Speaking on Morning Joe (MSNBC), Lawrence Kudlow complained that the average teacher makes $120,000. This is not true. The national average is about $56,000.
This teacher in Utah earns far less.
He/she writes:
“Every year since 2008 in my district in Utah, I have had more students with DECREASING salary. Because of the lack of will of the legislature to properly fund education, contract days have been cut almost yearly. We now have 184 contract days instead of the 188 we had five years ago, even though the work load has increased, meaning that I spend MUCH more time in preparation and planning than I used to. I now have 260 students in 8th and 9th grade geography and history, and will probably have closer to 275 next year. We just learned two days ago that my district is freezing step increases for the second time in five years. I am just finishing my 13th year of teaching, with 60 additional quarter credit hours, and I make about $40,000 a year. As I start on my 14th year, I will STILL be on step 12, meaning I have to teach at least two more years before I can retire, if I ever CAN retire. On top of that, the district has told us this year that it is “our fault” when students have failing grades, meaning that I spend far more time in email and phone correspondence with parents than ever before.
“I’d like to challenge this blowhard to try my job for a couple of weeks.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
2011-12 National Average Starting Teacher Salary: $35,672
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Thanks for posting this, Bob. I do not know where Lawrence Kudlow came up with $120, 000. I have been teaching in one of the most affluent school systems in the country for three decades. I know I will never see six figures.
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He is only looking at Charter school teacher’s salaries (-;
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This is to weigh in on the salary issue. I went to a higher paying district two years ago. We did get a raise last year (for this year). However, at my old district, between 2008 and 2011, we got NO raise (NO increase in our salary). What we had to pay for health insurance premiums went UP (so obviously this was a net DECREASE in salary) and as to “costs of health care” — our deductibles went UP, so while I paid nothing for health care (because I didn’t seek or receive any health care other than preventative doctor visits which were paid for under the $300 preventative benefit which did not change), if I had needed or gone for health care, I would have paid MORE for it than I would have under the old system.
During this same time period, my husband’s salary in the private sector did go up, every single year, and his insurance premium did not go up, at all.
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Corporate attackers lie with impunity. It doesn’t matter if what they say is true- it matters that the lies and confusion is ‘out there’ in the public. The goal is doubt.
http://billmoyers.com/2014/05/16/the-relentless-attack-of-climate-scientist-ben-santer/
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oops- ‘lies & confusion ARE’ out there.
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$56K average salary is hard to believe. Numbers may include administrative salaries. Many systems have frozen salaries, Step increases on Hold for years, and teachers retire with low monthly incomes…especially, many retire earlier due to NCLB & CCSS, with no raises in sight.
Where can one locate average Teacher salaries by states & cities? The $56K numbers are often tossed around by PublicPolicy types as horrendous overpayment for 9 months of a cushy job.
Excuse me while I ……!
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According to the NCES, the median base salary(not including any bonuses or extra pay for extra duties) of teachers in across a variety of states was $42,400 (the mean was slightly higher at $43,814) in the 2006-7 school year. The highest median was in Minnesota at $50,535, the low was in Oklahoma at $36,450. As this is seven years out of date, I suspect the current numbers would be higher.
Here is the link: http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2010/tcs2007/tables/table_11.asp?referrer=report
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te, why would you expect the numbers to be higher now when state after state has been freezing and cutting teacher pay throughout the recession and because of the reform movement?
In many places, including Florida where I live, we’ve actually accepted pay cuts for several years to preserve as many jobs as possible. The short term federal money that paid to restore some teaching jobs has now run out and it has not been replaced.
I know several reformy states under the control of TFA “leaders” have cut teacher salaries significantly, ended step scales, and eliminated all bonuses and extra pay that is not tied to test scores. Since test scores have remained stagnant or gone down in most states after CCSS was mandated who is making the extra money?
I would be surprised if the salaries have not remained stagnant or only risen slightly in the last few years when adjusted to today’s dollars.
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In general state revenue has increased across the country, so I suspect that overall payments have increased at least a little over the last seven years. Certainly if we looked at total compensation we would find that increases in health insurance costs have been enough on their own to increase total compensation.
