Recently, because this is the sort of thing your friendly neighborhood school choice mad scientist likes to do, I examined the Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction annual reports. Stick with me; this will be more interesting than you might suspect. So, if you go back to the 1994-95 report (the last year before any charter schools or district open enrollment) and go to page 273 you find that the Arizona school system spent almost $1.3 billion on teacher salaries, on a total spend of $3.5 billion. In other words, 37% of Arizona’s K-12 investment went to teacher salaries.
The latest edition of this same report keeps districts and charter schools separate for these calculations. In 2022-23 (see page I-253) Arizona’s total spend on school districts had increased to $13.2 billion, and the line item for district teacher salaries stood at $3.2 billion. Teacher salaries had dropped from 37% of the total spend to 25%. Dividing the total district teacher salary by the number of teachers and then adjusting for inflation revealed that the average teacher salary remained essentially flat in real terms over the 30 years.
That might seem odd at first. Arizona more than doubled the investment in school districts after accounting for inflation but somehow managed to prioritize every other type of spending except teacher salaries. How does this fit with the notion that school districts have been politically captured by teachers unions?
This puzzle is not overly difficult to solve. “Teachers unions” are actually “district employee unions,” and district employee unions can maximize their dues revenue by maximizing the employment of non-teachers. If for example you can hire two non-teachers for the same cost as hiring a single teacher, you can potentially double your dues revenue. The same reports cited above show that Arizona’s district system somehow soldiered on with one non-teacher employee per 19 students in 1994-95, but that had dropped to one per 15 students in 2022-23.
If in fact Arizona’s school districts spent 37% of their revenue on teacher salaries in 2022-23, it would have pushed the average annual teacher salary over $100,000. This could have been achieved without changing student-teacher ratios and would have left 63% of revenue to spend on everything else.
Other factors are at play as well; districts constructing buildings to the 21st century nowhere, etc. Chubb and Moe instructed us back in 1990 that the central problem in K-12 education is politics, a lesson that we seem prone to forget. The K-12 system isn’t just broken. Rather it is broken on purpose, and teachers have been hugely shortchanged in the process. Fortunately, the development of a solution is underway, and choice is key:
