New polls find most Americans say teachers are underpaid

Teachers seeking higher pay and more school funding walked out of classrooms in half a dozen states this year. Now, three national polls report that most Americans agree that educators don’t earn enough. And two of the surveys found that at least half of Americans said they would pay higher taxes to raise educator salaries.

The national polls were conducted by The New York Times, the Associated Press and NPR, and each found that Americans overwhelmingly believe public school teachers are underpaid.

The salary issue for teachers — who in some states are paid so little that many have to take second and even third jobs to pay their bills — is hardly new. U.S. teachers earn less than 60 percent of what similarly educated professionals make, according to a 2017 annual report on education around the world.

But the subject received renewed attention when teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona, Colorado and North Carolina walked out demanding higher salaries and more funding for their schools, some of which are starved for basic resources.

The strikes were largely in Republican-led states with weak union laws, and it was teachers — not their unions — who planned and carried out the walkouts. The “Red for Ed” movement in these states surprised the education world — and even some union leaders. The organic nature of the strikes may have helped shine a different light on issues ignored for years by lawmakers and the public. The New York Times wrote: “A survey conducted in early May for The New York Times by the online polling firm SurveyMonkey found that nearly three in four adults — 71 percent — considered teacher pay too low, while just 6 percent felt it was too high. And two-thirds said they supported increasing the salaries of public-school teachers even if it meant raising taxes.”