Published: January 2025
First Appeared In NEA Today, January 2025
Racial, Ethnic, and Gender Pay Gaps Persist For Educators
K–12 teachers still make $18,000 less than other full-time workers who have at least a bachelor’s degree. According to the 2024 State of the American Teacher Survey, which provides an annual analysis of K–12 public school teachers across the United States, this pay gap is even more pronounced when broken down by race, ethnicity, and gender. Educators of color and female teachers generally earn less than their White and male peers respectively.
Black teachers, for instance, earn about $22,000 less than comparable working adults and about $5,000 less than White and Hispanic teachers.
Female teachers, on average, reported base salaries that were about $9,000 less than those reported by male teachers.
Closing these pay gaps is challenging due to structural biases, which are embedded in initial salary placement, mandatory disclosure of salary histories during hiring, and the fact that equal pay is not always guaranteed for equal work.
Unions and collective bargaining, however, can significantly reduce pay discrepancies across genders and racial lines.
Unions increase pay equity
In a summary of research on pay gaps, the Center for American Progress concludes that collective bargaining has a significant impact on wage equity.
This is how:
- Wage increases: Unions raise wages for the workers they represent, particularly lower- and middle-income individuals. Since women and People of Color make up the majority of low-wage workers, increased wages help narrow the pay gap for these groups.
- Objective pay standards: Collective bargaining establishes pay based on objective criteria, such as skills and education. It also sets rules to prevent harmful practices—like pay secrecy, which prohibits employees from discussing their wages with co-workers—and creates mechanisms for enforcement of these standards. This reduces opportunities for discrimination and ensures equal pay for equal work.
- Work-life balance: Collective bargaining can secure essential work-life supports—such as paid-leave policies, which can help close the gender pay gap.
A Union Boom in Higher Education
Faculty and graduate-student employees are choosing to unionize, making higher education one of the fastest growing sectors of organized labor, according to Hunter College’s National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions. Between 2012 and 2024, the number of unionized faculty grew by 7.5 percent. The number of grad-student employees in unions grew even faster, by 133 percent. Today, about 27 percent of faculty belong to unions, for a total of 402,217 unionized faculty.
New Study: Educator Strikes Lead to Better Pay
A first-of-its-kind study has found that teacher strikes lead to increases in pay. Strikes also generate additional per-pupil spending, lower class sizes, and more investment in non-teaching employees, such as nurses and social workers. According to the September 2024 study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, strikes increase compensation by an average 8 percent—or roughly $10,000 per teacher per year—by the fifth year after a strike. Strikes also improve working conditions, with student-teacher ratios decreasing by 3.2 percent on average. They also lead to about a 7 percent increase in spending on non-instructional staff, such as social workers and nurses.
The Effect of Strikes on Teacher Salaries
Researchers found that by the fifth year after a strike, teacher salaries had increased by 8 percent, or about $10K per teacher.
Source: National Bureau of Economic Research, August 2024
80%...
...is the percentage of students ages 13–18 who say they see conspiracy theories on social media at least once a week. Of those teens who reported seeing conspiracy theories, 81 percent reported that they believed at least one of them. Learn more about helping students navigate today’s ‘infodemic’ of misinformation online.
Source: The News Literacy Project, “News Literacy In America: A Survey Of Teen Information Attitudes, Habits & Skills” October 2024
School Vouchers Are a ‘Comprehensive Failure’
In the new book, The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers, author Josh Cowen explores how school privatization advocates have been able to advance vouchers. This expansion has occurred despite overwhelming evidence showing voucher programs strip funds away from public schools, lack fiscal and academic accountability, and are used primarily by families with children already enrolled in private schools. A professor of education policy at Michigan State University, Cowen traces the beginning of the voucher movement from White parents’ resistance to integration in the 1950s through to the recent “culture wars.” As he recently told NEA Today, the overriding goal of privatization has always been to destabilize the institution of public education—and vouchers serve that purpose.