Of course I was only talking about nominal pay, real pay levels might well have gone down. They have for many.
Unfortunately there is no good way to quickly get good data, as each district is a world in itself.
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Thanks for an honest and helpful answer.
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Including health insurance costs assumes more benefit. That certainly isn’t the case as teachers are paying more for less. Plus retirement contributions have increased drastically in our state to fund the plan the required number of years. Now if you are the schoolboard treasurer, then you’d be looking at total costs. But when most people are arguing about teacher pay, they think take home pay or better yet net.
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If you are thinking about alternative uses for biblical resources you should think like the school board treasurer. Unfortunately some don’t think in terms of opportunity costs.
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TE, I am the original poster of this. My salary has gone down BEFORE you factor in benefits, because we’ve had contract days cut, which cuts into the salary schedule, as we are only paid for the 180 or so days we’re on contract. The state of Utah HAS raised the Weighted Pupil Unit about four percent total over five years; however, it stopped paying the retirement and Social Security costs that districts must pay, leaving districts further behind. Also, the legislature has not paid for the growth in the number of students, which is something like 100,000 students a year, which means that new teachers cannot be hired, making the class sizes of those of us who are left bigger every year. We are getting paid less to teach more students.
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TE WROTE:
“In general state revenue has increased across the country, so I suspect that overall payments have increased at least a little over the last seven years”.
Public school teachers, raise your hand if you have had pay cuts in the last several years, IN ADDITION to increased health benefit costs.
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Did your out of pocket increases in health insurance match the increases in the cost of health insurance?
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Sadly, I think that both out of pocket costs and employer costs for health insurance has skyrocketed for pretty much everyone in the US except possibly CEOs. A colleague’s spouse works for a health insurance company, the one place I figured employees would get decent coverage, and his cost has gone up while coverage has gone down. I think teachers will get much more sympathy from the public if they publicize the real number of the salaries (vs. these crazy figures folks like Kudlow tout) than spending much time on health insurance.
I am also shocked at some of these state’s average salaries. My district’s average is much higher. Granted, we are one of the highest paid districts around because we are one of the roughest. We still have a hard time getting qualified applicants, so I can’t even imagine how schools in some of these states are getting and retaining teachers.
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Opportunity costs assume a fixed zero sum game. Wouldn’t it be better to expand the pie of the middle class? I appreciate those that do not always think in opportunity costs. We call them optimists and romantics. If you’ve ever been part of a startup, you can’t sit back and fret about trade offs all day long. Often, you just take a shot. Business and economics are far too myoptic. Teachers have to think about the future in that the seeds they plant today blossom years from now.
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Opportunity costs have nothing to do with zero sum anything, it is just what must be given up when you make a choice. Resources devoted to X can not also be devoted to Y.
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Uh…. that’s the definition of a zero sum game. The utlity given to one is taken from the utility of another. One negative is balanced by a positive. Opportunity costs assume you must choose – devote time to one activity in exchange for giving up time on another. The assumption is you can’t do both.
It may be true in the short term, opportunity costs seem relevant. But are you saying we must choose the trade off of knowledge v ignorance?
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No it isn’t.
Think about buying a used car. You have found one you like and are willing to pay up tom$10,000 for the car. The person selling the car is willing to sell for any price over $8,000. You negotiate over how to split the gains from exchange and end up buying the car for $9,500. You gain $500, the person selling the car gains $1,500. A positive sum transaction. Did you face an opportunity cost when buying the car? Sure you did. You can not use that same $9,500 to purchase something else. Did the person selling you the car face an opportunity cost? Yes, they can no longer use that car (or sell it to someone else).
The idea of zero sum is about interactions between people. Most games are zero sum, there is a winner and a loser. Voluntary economic transactions are positive sum, both sides gain as long as both sides have the power to say no. What your thinking about is an individual’s budget constraint, broadly understood to include things like time.
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Do you have a median figure? At least we can try to control for the outliers a little bit.
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Sorry I see some attempt was made to provide this info.
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I linked to the table from which I took this figure. It’s from the National Center for Education Statistics. The figures there are all given as averages–means.
