A study from the Education Policy Innovation Collaborative at Michigan State University has found that yearly wages for Michigan's public school teachers have slid behind the national average. The report found that from 1999 to 2021, adjusted for inflation, Michigan’s teacher wages have declined 20.6%. The study comes as state officials work to address a teacher shortage.
The report also finds Michigan’s public school teacher wages are slightly lower than the national average, and the average starting salary in the state is among the lowest in America.
The findings also include:
- If Michigan’s teacher salaries had kept up with inflation since 1999, the average wage would be $81,703. In 2021 the average wage stood at $64,884.
- The average yearly salary for a first-year public school teacher in Michigan was $38,963, the second lowest in the Great Lakes states and near the bottom 20% of the country.
- Teachers in Michigan make 20.7% less than other college graduates with similar levels of education
- There's public support for raising teachers' wages. Among those surveyed for the report, 72% support raising starting wages. More than 40% support raising average wages, and 51% said they should stay about the same.
Jason Burns is a research special at Michigan State and a co-writer of the report. He said there are many reasons wages for teachers have lagged. He pointed to increased reliance on early career teachers and changes in school funding.
“So starting in the mid-'90s, the way that education is financed in Michigan underwent a significant overhaul, such that now teacher salaries are inextricably linked to state policies,” he said. “The states sets a per-pupil amount of funding that districts get, and then that's all that they can use to pay for things like teachers."
As for solutions, Burns pointed to two potentially helpful policies. Strategic compensation, which would offer incentives for understaffed subjects and schools, and minimum salaries for teachers. “And so what we see is Mississippi, West Virginia, Georgia, and South Carolina have passed Michigan. They now have a minimum starting teacher salary that's higher than in Michigan.”
Ultimately, Burns said, raising wages to address teacher shortages has become a bipartisan effort nationwide. “There are some, traditionally, you might think of blue states that have been doing things to raise teacher salary, like, say, Maryland and Delaware, but also what we might think of as more like red states, Georgia, Utah, Idaho, and there’s a whole host of others.”
