Title: Cost-of-living doesn't make up for Oklahoma's low teacher pay - Oklahoma Policy Institute
Headings: Cost-of-living doesn’t make up for Oklahoma’s low teacher pay
Cost-of-living doesn’t make up for Oklahoma’s low teacher pay
Share This:
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Content: What is less fortunate is that Oklahoma’s low cost-of-living does not make up for our even lower teacher pay. The 2014-15 average salary for classroom teachers in Oklahoma was $44,628, which was just 77.8 percent of the national average teacher salary ($57,379). It costs about 90 cents on the dollar to live here, but we are paying teachers less than 80 cents on the dollar compared to the national average. To bring our teacher pay and cost-of-living into balance, the average Oklahoma teacher would need a raise of about $6,500. Even that understates the problem, because we must compete for teachers against neighboring states with similar costs of living. Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas all have a cost-of-living within 2 or 3 percentage points of Oklahoma. But their starting pay is in many cases thousands of dollars more. As one Arkansas principal, who himself left Oklahoma in 2000, told the Tulsa World, “I hired two just this year from small districts just over the [Oklahoma] border — Westville and Oaks Mission. The pay is definitely better.” Lawmakers are feeling pressure to do something about Oklahoma’s mounting teacher shortage, but they haven’t shown any willingness to stop cutting taxes, much less to find new revenue to close our state’s growing budget gap .