers if they'd ever considered changing career paths for better pay, and well, I'll let them tell you.

Educator:

I wish that I didn't feel this way, but I have considered changing professions or changing out of education.

Have I ever considered changing career paths because of the money or difficulty? Such a good question. I definitely have considered it. I have considered changing career paths because of the difficulty.

I did consider changing career paths.

The answer is yes, and I did change my career path.

Have I ever considered changing career paths? Yes, I have changed career paths.

I have absolutely considered changing career paths. Teaching is not for the faint of heart.

Yes, I'm considering changing career paths.

Katie:

And as for if any of them were surprised about teacher shortages...

Educator:

It is no surprise to me that there's a shortage of teachers, and the impacts in my district are definitely felt.

It does not surprise me at all that there is a teacher shortage. It is a tremendously difficult job with unreasonable and forever changing and increasing expectations, insufficient training, insufficient support and insufficient pay. The pay is insufficient for the advanced degrees that many teachers have and are still paying student loans for, and it's insufficient for a living wage.

Because of what I was being paid and the amount of work I was being asked to do and the toll it was taking on my mental health, it got to a point with teaching where I would have to make that drive and I would rather have gotten into a small accident than go to school. And so that's when I really realized, this is really affecting my mental health and it's not worth what I'm making to feel just so overwhelmed by everything we had to do and be for the kids and the parents and the school district. So it doesn't surprise me there's a shortage of teachers.

I think money is a factor, but in my opinion at least, the reason that we have a teaching shortage currently, which does not surprise me at all, I think it's more to do with the difficulty than the money. It was really nice to teach in China for four years and not have to do a single active shooter drill and not have that in the back of my mind every single day.

I'm not surprised there's a teaching shortage. I also think that taking people with no degrees and no experience, and giving them emergency certifications and putting them into the classroom as a teacher is just another way that the profession is being devalued and why teachers are leaving, why highly educated, highly motivated, highly dedicated teachers are leaving the profession.

Katie:

It seems to me that as long as teachers have, quote unquote, better options outside the field of education, these trends are going to continue. A few months ago, our Monetization of Self episode featured an overworked and underpaid former elementary school educator who left to become a viral TikTok creator because she could make so much more money posting fun dances and songs online than educating America's youth. Who among us would not make that decision if they found themselves bringing home far more money from TikTok? As we noted, teachers earn on average 23% less than their college educated peers, though I suppose some researchers do come to the conclusion that it's 8% more when controlling for time worked. But if we believe free markets really work rationally, that should serve as a magnet away from choosing to enter education, and as we've seen, it's starting to.

That's why I found it surprising that in 2017 and 2018 when surveyed by the National Center for Education Statistics, about 65% of teachers said they wouldn't leave teaching for a higher paying job. Even through the pandemic, less than 5% of teachers switched occupations in 2020 or 2021, lower than the nationwide switching rate of 13%. Despite its many challenges, there's something sticky about teaching, and that might be an indication of where the solution lies.

So my point of view, I'm fascinated by challenges like this one because to me it boils down at its simplest level to this set of prior assumptions. Number one, that folks generally agree that educational outcomes in the public school system in the US are in a state of decline, or at the very least, leave something to be desired. Number two, that the correlation between money and better outcomes in public schools are rather obvious, even anecdotally. That most people can tell you which public school in their town is, quote, best, and usually, it is the school in the wealthiest zip code. And three, fields that are well compensated and carry some level of cultural cachet - think law, medicine, accounting - they often require post-secondary education, which tends to attract ambitious students, and teaching is one such field that often requires additional schooling but is not often associated with being well compensated.

And it's on this point that some researchers would disagree, right? Pointing out the 180 versus 260 days worked per year discrepancy, so we'll put that footnote there, but assuming you accept the premise that teachers provide a value to society on par with what the lawyers, doctors, and accountants provide, admitting fully that, quote unquote, bad teachers, lawyers, doctors, and accountants absolutely exist, it seems to me that we need to get to the bottom of the correlation between pay and prestige. Does prestige lead to pay or the other way around? How do we elevate elementary and high school education to the same level of prestige in the US that say tenured academics enjoy? Though I know the issues of low pay and bloated administrative salaries exist at that level too.

Like most things in society, the, quote, quick fix isn't likely to get us very far and it seems to me that as long as budgets are being optimized for a quarter or a year rather than say a 10 or 20 year plan, it's going to be challenging to see long-term results. And it struck me that most of the studies that I saw for these pay for performance style models tried it for a year or two or three, and as the RAND Study noted, a potentially suboptimal execution with lack of buy-in, lack of understanding, et cetera, could sour the results, but I might suggest it's actually a little simpler than that.

It takes time for the prestige of a field to shift and change. One or two years of higher pay is not likely to shift a cultural interpretation of the value of teachers, but I am inclined to agree with Ezra Klein's take that fields that are paid well tend to garner prestige and attract highly qualified candidates. As long as property taxes serve as the primary funding for schools, it may be that wealthier zip codes will produce wealthier teachers, but the field as a whole will still suffer from a general perception of not being very competitive or well-paid.

Now, Richwine and Biggs might say that free markets would solve this problem if it were warranted. While free markets are great and all, at the end of the day, free markets are not great at solving all problems that a society faces. Some of the most important jobs in the world don't pay well, not because they're not valuable but because they aren't valued. The free market hasn't solved for, say, issues like childcare more broadly, but most parents would probably tell you that the quality of their childcare is one of the most important things in their life. To the extent we value education and having an educated populace powering our economy in the United States, we should probably value teachers. One recap from educator, Brie, does a fantastic job of summarizing this challenge in a nutshell, so I thought I would let her close us out today.

Educator:

There's just a devaluation of this profession. It doesn't matter if you're in private practice, if you have advanced degrees, if you've been in the game for a long time. There's an expectation that teachers or educators are doing it and that what they get out of it is enough. There shouldn't be a financial compensation, but I need to pay my bills and I should also be able to have some leftover to enjoy my life. It's really interesting to look at the roots of being a teacher and the history of it, and I think that there's a lot of ingrained systemic financial oppression, I guess. I don't know if that's the right word, but teachers have primarily been women, and if you look back to the early days, a teacher could no longer teach once she was married and they had very specific rules and codes of ethic that they had to follow, and they had a meager sum but they were just expected to lead with their heart in all of this.

And I just think it's really interesting that this is a primarily female care-taking profession in people's opinions, and that's why it's paid so little. However, if you really think about excellent teaching and what teaching requires, it requires knowledge of mental health. It requires scientifically based practices to support students' learning needs. It requires creativity. It requires administrative skills. It requires so many things that in any other job, there would be a separate person or multiple people for each of those roles that a teacher serves, and they'd probably all be making at least what one teacher makes in a year.

Katie:

Couldn't have said it better myself, Brie.

That's all for this week. We'll see you next week, same time, same place on the Money with Katie Show. Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henna Valez and me, Katie Gatti Tassin, with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is our chief content officer, and additional fact checking comes from Kate Brandt.