Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/05/30/how-much-are-teachers-paid-in.html
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It should be compared to the cost of living to make any salary number meaningful.
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This. I can speak up for Seattle/WA and say 62K isn’t going to get you very far when factor in your rent (or mortgage if you can find a house that is affordable for that salary hell double that salary)
One bedroom apartments are like $1800/month now.
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You can live pretty well in South Carolina on $50K - well enough to be a single income family.
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But then I would have to live in South Carolina…
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Yes. I also think that the statewide average hides a lot of variation within some states. For example, teacher salaries in southern Illinois can be half of those in the Chicago area. I notice that the other dark blue states have large urban area as well.
A map of teacher salary vs. median salary by zip code or county would be interesting.
As someone the the education field, I’m all for improving teacher salaries, and I wonder what mix of local vs. state / national efforts will be most appropriate.
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$77,990 in California is much closer to the ceiling/ last pay step, not the average. Many credentialed K-12 Bay Area teachers start at around $54K depending on the district. It takes decades and longevity steps to get $80K here.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-francisco-middle-school-teacher-salary-SRCH_IL.0,13_IM759_KO14,35.htm
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Here in a smallish college town in TN, you can rent a 3 bedroom nice house. If you can live with the lack of cultural life and limited number of restaurants. But we got a Starbucks 5 years ago! Now we have 6. 
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Yeah, I did that in college. Chattanooga was close enough for evenings and weekends when the local movie theater didn’t sell enough tickets to turn on the electricity, much less pay the fees to show the movie.
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Easy answer; not enough.
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Honestly, that is higher than I expected. In fact it makes me wonder how much the flux is.
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They could at least show a net number rather than a gross number. Washington sat $62k is probably better than Oregon at $65k simply because there’s no state income tax in WA. I’m in Texas and the same goes here - no state income tax and the cost of living in general is pretty low.
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Washington and Texas have the (regressive) sales tax to make up the difference. 6.5% and 6.25%, respectively, as well as local sales taxes in the major cities that make that figure jump to 10.5% and 8.2%, respectively. State income tax is deductible on one’s Federal tax, whereas sales tax is not.
Good point about Texas, though. Other than in some of the big urban centers, cost of living is quite reasonable.
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MUCH higher. Would have been more interesting to show starting salaries.
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No, the most regressive tax system in the country - Washington state - isn’t a great place to be paid a few thousand above the median wage.
It’s a fabulous place to be paid way over the median. At $200k you only pay something like 4% in state and local taxes, and it only goes down from there till Gates, Bezos, etc pay near 0% of their income.
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Here’s the same data by MSA, which still isn’t very fine-grained, but at least a little more localized. Also, there’s no distinction made between public and private schools. Presumably private schools pay better, but one might expect a lot of variation there, too.
https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oessrcma.htm
Also, by county/town.
Private schools consistently pay less than public, most places. There might be exceptions in places like Oklahoma where public schools pay just above the poverty line.
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One of the wierdnesses in US government pay is that it often does not really adjust for cost of living very much.
Teachers in Seattle are paid only about 20% more than those in far smaller eastern washington cities where housing costs are 1/4.
I suspect this is a contributor to the whole rural people think the government pays too much, urban people think it pays too little divide. It actually somewhat does, in these different regions.
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There is going to be a wide diversity in private schools.
There are a lot of more modest religiously based private schools, those usually pay anywhere from a little less than public schools to significantly less (particularly considering benefits).
Then there are the super-expensive private schools of the rich. They typically pay significantly more.
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Here is some data that does indeed suggest that public schools pay better than private schools. No classification otherwise on type of school. Wouldn’t be too surprising if parochial schools were at the low end of the pay scale/
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_211.10.asp
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