The Digest of Education Statistics has new numbers out on teacher salaries. I combined these with numbers from the census on earnings of college-educated workers more generally. Now there are legitimate quibbles about comparing the levels of the two series as they don’t measure exactly the same thing. But looking at the trend is (a) legitimate and (b) depressing.
Some day we need to start paying teachers more.
Yep, depressing. And persuasive.
If you’re interested, I did a similar (snapshot, not trend) salary comparison on a state-by-state basis here:
http://www.paul-bruno.com/2013/12/teacher-salaries-and-earnings-for-college-graduates/
Some states seem considerably more generous in relative terms, but you get somewhat different results comparing teacher salaries to household incomes and college graduate incomes.