Q&A: Why schools have more money, but teachers aren’t making more

There’s been a puzzling trend over the last few decades: Adjusted for inflation, school funding has increased substantially, but teacher salaries have not. In recent years, real teacher pay has actually dipped as inflation surged.

Pay matters for every profession, including teaching, for obvious reasons. It shapes who enters and stays in the work. Talented people might not consider teaching or might leave after a few years because they’re not happy with their salary.

Teachers have never been paid especially well, but the pay gap between teaching and other college-educated professionals has grown in recent decades. And now there’s a new challenge: Many other white-collar jobs offer remote work perks that aren’t available to educators. 

Meanwhile, more teachers have left the classroom in recent years and fewer young people aspire to become teachers.

So why has teacher pay been stagnant? Again, it’s not because school budgets have been flat. Rather, as school districts have gotten more money, they’ve used it for other matters, including hiring more staff. Schools have brought on new people for a variety of reasons: to serve a growing number of students with disabilities, to address demands for more security, to lower class sizes. (More money has also gone toward non-salary benefits, like health insurance and retirement, for teachers and other staff.)

This “staffing surge” may have been valuable, but a number of policy analysts have raised pointed questions about whether dollars could have been better used elsewhere. One of them is Aaron Garth Smith, director of education reform at the Reason Foundation, a libertarian-leaning think tank. In a recent piece for Education Next, Smith dug into school staffing data in helpful detail.

I recently spoke with Smith to understand how schools are using their money and how strong the case is that they should spend it differently. 

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me what you found about how American public schools have spent their increased resources?

In the last couple of decades [between 2002 and 2023], enrollment is up by about 4% but staffing went up by about 15%. One of the drivers of that is non-teaching staff. It’s not central office staff that’s driving this growth. It’s primarily school-level staff, in particular instructional aides and student support staff, including positions such as social workers, psychologists, audiologists, and several other categories of positions. I estimate that about 40% of the overall staff growth can be attributed to special education. The two main [special education] categories where we see growth are autism and ADHD. 

What else do you think is driving staffing growth?