Skip to main content

How Much Do We Pay Public School Teachers?

Blogger's note: With 10,000 views (about 50 times average) I've received a lot of comments.  You may want to read this first before responding)

While public school teacher salaries are not exactly a Higher Education topic, it's not too hard to see the connection.

This is NCES Data from the 2013 Digest of Education Statistics, showing teacher salaries over time by state. The view defaults to Constant (inflation adjusted) dollars and 2013, but you can choose any year and nominal (not adjusted for inflation) dollars if you'd like.  The map color codes for the year selected so you can see the range, and the bar chart shows the state-by-state breakout; the weighted US average on is shown on the bar chart in blue.

See the NCES table for notes about interpreting the data.

Note: My Tableau coding skills are still not what I'd like them to be; if anyone wants to download this and help me create parameters to allow the viewer to compare states by percent change over any two years selected, I'd be grateful.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Educational Attainment and the Presidential Elections

I've been fascinated for a while by the connection between political leanings and education: The correlation is so strong that I once suggested that perhaps Republicans were so anti-education because, in general, places with a higher percentage of bachelor's degree recipients were more likely to vote for Democrats. The 2024 presidential election puzzled a lot of us in higher education, and perhaps these charts will show you why: We work and probably hang around mostly people with college degrees (or higher).  Our perception is limited. With the 2024 election data just out , I thought I'd take a look at the last three elections and see if the pattern I noticed in 2016 and 2020 held.  Spoiler: It did, mostly. Before you dive into this, a couple of tips: Alaska's data is always reported in a funky way, so just ignore it here.  It's a small state (in population, that is) and it's very red.  It doesn't change the overall trends even if I could figure out how to c...

First-year student (freshman) migration, 2022

A new approach to freshman migration, which is always a popular post on Higher Ed Data Stories. If you're a regular reader, you can go right to the visualization and start interacting with it.  And I can't stress enough: You need to use the controls and click away to get the most from these visualizations. If you're new, this post focuses on one of the most interesting data elements in IPEDS: The geographic origins of first-year (freshman) students over time.  My data set includes institutions in the 50 states and DC.  It includes four-year public and four-year, private not-for-profits that participate in Title IV programs; and it includes traditional institutions using the Carnegie classification (Doctoral, Masters, Baccalaureate, and Special Focus Schools in business, engineering, and art/design. Data from other institutions is noisy and often unreliable, or (in the case of colleges in Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and other territories, often shows close to 100% of enro...

Changes in SAT Scores after Test-optional

One of the intended consequences of test-optional admission policies at some institutions prior to the COVID-19 pandemic was to raise test scores reported to US News and World Report.  It's rare that you would see a proponent of test-optional admission like me admit that, but to deny it would be foolish. Because I worked at DePaul, which was an early adopter of the approach (at least among large universities), I fielded a lot of calls from colleagues who were considering it, some of whom were explicit in their reasons for doing so.  One person I spoke to came right out at the start of the call: She was only calling, she said, because her provost wanted to know how much they could raise scores if they went test-optional. If I sensed or heard that motivation, I advised people against it.  In those days, the vast majority of students took standardized admission tests like the SAT or ACT, but the percentage of students applying without tests was still relatively small; the ne...