NEA Today: Your book details how the privatization agenda slowly advanced over the past decade or so, but it seems almost like a dam broke a couple of years ago. What happened?
Josh Cowen: If you look at the past decade, you really can’t find a more comprehensive failure than vouchers.
So why are voucher bills succeeding now? You can’t look at the voucher question in isolation from the political climate we’re currently in. Why are we also talking about book bans? Why are there new attacks on LGBTQ+ Americans?
These are things you would have thought were beyond the pale three or four or five years ago. This is about destabilizing public education.
Privatization advocates use phrases like “freedom” and “parents’ rights” to shield against the overwhelming evidence that vouchers are a failure.
JC: Right. The talking point, “As long as the parents are happy, it’s fine,” has been around forever. We need to acknowledge and affirm the importance of parents as partners in the education space, but “parents’ rights” has deeply negative and nefarious historical connotations, dating all the way back to the post-Brown v. Board of Education world, where your “rights” meant you got to segregate your child.
Public school advocates have scored some significant victories, pushing back voucher bills in some pretty red states. What are some lessons there?
JC: It’s hard to overstate how much these voucher schemes are opposed by many rural Republicans in state legislatures. Schools are often the biggest employers in their district. They know the school board members and the superintendents, who are like mayors in those communities.
Public school advocacy groups are working really hard on the ground to push these bills back, and as long as those rural lawmakers are in office, those alliances are absolutely critical in fighting these bills.
What do you see over the next few years?
JC: We need to continue to oppose vouchers and school privatization and the radicalism that has undermined public schools.
At the same time, the positive, forward-looking policy is to fully fund public education. For years, the right wing said all we’re doing is throwing money at a problem without academic results. It was kind of taken as gospel. As it turns out, we have strong research, based in social science, that shows that investments in public schools do have direct payoff over the short run and over the long run—on academics and on later-in-life outcomes like wages.
Record High School Sports Participation
More than 8 million high schoolers are participating in school-sponsored sports—an all-time high, according to a survey by the National Federation of State High School Associations. The survey found that sports participation grew by 210,469 to 8,062,302 from the school years 2022 – 2023 to 2023 – 2024. The previous participation record was 7,980,886, set in 2017 – 2018. One driver of the increase is the growing popularity of girls flag football. Almost 42,000 girls participated in flag football in 2023 – 2024, compared with 21,000 the previous year.
Top 10 Boys Programs (2023 – 2024)
| | SPORT | PARTICIPANTS |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Football—11 Player | 1,031,508 |
| 2 | Track and Field—Outdoor | 625,333 |
| 3 | Basketball | 536,668 |
| 4 | Baseball | 471,701 |
| 5 | Soccer | 467,483 |
| 6 | Wrestling | 291,874 |
| 7 | Cross Country | 239,381 |
| 8 | Tennis | 157,835 |
| 9 | Golf | 155,174 |
| 10 | Swimming & Diving | 116,799 |
Top 10 Girls Programs (2023 – 2024)
| | SPORT | PARTICIPANTS |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Track and Field—Outdoor | 506,015 |
| 2 | Volleyball | 479,125 |
| 3 | Soccer | 383,895 |
| 4 | Basketball | 367,284 |
| 5 | Softball—Fast Pitch | 345,451 |
| 6 | Tennis | 195,766 |
| 7 | Cross Country | 192,969 |
| 8 | Competitive Spirit (Cheer) | 181,023 |
| 9 | Swimming & Diving | 138,174 |
Can Educators Afford to Work Where They Live?
Despite recent increases in the average salary for public school teachers, when adjusted for inflation, they and other school staff are still making less than they were a decade ago. Housing prices and inflation have increased steadily over the past few years. According to a recent NEA survey, more than half of pre-K–12 teachers, education support professionals (ESPs), and specialized instructional support personnel (SISPs) (non-classroom educators) live in the community in which they work. But many find it a financial strain to do so.
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