School districts need a lesson on economics

Florida’s Hillsborough County Public Schools has become the latest in a string of school districts throughout the country to come forward with a proposition to develop housing for their teachers. This announcement comes on the heels of a Florida Education Association report that noted the state had over 10,000 teacher vacancies. While thousands of teachers are leaving the industry, district-managed housing seems to be a poorly veiled attempt to coerce teachers to stay without increasing their compensation.

For years, teachers throughout the country have complained of low wages and long hours. As the pandemic made working conditions more difficult for those in education, the complaints grew louder, and many teachers began abandoning the profession altogether. School districts have become more desperate to keep educators, proposing ways to placate employees without addressing the core issue at hand: inadequate wages.

Teachers throughout the country are gravely underpaid, and in Florida the problem seems to be getting worse. Adjusting for inflation, the average Florida teacher salary has decreased by over $9,000 from 1970 to 2021, falling from $58,747 (in 2021 dollars) to $49,583 — a 15.6% decrease. For comparison, over roughly the same time period (1970 to 2020) the Social Security Administration’s Average Wage Index increased from $45,520 (adjusted for inflation) to $55,628 — an increase of well over 20%. Average wages are rising, but teachers’ pay isn’t keeping pace across the country, and in Florida, teachers are falling behind.

This salary problem has thankfully been recognized by some district administrators. But instead of addressing the issue by lobbying voters (who ultimately control the district’s ability to provide wage increases) to raise their educators’ salaries, a few school districts around the country have pondered the idea of providing affordable housing for their faculty to lessen the burden of their rising living costs. Notably, school districts in California, Florida, Colorado and North Carolina have gone public with proposals to establish district-run housing facilities for teachers. A possibly even more bizarre response to educators’ grievances of rising living costs was Milpitas Unified School District’s plea to Bay Area families to rent out rooms in their homes to teachers.

Construction costs for teacher housing would vary depending on the real estate industry in a given district, but it’s safe to assume that construction alone — much less property management and upkeep — would cost more than increasing educators’ wages district wide. Even if these housing projects are not being built from the ground up and are instead converting existing buildings into teacher housing (which can be just as costly at times), there would still be added ongoing expenses to maintain and staff the buildings. Alternatively, federal proposals to increase teacher salaries nationwide are not a viable solution. Federally prescribed minimum wages ultimately hurt workers as industries have to cut back on employees and resources in order to abide by the wage requirements. In a field that is already restricted budgetarily, teachers would be worse off with national wage mandates than locally devised minimums.

If school districts really valued their teachers, wouldn’t they pay educators a wage that would allow them to live comfortably in the neighborhood that they teach in? Instead, under these proposals, teachers would be locked into their low-paying jobs because their employment is tied to their housing.

Teachers in these districts have no bargaining power — if they were to threaten to walk away from their jobs due to the unchanging conditions, they would be at risk of losing their housing.

Increasing teacher salaries would provide educators with a greater ability to make choices about their housing instead of being forced into employer-run housing due to insufficient salaries.

Teachers should have the ability to choose where they live — and this starts by increasing their salaries to a living wage at the local level.