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Payscale.com gives the following medians:
high-school teacher: $45,663
elementary school teacher: $41,277
middle-school teacher: $42,529
spec ed, preschool, kindergarten teacher: $42,243
I have no idea how good these figures are or where they got them from.
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Sorry, never2old. My link is way at the bottom of this thread. Here it is:
http://www.nea.org/home/2012-2013-average-starting-teacher-salary.html
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The answer is simple, but no one is willing to make the short term sacrifice. Stop supporting those who sponsor these programs. We stopped four years ago going to Walmart, Exxon-Mobile, Microsoft products and cancelled the New York Times for starters. Eventually, if enough people put their money in the right places we could make a huge difference. Four years ago, I suggested everyone stop going to Exxon-Mobile gas stations and after people see stations closing everywhere, then the other large funders of anti-public schools would get the message! I hope you start now if you have not already done so. Thank you.
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Excellent information, Mark. I have been doing the same and hope others will follow. People wonder what they can do to affect change. This is it.
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The sacrifice of not watching Larry Kudlow on tv? The very thought is too much to bear!
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Who’s this Larry Kudlow guy?
Don’t watch TV. Don’t know the “players” and really don’t care to anymore, not that I ever watched that much.
I prefer my reality to be real!
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I had a job in the late 1990s where CNBC was on 24/7. Kudlow was a Bear Stearns economist and a regular on CNBC at that time, and he parlayed that into more talking head gigs, branching out from his supposed area of expertise (the intersection of economics and investment) to politics in general. He’s a classic blowhard, sort of a less interesting version of Bill O’Reilly mixed with a more laissez-faire friendly and less thoughtful version of Britt Hume. If it’s possible to imagine that. I haven’t watched any if these guys in over a decade, and there’s no good reason to do so.
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Kudlow is either pulling that figure out of his backside or he is including benefits in that figure. Teachers, of course, don’t eat on benefits.
Lots of public school-hating liars also “prorate” the annual salaries teachers make to make it look like they are more than adequately compensated. The problem with that lie is that teachers don’t eat on money that doesn’t exist. The same is also the case with their current lie that teachers are only “part-time” employees. That’s a good one considering all of the time teachers put off the clock and are not compensated for it.
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He pulled it out of his backside based loosely on his vague understanding that the max salary under the new deal between the UFT and New York City. There is no source for the statement, no math behind it. He didn’t say it was the “average” salary; he just said that’s what teachers make. He didn’t even single out teachers. He also said cops make $120k a year, which is even more absurd.
Don’t give Kudlow too much credit. He just “says stuff.”
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Excellent knowledge thank u mark
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After 17 years of teaching, attaining 2 master’s degrees and National Board Certification, and being named a teacher of the year twice I still make less than the national average teacher salary here in Florida.
My district is undergoing yet another financial crisis so I do not expect a raise — haven’t had one in over 7 years. The meager yearly NBCT bonus that was promoted by and promised to me through state law was rescinded after the first 2 years due to another financial crisis that gutted the program after I invested a few thousand dollars to complete it.
I am still paying off my student loans after 18 years. For the last 10 years or so I have had to spend over $2000 a year to maintain basic classroom supplies since my district only gives me $50 a year for supplies and my students’ families are largely unable to afford to help much. I buy pencils, paper, crayons, markers, glue sticks, scissors, etc.
I used to buy books for my classroom library but their price has skyrocketed and I can’t afford but a few titles each year now and my district, again, doesn’t supply them.
My district is actually talking about having teachers and students supply their own technology next year as a cost-saving measure since our computers are over 8 years old and we have no money to replace them. Our business/military non-educator superintendent fired or displaced almost all of our technology department employees as a cost-saving measure and he has not talked about what the plan will be when we go mandatory online testing in grades K-12 next year in all subjects with our ancient and far too few computers.
The state actually cut our funding again this year though they bragged about how much they budgeted; all of the increase will go to charters and the state voucher program instead of public schools like mine and we now rank 50th out of 50 states in per pupil spending.
