Florida Ranks Fiftieth In Teacher Pay

Florida teachers make $6,000 less than the state's living wage

The discussion of whether teachers are paid sufficiently has been a national conversation lately. Overall, there is a good deal of polling suggesting Americans believe teachers should be paid more. There’s debate about how much more, but that’s politics.

Some states are already doing better than others in this regard, however. Florida is objectively one of, if not the worst when it comes to compensating its teachers.

Recent data shows Florida’s teachers rank 50^th in the United States in pay. 

Fiftieth.

Only Washington D.C. and West Virginia fared worse.

Now, that’s not the narrative the Florida state government wants to direct you towards.  What they want you to focus on is that it ranks sixteenth in starting teacher pay.  And that’s not bad!  If we’re giving credit where it is due, sixteenth is pretty okay for starting pay for teachers.

Unfortunately, what that means is that over a teacher’s career in the state of Florida, they will fall increasingly far behind in compensation.  Their pay will barely move, which is not only out of step with current inflation (and historical inflation) but it also fails to provide an environment that encourages teachers to stay in the state.

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Think about it.  If you stay in one job year after year, and your pay almost never goes up no matter how good a job you do, is that a job you are going to stay in?  Likely not.  And when it comes to teachers, leaving a job often means moving to another state since state law dictates a great deal of how much those teachers are compensated.

Which means Florida is likely to find itself in a position of constantly turning over teaching staff.  Veteran, well educated, knowledgeable teachers will leave the state in search of better paying positions elsewhere.  And while we recognize all teachers need to start somewhere, keeping teachers who have a proven career is incredibly important.  Teachers get better at their curriculum and lesson plan every year they put it into action.  They tweak and adjust and become increasingly effective.

All that institutional knowledge and experience goes out the window when one decides to leave the state for greener pastures because Florida lags so far behind in compensation.

In fact, based on economic data for the whole state, the average Floridian needs around $59,000 annually to make minimum living wage.  The average Floridian teacher’s pay?  $53,000.

That’s a gap of $6,000 annually.  What’s even more insidious, is that the starting teacher pay is $50,000 a year.  So if starting pay is $50k, and average pay is $53, that means statistically speaking the highest paid teachers in the state are making $56,000 a year.  Still below minimum living wage, and only a $6,000 increase over their career lifetime.

Really think about that.  Let’s go back to the question of ‘if you barely saw a raise in your job every year would you stay?’  Now put it in those real terms.

If you started a job making $50,000 and ten, fifteen, twenty years later you were only making $56,000 would you stay?  Would you still even be able to afford rent, or groceries, given how fast prices are rising around Florida?  Think about where you were fifteen years ago, and imagine if over the entire length of Obama’s two terms, Trump’s term, and Biden’s term, your entire salary only went up by $6,000.  Does that seem reasonable?

Even worse, Florida continues to unload more expenses on its teachers despite paying them less. 

Florida students are supposed to have a right to an equal, safe, and efficient education, but this is categorically impossible given how underfunded classrooms are, and how few resources are going towards them. 

For example, the issue of the classroom library.

Florida classrooms are encouraged to have a classroom library.  And ideally, this would be a space where students could expand their reading habits and enjoy the works of authors appropriate for their age and learning capability.  It should be a great idea in theory.

But guess who has to pay for the books in a classroom library? 

That’s right: the teacher.

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We’ve done articles in the past about the economics of book banning and how the expense of books puts them out of reach to be purchased by families in economic need.  Now imagine having to purchase, stock, and curate an entire classroom library.

Not only that, but the state’s evolving and continuously nebulous language around what books are and are not allowed in schools means that it is a legal risk for teachers to put certain books in their classrooms.  If a single upset parent decides to challenge something a teacher provides for their students, it could wind up risking the teacher’s credentials and the principal’s professional credentials all because the state of Florida refuses to clarify its stances on what books are allowed.

If the state provided funding and a curated list of books that every classroom at every grade was allowed to have, then equal and efficient education would be increasingly more possible for its students.  But it won’t.  Or hasn’t at the very least.

Maybe because the state doesn’t have enough money to buy all those books and provide an additional investment into its students, perhaps?  That seems reasonable, considering we just mentioned how expensive a single classroom’s library could be.

Well, did you know that the state of Florida has a $15,000,000,000 surplus? 

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This sounds great, in principle.  After all, we often criticize states and companies for not having an appropriate rainy day fund, and in the face of increasingly violent weather and hurricanes, it makes sense for Florida to have some monies tucked away.

But think about what this means.

That’s $15,000,000,000 that could have gone back into education for your students.  That could have been reinvested in schools and educational materials to shore up the opportunities of Florida’s learning age kids statewide.

In fact, Florida lags behind not just in teacher pay, but in student investment.  Florida ranks 48^th in the nation in student investment, putting around $12,500 behind every child in its education system.  The national average is closer to $16,000.

Wouldn’t you know it, if you multiply the number of students in the state by the educational funding gap per student, you get pretty close to $15,000,000,000.

We’re not saying that Governor DeSantis created his surplus by intentionally shorting the students of Florida educational funding, but the numbers sure are suspiciously similar.

Unfortunately, the cost of educating a student from K-12 is not cheap.  And if we want it done well, we also need to be willing to pay our teachers at the very least a minimum living wage, and compensate them over the lifetime of their careers to stay, care, and teach better with every class.  Those are real costs.

But the state has money to at least close some of this gap.  It very realistically could reinvest some of its surplus back into teachers, into classrooms, and into students.  We think the students of Florida deserve that investment, and that we should be proud of how well educated and prepared they are for the world.

The question is: will the state government invest in its children, or not?

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