Moore: A new report from the Economic Policy Institute and the Center for Economic and Policy Research shows that teachers earned about 25% less than comparable college graduates and other professions in 2025. The numbers in Missouri and Oklahoma are especially high. In Missouri, the gap is nearly 36%, the second highest in the nation, and Oklahoma falls in the top 10 at 33%. Sylvia Allegretto is the author of this report. She calls this discrepancy in pay the teacher pay gap.
Allegretto: And that those pay gaps went from being around 6% in the mid-1990s to about 25% today. So the gap, this divergence between teacher pay and what other professionals are earning has gotten much larger over time.
Moore: We often hear this sort of rhetoric around, especially public education, that teachers aren't getting into it for the money. They're getting into it for the love of education, for the love of children. That seems to be, I don't know, perhaps a pass as to why teachers can and often do get paid less. Is that the kind of rhetoric that you're used to hearing around this sort of conversation?
Allegretto: Well, especially in times gone by. But even now you hear this rhetoric and it's completely ridiculous. I mean, because it's because people are passionate about their work, they should be paid less? I mean, would you want your doctor, who's probably very passionate about being a medical doctor, to be paid so much less than other comparable workers? I mean, I don't think people think this is reasonable.
And of course, I believe that it's really couched in the fact that most teachers, even today, about 70, 75, 76% are women. And they look at women. And they certainly did in days gone by, women is taking care of children. They don't. It wasn't valued. Many people say especially early education is like babysitting. Well, all the research shows that that's not true. You can call it babysitting, but kids are learning all the time whether you think you're teaching them or not. So no, I don't think that holds any water. I think it's completely ridiculous.
Moore: When we look at the study you have here, we're looking at your data starts around 1980. We're looking at, you know, close to 40 years' worth of data here. And it just seems that this delta is growing wider and wider. Is this something that, you know, economics can explain?
Allegretto: Well, it's not, it's just what it is. I mean, I'm taking, again, the weekly wages of teachers and against other professionals. And this is regression-adjusted analysis. I don't want your listeners to have their head pop off on that, but it's basically just using statistics to control for differences in the two groups. If one group's older, or if teachers are on average older or younger than other professionals, you'd want to take. You'd want to, what we call, control for that. So this is kind of a good apples-to-apples comparison, especially over time. So any issues that it may have, it doesn't explain why this has gotten so much worse over time.
And by the way, I actually go back in other work all the way to 1960, using the 1960 decennial census. Again, while teachers were still, over three out of four of them were female teachers. At that time, women who were teachers in the teaching profession were doing quite well. The reason being that they didn't have much other opportunity. So if you had some college education back in, if you were a teacher back in 1960 and you had some college education, meaning that you probably got that education in the '50s or the '40s, you didn't have a whole lot of choice in your occupation. Most who had any education at all were nurses and teachers.
So they had what I call a 15-point teacher premium back in 1960. So for women, it went from a 15 percentage point premium in 1960 to a 20 percentage point penalty in 2025. That is a massive erosion of teacher pay relative to other careers.
So one thing to keep in mind, and it is driving some of this, especially for female teachers, is that now they have so much more in terms of educational opportunities compared to the '40s and the '50s, and career choices, right, that are better paying. So one of the things that's happening here is the pay for teachers has been stagnant for quite a while, barely keeping up with inflation on average. Well, the pay for other college graduates has soared, especially for women coming into all of these different professions and being able to earn more and more over the last, you know, five decades, for instance.
Now, for the men, they've always been a small share of teachers. I mean, except for if you go way, way back to the rollout of public education when there were only male teachers. But when we started rolling out public education, they decided to save money by letting women do the teaching, even though way back then, in the late 1800s, early 1900s, women again weren't allowed to go to college and get these degrees. But they allowed them to teach, basically. So it became a feminized profession.
So these men that are teachers are already in an occupation that's majority women. That means the pay is going to probably be lower anyway. So that hurts them. But even if you go back to the 1960s, only about one in four, even less, of teachers were men. And they always had a pretty high penalty. And that went from where it was in 1960, which was similar to where it was in 1980, around 15, 16, 17% penalty, to now a nearly 35% teacher penalty for male teachers.
