The United States has more than 400,000 teacher positions that are either unfilled or staffed by teachers without full certification. The profession's pay penalty hit a three-decade record in 2024. And Congress just moved to cut Title I, the federal program that sends targeted funding to schools serving low-income students, by 26 percent for fiscal year 2026.
Three Decades of Falling Behind
In 1996, teachers earned about 93.9 cents for every dollar paid to other college graduates with comparable education and experience, according to the Economic Policy Institute. By 2024, that figure had fallen to 73.1 cents on the dollar. The teacher pay penalty, 26.9 percent in 2024, is the highest EPI has recorded since it began tracking the gap in the early 1990s.
The average public school teacher salary was $74,495 in the 2024-25 school year, according to the National Education Association. The gap exceeds 20 percent in 36 states. For male teachers, the penalty reaches 36.4 percent. In Colorado, it hits 38.5 percent, the widest of any state.
The Learning Policy Institute estimates more than 400,000 teaching positions in the 2024-25 school year were either vacant or filled by teachers who do not hold full certification for the subject they are teaching. Every state reported shortages in multiple areas, with special education, mathematics, and science the most commonly cited.
Your Zip Code Is Your Budget
The teacher shortage does not fall evenly. It concentrates in the districts with the fewest resources, which are, by design of the funding system, the districts in the lowest-income zip codes.
American public schools draw the majority of their funding from local property taxes. The wealthiest 10 percent of school districts spend $54,464 per student. School districts serving the highest concentrations of students of color receive $2,700 less per student in state and local funding than districts that serve predominantly white student populations, according to the Education Law Center's 2024 analysis. Between the highest- and lowest-funded states, the per-pupil spending gap has held between $13,000 and $14,000 for more than a decade.
Nearly a third of states provide less total funding to their highest-poverty school districts than to their lowest-poverty ones. An EdSource investigation in 2025 found that property-tax-driven inequalities continued to widen in California even after the state adopted a weighted funding formula intended to close the gap. Wealthier county districts extended their per-student advantage in the years the reform was being credited as a success.
"After factoring in inflation, teachers have seen a 5 percent decrease in real earnings compared to ten years ago, while wages of other college graduates increased by just over 30 percent." — Economic Policy Institute, 2024
Title I Was the Partial Fix. Congress Is Cutting It by 26%.
Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, signed into law in 1965, is the federal government's primary mechanism for countering the property-tax imbalance. It directs roughly $18 billion per year to schools serving concentrated low-income populations, on the premise that when local real estate tax revenue fails children in a poor zip code, federal dollars compensate.
The House Appropriations Committee approved a 26 percent cut to Title I for fiscal year 2026. Rep. Rosa DeLauro calculated that the reduction removes at least 72,000 teachers from classrooms in low-income communities. The Department of Education has already cut nearly half its workforce since January 2025 and placed close to $7 billion in grants on hold, affecting after-school programs, teacher training initiatives, and support for English learners.
The alternative the administration has advanced is school vouchers: redirecting money from public school budgets to parents who choose private schools. Research from Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio, states with large-scale voucher programs, consistently shows that vouchers do not improve outcomes for public school students who remain, and that the families who benefit most are those who had already enrolled their children in private schools before the voucher arrived.
The Fix Is a Federal Floor, Not a Federal Takeover
The school funding problem does not require eliminating property taxes or abolishing local school boards. It requires a federal funding floor, weighted toward high-poverty districts, so that the qualifications of a child's teacher are not determined by the assessed value of their neighborhood's real estate.
Research from the Learning Policy Institute and others shows that additional funding directed to high-poverty schools does improve outcomes, with the strongest effects on graduation rates, college enrollment, and adult earnings for low-income students. The mechanism works when the money actually reaches the schools. The policy debate is not about whether money matters; three decades of quasi-experimental state funding reform data confirm that it does. The debate is about which children's classrooms receive full funding.
The House Appropriations Committee's proposed 26 percent Title I cut would remove 72,000 positions from low-income classrooms, leaving the property tax to do work it was never designed to do alone, and leaving a teacher shortage that is already more than 400,000 positions deep to grow a little deeper.
Sources
- Economic Policy Institute: The Teacher Pay Penalty Reached a Record High in 2024
- National Education Association: Educator Pay Data 2026
- Learning Policy Institute: An Overview of Teacher Shortages, 2025
- Education Law Center: Making the Grade 2024
- EdSource: Inequalities Grow Unchecked Despite Funding Formula Reforms, 2025
- K-12 Dive: House Panel Approves 26% Cut to Title I Funding for FY26
- Economic Policy Institute: U.S. Investment in Public Education Is at Risk
- Learning Policy Institute: How Money Matters
- NPR: Inflation Is Sucking the Life Out of Teacher Pay Raises, April 2026
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