I have no hope of home ownership due to an expensive hospital visit 5 years ago that I am still paying for. My car is over 9 years old but I am afraid to buy a new one since I may lose my job and my profession with the VAM model here in Florida is used against me for teaching the poor and children of color in Title I schools my whole career.
I am in my mid 50s and starting a new career in the current employment atmosphere is bleak to say the least so I am preparing for high poverty-level living and possible homelessness, just in case.
Kudlow can, well, out of respect for Diane, I won’t say.
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Bobby Jindal, announced before forcing his school destruction bills through in Louisiana that advanced degrees and national certification don’t raise test scores. It was shortly after that the he hired John White, a TFA with 2 years in the classroom as State Superintendent and started his punitive evaluation plans against teachers and their unions.. He reportedly got a Masters mysteriously quickly and proceeded with Jindal’s plans. Remember the name of Bobby Jindal. He is planning a run for national office.
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Chris – Your story is repeated by so many of us…when will this change ? What do we need to do to change people’ s hearts and minds and get back to local and free public education?
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Kudlow? wasn’t he the one with the $10,000 a month cocaine habit?
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I have taught for 29 years and make $58,000 at a public school.
This district hired me at age 50 with 26 years under my belt. Did not get credit for my 26 years- top salary step. They put me on step 5 as if I only taught for 4 years! Will get 80% of my salary if I retire at age 66. So may have to teach preschool until I’m 70. That should be fun! May have to move in with my children on that fixed income.
I never take a prep or lunch break because I have 20 challenging 4-year-olds and can’t leave the room. I put in 50-60 hours per week.
I wish I could say it. This guy is an…
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I never took a formal planning period or lunch break away from the kids either because I did not often feel comfortable leaving them in the room with just a para. (Multihandicapped).
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Some conservative think tanks annualize teacher salaries to inflate the numbers.
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Yep. They’ll take a 50k a year job and say teachers are actually making what amounts to 65k or 70k on a 9-month work schedule. The problem is teachers don’t live on what doesn’t exist.
The teacher haters also include benefits in the total to further distort the picture.
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MathVale & susannunes: charterite/privatizer math is a RheeWorld unto itself. It has taken me five years on ed blogs to see enough examples to not believe any of them unless I can see the actual figures—or at least, until someone with the requisite numbers/stats background can go over them. I am thinking here of folks like KrazyMathLady aka deutsch29 aka Dr. Mercedes Schneider and Gary Rubinstein and Dr. Bruce Baker and GFBrandenburg and Jersey Jazzman…
For example, take the typical edubully using figures carefully doled out by an accountabully underling. With great gnashing of teeth and a banshee’s wail we will be treated to a whine fest about how during the course of a school year there are huge amounts spent on “every student” or “every classroom.” Okey dokey—until you see that they’ve included deferred maintenance, or are not detailing how much is going for SpecEd students and services as opposed to other students and services, or neglect to mention that $1 billion for iPads has suddenly introduced a lot of unnecessary bloat.
Want to make the yearly salary average (mean) of classroom teachers look humongous? Just add in the salaries of highly paid administrators and every other person in that school district (perhaps including consultants as well) who has—or had!—a teaching credential and is carried on the books in some formal sense as an educator. Voilá! Now the average (mean) has been skewed upward by outliers. Of course, this is where two other averages, used in tandem, would be extremely useful: the median and the mode. In addition, clear and trustworthy definitions of terms such as “classroom teacher” would be vital to understanding what the numbers might show.
And then there’s those pesky 100% charter graduation rates. Works fine until you ask inconvenient questions like why we don’t include attrition rates for ninth-grade cohorts (on their way to the twelfth grade) but only include that part of a ninth-grade cohort that is just about to finish twelfth-grade. And charters have the same kinds of students like public schools—until we can look at actual numbers of subgroups like students classified as ELL or SpecEd [useless unless we have accurate info about what types of learning or other difficulties are involved] and realize that comparisons are being made between significantly different groups.
It goes on and on. But it raises the question: before there were stats and numbers, how did frauds of all kinds manage to massage and distort information?
