Teacher pay is not just about teachers.
Of course, it starts out being about teachers. Like all other professionals, educators deserve to be compensated for their skills and expertise. They should have the resources they need to be successful in their jobs. But the benefits of improving teacher pay extend far beyond teachers’ own finances—all the way to students’ academic performance and even their attitudes about education.
There’s a lot of research to back up that assertion, but it also just makes sense. If we raise teacher pay, more people—and, importantly, more highly qualified people—will want to become teachers. With more all-star applicants vying for jobs, schools and districts will have their pick of the best teachers to put in front of Utah kids. From there, classroom instruction will improve, and since teachers are the single most impactful factor in a child’s school experience, so will student outcomes.
Students get this. In our recent survey of 7,600 Utah high school students, 75 percent said they believe higher pay would help teachers perform better, and 65 percent said they would get a better education if teachers were paid more. Only 8 percent disagreed. At the same time, less than 15 percent of students said they believe teachers are paid adequately for their jobs.
Teachers are the single most impactful factor in a child’s school experience.
Better teacher compensation could have a major positive impact on student learning, but right now, the opposite is happening. Teacher pay in Utah tells our kids that their educators either don’t deserve adequate support or are not very good at what they do. Neither idea is true—but both play a role in shaping students’ ideas about the value of education and the importance of working hard in school.
Imagine instead how students would feel about their education if they knew our communities valued teachers enough to give them meaningful support and compensation. Imagine students’ confidence knowing they were learning from the best possible teachers every day.
This year, Utah schools have an opportunity to improve student learning by improving teacher compensation. The Utah State Legislature has approved a historic 6 percent increase to the weighted-pupil unit—meaning the coming school year will see 6 percent more education funding per K–12 student. That’s a critical step in the right direction. The next step is to ensure those funds go where students need them most: to teachers.
Envision Utah worked with a team of education, state, policy, and business leaders to figure out exactly what kind of compensation would attract and keep the best possible educators in the classroom so that every Utah child has access to a great education (check out our vision here).
We found that raising first-year teacher pay to an average of $60,000 and end-of-career salaries to $110,000 is the most urgent and most significant thing we can do to improve education—not just because teachers deserve it, but because our students deserve it. If we can do this, even in the middle of a pandemic, our students will be unstoppable in the years to come.
Check out the rest of the results from our high school student survey related to how they feel about teachers below.
