The high cost of teaching
Most new teachers can’t afford to rent where they work
In sunny Miami, bilingual elementary teacher Mari Corugedo has 26 years of experience, a master’s degree and a passion for helping Spanish-speaking students quickly learn English.
Her annual compensation for those skills: $64,000, plus benefits. That doesn’t go far in this popular coastal city, where median rent has shot up to almost $2,000 per month, and the median mortgage is almost $1,300 per month before taxes or insurance, according to the real estate site Zillow.
“I would have moved out of Miami by now if not for my husband’s additional income,” said Corugedo, 52.
Beginner teachers have an even tougher time. Skyrocketing housing prices combined with relatively low educator salaries have made Miami one of the nation’s priciest cities for starting teachers.
In the first analysis of its kind, USA TODAY examined salaries and housing costs for teachers all over the country.
New teachers can’t afford the median rent almost anywhere in the USA, the analysis shows. But that’s not the full story. Despite widespread demand for higher salaries, teachers in some regions actually make ends meet, especially as they approach the middle of their careers.
In other areas, mid-career teachers can’t afford to live on their salaries without picking up side hustles or commuting long distances.
Then there are places that no teacher can afford, no matter how much they earn. Such as Miami.
“We have teachers as Uber drivers, Lyft drivers,” said Karla HernandezMats, president of the union for teachers in Miami-Dade County Public Schools. “They certainly love teaching, but they can’t pay their bills with love.”
What does ‘affordable’ mean?
To gauge teachers’ standard of living, USA TODAY looked at salaries in the lowest, middle and highest pay brackets in almost all the nation’s metropolitan areas – cities and their surrounding counties. The data reflect the earnings of teachers in public and private schools, collected in a Bureau of Labor Statistics survey released in May 2017.
Areas were deemed affordable if teachers would have to spend no more than 30% of their salaries – after accounting for federal taxes – to afford the median rent. That’s in line with experts’ recommendations for budgeting.
Beginning teachers, or those in the bottom 10% of the pay scale, can afford to rent a median-priced unit in just 13 of the 291 metro areas analyzed.
The area around Johnstown, Pennsylvania, is one of them. The former steelworker town is a distressed city. Eighty-three percent of the district’s 3,000 students are poor. A starting Johnstown teacher with a bachelor’s degree earns $49,995. Nearby homes are relatively cheap, in part because of the city’s many blighted properties.
New teachers can also afford Springfield, Ohio. Starting salaries in the school district are about $37,000, plus an annual bonus of $1,000, teacher Kathryn Richison said.
Springfield houses are affordable largely because people aren’t clamoring to buy or rent them. Many choose to live in nearby Dayton or Columbus for the big-city amenities, Richison said.
The average salary of a U.S. teacher was $58,950 in 2016-17. When adjusted for inflation, that’s slightly less than almost two decades ago.
Even when benefits are thrown in, America’s teachers earned 13% less in 2018 than private-sector workers with similar levels of education, according to an analysis of federal data by the leftleaning Economic Policy Institute.
Republicans, who trimmed education budgets over the past decade, are starting to pivot. Governors in South Carolina and Texas signed on to plans for teacher raises.
Among Democrats running for president, former Vice President Joe Biden proposed tripling federal money for low-income schools, in part to give teachers raises. U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris from California wants to give the average teacher a $13,500 raise.
Side gigs
Less than half of the metro areas studied – 135 – are affordable for teachers
earning a median wage. For teachers in the rest of the country, the hustle continues.
In the Clairton School District in western Pennsylvania, fifth grade teacher Stacie Baur earns about $43,100 per year. Her education saddled her with $130,000 in debt.
For extra income, she rises before 4 a.m. to teach children in China how to speak English, via a video feed. Baur earns $10.50 for each 25-minute class. During the week, she’ll teach four classes before rushing to Clairton. On weekend mornings, she teaches 10.
As for owning a home, “we haven’t been able to save for the down payment yet,” said Baur, 33. “It’s hard to save when things keep getting more expensive.”
In some areas, teachers struggle because their pay doesn’t increase much even as they gain years of experience.
On average, USA TODAY found teachers’ salaries grew by $31,322, after taxes, as they moved from the bottom to the top of the pay scale. Salaries grew far less than that in some places.
In the rural area around Enid, Oklahoma, salaries start around $32,000 and top out at about $48,000 after federal taxes, according to USA TODAY’s analysis.
On the East Coast, districts generally pay higher salaries, but housing is much more expensive.
Ryan Brown, a Bridgeport, Connecticut, middle-school teacher, lives at his parents’ place 45 minutes away because he can’t afford rent in Bridgeport. He started at $45,000 six years ago and now earns about $56,000 before taxes.
Low pay offset by cheap housing
In Texas, teacher Sarah McManus has 12 years of experience in Henderson, about two hours from Dallas. She earns $42,000 before taxes, but she and her husband, who works in medical billing, can easily afford a home with five bedrooms and a swimming pool. They bought the house for about $140,000. The monthly mortgage is about $1,200.
America’s top-earning teachers can afford the median rent in almost all the metro areas USA TODAY studied – specifically, 249 out of 291.
In New York City public schools, teacher salaries range from about $61,000 to about $129,000, according to Chalkbeat, an education news site.
That means a city that’s legendary for expensive apartments is actually affordable for individual teachers – once they reach the top of the pay scale.
In Miami, Corugedo said she’s lucky her husband has a good job with UPS. “He makes a lot more than I do,” she said.
Education coverage at USA TODAY is made possible in part by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The Gates Foundation does not provide editorial input.