Moore: Arkansas is a state that just recently instated a floor for public school educators: $50,000. Whether it's your first semester ever teaching or, you know, you never quite reached that level as a teacher in your career, $50,000. Does this sort of policy play a role in helping to both incentivize teachers to come into the field and also retain those teachers into the field? Are you seeing that sort of success with policies like this?
Allegretto: I have heard, and I've spoken to some groups and policymakers across the country who have done this. I know Pennsylvania did this a few years back. That's my home state. So it's happening, but think about it. $50,000. Teachers have one of the, if not the most consequential job in the country. They have the future of the country in front of them each and every day. And to think like you have to set $50,000. Everyone has to have a college degree to be a teacher. They have to have jumped through all kinds of other hoops to become a teacher, preparation classes. You know, this varies also by state. And to think that you're going to come out of college with probably a lot of debt and become a public school teacher and make $50,000, that's, to me, is the fact that we have to get it up to that level is part of the problem here. It's just far too low.
You know what teachers are earning. And again, what I'm showing here over the long haul is that it's getting worse and worse and worse. So we do have states all over. I think New Mexico is another one that, you know, trying to see what they can do to increase the pay. Again, Colorado is doing that this year for their teachers, because they understand, they're starting to understand the ramifications of having teacher pay fall so much behind that of other career choices that potential teachers could be making, who are sitting in college making those decisions today, is becoming a real problem with retaining the teachers of today and recruiting the teachers of tomorrow.
Moore: It is interesting when you think about other areas where we do require this sort of threshold of, you have to have a certain amount of education, you have to have a certain amount of certification. The two that come to mind instantly for me are lawyers and doctors, both of whom are paid quite well.
Allegretto: Quite well. And of course we want them to be paid quite well. At times, they have our life and our limbs in their hands. But as I say, it's very hard to argue that teachers don't hold one of the most important and consequential, you know, jobs in the country. They have the education of the students in front of them. But the ramifications of that, not just for those students, for the families of those students, the communities of those students and the future labor force and the future of our entire country depends on this. This should not be something that has to have a lot of argument.
I mean, people have been struggling with the idea of how do we get and keep the best and the brightest and the most enthusiastic and the people we want to be teachers, but we know over and over again with the surveys that students take that even the ones who want to be teachers, even the kids of teachers who often go into teaching, that's happened in my own family, they just often say, especially males, how can they afford to go into teaching when they know this has gotten so bad? This 35% ding they're going to take on average in pay. And how bad is it going to be once they graduate? Ten, 15, 20, 25 years from now.
Moore: Do you worry that it'll get to a point even lower than it is now?
Allegretto: Oh, I don't worry about it. I know it's going to get. Again, I told you I've been doing this for over 20 years. So when I first published this paper, these gaps were nowhere near where they are today. I keep redoing the paper and updating the paper because they have gotten consistently so much worse over time. Again, let me just remind you that I estimated a pay gap for all teachers of about 6%, even as recently as the mid-1990s. And today that is now just over 25%. There is nothing that I see in the works that is significantly going to mitigate, let alone turn around, these trends.
Even as what you said, Matthew, is correct. There are, in certain pockets, school districts and locales and states trying to shore up some higher pay for teachers, because they know it's actually at a critical time. Things have gotten really bad over time and it's finally, you know, sinking in to some politicians and people who can do something about it. But in far too many places, especially this, you know, this notion that has been happening over the last 30, 40 years, is that this attack on public sector, public sector goods and the idea of public sector goods is really kind of caught up in what we're talking about here when we talk about the public education system, especially when public school teachers are highly unionized, which thank goodness they are, because I can tell you that nonunionized teachers, especially nonunionized and they mostly are nonunionized in the private sector, those teachers do even worse, even worse than the public school system.
So we need to keep strong unions. We need more union participation, especially in the right-to-work states and in the red states, to make those unions and their voices stronger, because it helps the teachers. It helps the whole public school system when we have good unions.
And so I do believe that it's just the way we also think about the United States together. You know, are we in this together, or are we the, you know, yo-yo economics, you know, you're on your own. Many people seem to think we need to be. You're on your own, right? Send your kids to private school or be on your own to educate your own kids. No. Educating our children, each and every kid, for, you know, at no cost to themselves, is one of the highest ideals we've ever had in this country. We've always fallen short of that ideal, but it is an ideal worth hanging on to, and bettering the situation from what we have now.
Moore: Sylvia Allegretto is a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
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