‘Distressing.’ Kentucky drops from 32 to 36 in state rankings for average teacher pay

Kentucky’s education commissioner on Monday said it was “distressing” that the state-by-state rank of average salary for public teachers dropped Kentucky from 32 in the nation to 36, with the average salary being $56,912.

The data comes from National Education Association research.

The national average salary for teachers is $67,507, according to a Kentucky Education Association news release. Kentucky educators and school support workers were the only state employees who did not receive an across-the-board raise in this year’s budget, the release said.

“I think it’s distressing and confirms what our teachers have been expressing to us for some time,” Kentucky Commissioner of Education Jason E. Glass told the Herald-Leader. “Our teachers are falling behind in keeping up with middle class standard of life and a professional wage in the state. We’re experiencing the results of a longstanding underinvestment in the pay level of educators and people working in our schools.”

Salaries rose just 0.46% in Kentucky from the 2019-20 school year to the 2020-21 school year, which ranks Kentucky 43 in raises for teachers. Only Alabama, North Carolina, West Virginia, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, Idaho, and Louisiana ranked lower, according to the release from KEA, one of the state’s main teacher groups.

Neighboring Indiana teachers received the second highest raises nationally at 6.52%, which took them from 23 nationwide up to 18 in average teacher compensation, the release said.

KEA supported Gov. Andy Beshear’s proposed budget, which would have invested an additional $2 billion into the state’s K-12 education system — the most since the passage of the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990 – and would not have required additional taxes.

Beshear’s budget also called for a mandatory 5 percent across-the-board salary increase for all school employees, including teachers, bus drivers, cafeteria workers and all clerical employees.

The Republican-led General Assembly instead passed a budget that “included raises for themselves,” but which provided no funding for universal pre-K and no raises for teachers or school staff, KEA officials said.

“To add to that insult, the General Assembly established a system that requires public school districts to transfer state and local tax dollars to privately managed charter schools,” the release said. “Refusing to dedicate available funding to public schools statewide and making the situation worse by imposing additional unwanted, unnecessary costs on local school districts will certainly not improve Kentucky public education.”

The legislature included some additional state school funding, known as SEEK, but no language mandating pay raises. Lawmakers said if local school districts wanted to raise salaries, they could do so at their own discretion using the additional SEEK funds provided in the budget.

Glass said teacher pay needs to be elevated out of a political conversation.

“It’s a labor market problem,” he said. “The labor market is telling us we have a significant problem. We have to confront it head on or it’s only going to get worse.”

This story was originally published May 3, 2022 at 2:32 PM.