“In ancient times they had no statistics so they had to fall back on lies.” [Stephen Leacock]
Ahhhhh…
😎
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That kind of mathematical legerdemain is what Florida tried to do to get around the constitutional class size amendment. Suddenly reading coaches, math coaches, speech therapists, guidance counselors, etc. became “teachers” although none have an assigned class. Thus they could be counted in the school-wide average for the ratio of students to teachers. The state supreme court finally knocked that down calling it what it was: a clever way intended to avoid the simple requirement of the law. 18:1 in grades PreK-3; 22:1 in grades 4-8; 25:1 in grades 9-12.
Mathemagical!
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As usual KTA, well stated, or as you’ve been know to say, “You’ve hit one out of the park, opposite field even!!
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Yes. I was thinking of the Buckeye Institute here. They created a database of all teacher salaries. The funny thing is, friends would ask me “is that all you make?”. Kinda backfired on them. The other trick is to use mean and not median. TE prior correctly used median. But using mean makes salaries look higher if there are outliers, though probably none like a $15 million CEO.
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http://www.nea.org/home/2012-2013-average-starting-teacher-salary.html
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I Wish! Even when Georgia made the law that teachers pay would reach the national average I never made more than $56,000 and that was with a Masters and over 20 years. Plus there are always some dirty little secrets, like the systems not paying you for all of your experience if you change to another system. One paid for 10 years for special ed. but only 5 for regular ed teachers and we were told not to let the regulars know this and, at the time, in order to keep special ed. teachers they were planning to increase the number of years paid for. City of Atlanta was the only system in the metro area that paid teachers for all of their years and that was because it was a primarily an inner city system so it was hard to get teachers.
Oh, and the systems in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana screamed and hollered when Georgia raised its pay, because they knew they would have to do the same to keep teachers. In 2005 in Catahoula Parish in Louisiana they were only paying $22,000 to start and the top pay was only about $35,000. I know this because I was looking at where I could go after Hurricane Katrina. They said that, for the most part, the teachers in Catahoula were “tied to the land”. That meant their husbands were farmers or worked on the oil rigs so they really could not leave for a better job.
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Most of these charter school advocates, teacher biters and teaparty governors would not last until lunch alone in a classroom with kids, much less a week.
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Teachingeconomist ~
Around Atlanta, many systems’ teacher salaries have been frozen since 2007 and teacher furlough days cut deep into their pay, benefits and retirement. Time stood still! Hurting 20-30-40 year veteran teachers tremendously. That is the idea!?
TFA here they come.
May need to call them McTFA?
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Bet Morning Joe didn’t even challenge him..
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And therein lies the problem… an unchallenged lie gets repeated and becomes fact… I’m sure some of my conservative friends and relatives will be repeating the “120,000/year” meme in a couple of weeks because it will be repeated by every Fox news broadcaster…
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From the National Center for Education Statistics
The estimated average annual salary of teachers in public elementary and secondary schools for 2012-13 was $56,383. That’s down 1.3% since the year 2000.
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_211.60.asp
People come up with larger figures by adding about 42% of wages for benefits and, as someone noted above, by annualizing the school year rate for pay and benefits.
In 2011-12, the lowest average beginning teacher’s salary in the U.S. was in Montana, at $26,734.
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The highest paid teachers are in Luxembourg, at $125,962 annually, $69,579 more than U.S. teachers do.
Experienced teachers in Switzerland average $94,038 a year, $37,655 more than U.S. teachers do.
Secondary school teachers in Korea earn $76,423 a year, $20,040 more than U.S. teachers do.
Everyone knows that the biggest cost in education is in the salaries and benefits of teachers. That’s one of the reasons why the oligarchs pushed for a single set of national standards. They want to create software and assessments all tagged to that single set of standards so that they can use software to reduce the number of teachers. Imagine, 400 students in a room, all working at their tablets, doing their worksheets on a screen, and a single low-level teacher’s aide type walking around helping anyone who is having a problem.
Thus the common Ed Deform mantra that “class size doesn’t matter.”
