Governors' Power to Increase Teacher Salaries During Teacher Appreciation Week

Governors in more than half of the US states have proposed boosting teacher compensation, including pay increases, bonuses, and other perks, to attract and retain educators amid teacher shortages. However, some teachers say it is too little, too late to fix problems that are years in the making, and fixing teachers’ deteriorating work culture and growing workloads would be a more powerful incentive than a pay raise. The teacher pay penalty, the gap between teacher salaries and their college-educated peers in other professions, is growing, and researchers suggest that getting better data on where the shortages are and then targeting raises to those areas will help more.