The Ed Deformers initially pinned their hopes on distance education, but the numbers there were pretty bad. Large percentages of students didn’t complete the classes, and those that did complete them, performed poorly. So, they’ve moved on to the idea of having kids do supervised work on computers. There are several experiments going on in colleges around the country, funded by you know who, to test this alternative way of reducing the teaching force.
“Teaching, there’s an app for that.”
And weirdly, the leaders of the teachers’ unions did not even see the connection between the rush to implement a set of national “standards” and this game plan to reduce the teaching rolls.
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“And weirdly, the leaders of the teachers’ unions did not even see the connection between the rush to implement a set of national “standards” and this game plan to reduce the teaching rolls.”
I’m not sure we should have expected them to see the connection. They and their organizations were paid not to see!
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cx: The highest paid teachers are in Luxembourg; at $125,962 annually, they make $69,579 more per year than U.S. teachers do.
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Many years ago, when I was a baby teacher, newly minted, one of my 9th graders pulled out that old, old complaint, “Why do we have to study this stuff?” And I said, “So you will be able to get a decent job in the future and make a decent living.” And then one of the 9th graders said, “Oh, yeah. We need to learn this stuff so we can be a teacher like you and make, what? 25K? My dad never went to college, and he makes three times what you make.”
And, of course, he was right. As a beginning teacher, at that time, in Indiana, I was teaching six preps and coaching the speech team and doing drama productions and putting in about 70 hours a week and earning just slightly more than the folks bagging groceries at the local supermarket were making.
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I got that figure wrong. I forget the figure the student used, but it was pretty close to correct. At that time, back in the 1980s, I was making a little less than 13K a year as an Indiana teacher. I left that job for one in publishing that paid more than twice as much. Two years later, I was making over three times as much. Five years later, I was making five times as much as I had made teaching.
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This jerk really makes me ill.
It’s time we started honoring our teachers. Teaching is the hardest and most non-monetarily rewarding work that I have ever done. I think that teaching should be the highest paid of all the professions. It’s extraordinarily important and should be accorded the highest status. When I teach, I am practicing the profession of the Buddha and Yeshua of Nazareth and Socrates and Rumi and the Baal Shem Tov and Richard Feynman. I take that very, very seriously. The teacher should be someone that everyone else looks up to. This is a learned person. This is a dedicated person. Into the hands of this person, we place that which we care about most–our children. And so we choose from among us, to do this job, the ones we most respect and look up to–the most learned, the wisest, most decent and compassionate of us. And we pay them accordingly.
Teaching should be a high status job. In my book, it is. Teachers (and daycare workers, and those who care for the elderly and the sick and the dying) are the people I most respect. I could tell you a lot of stories about being at social events and having conversations like this one:
So, what do you do?
I teach English.
Oh, which university?
I teach high-school English.
Oh. (person moves on to find someone important to talk to)
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In Westchester County, New York (northern suburb of NYC), there are districts in which teachers can earn that amount AFTER more than 20 years of teaching, and with about 60 credits or more beyond their masters degree. Teachers pay for their masters degree (unlike private sector employees I know whose employers paid for their MBAs) and teachers pay to earn their 60 credits. It used to be the case that teachers could earn the 60 credits through in-service programs, or through college courses. Most districts now require those credits be earned through college courses. (Credits earned through in-service courses were never honored if a teacher moved to another school district, even if that district was located in New York State.) I would also add that ANY COURSES A TEACHER TAKES TO EARN CREDITS BEYOND THEIR MASTERS DEGREE ARE SUBJECT TO APPROVAL BY THE SCHOOL DISTRICT.
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I must add that it will be much more difficult, if not impossible for new hirees to earn this amount of money in Westchester County. Tier 6 employees will have to earn anywhere from 75 to 90 credits and teach more years to earn that amount, under recent contracts. I would also add that the cost of living in this area and its environs is much higher than in other parts of the country.
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Once the fast food joints get their $15 an hour, they’ll actually be earning more than many beginning teachers, and not that much less than some of the veterans.
I don’t know any teacher who makes $120,000. Some administrators do, but they were a minority.
Unless you run a Charter School. Then we are talking big bucks.
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Yes! Finally someone writes about utah 701
schedule.
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