Proposal to give teachers 50% pay increase over the next seven years advances

(The Center Square) – An education finance bill by Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi (D-Torrance) to increase wages for teachers and school employees, was approved April 27 by the Assembly Committee on Education.

“I am proud to stand with teachers and essential school staff from throughout the state to introduce Assembly Bill 938, to give teachers and school staff a 50% pay raise by 2030,” Muratsuchi commented.

The bill was passed unanimously and will now head to the Assembly Committee on Appropriations for funding.

“We need to close this wage gap to get more young people to aspire to become educators, that is why I introduced AB 138 to set the goal of raising teacher and school employees salaries by 50% by 2030.

“Schools across the state are facing a workforce crisis, with many teachers and school employees unable to afford to live in the communities that they work in,” the assemblyman lamented, “In particular there is a growing wage gap between teachers and comparably educated college graduates in other fields.”

Some of the key findings noted in the bill include the “2023 findings from the Economic Policy Institute, inflation-adjusted average weekly wages of teachers have been relatively flat since 1996, finding that the average weekly wages of public school teachers (adjusted only for inflation) increased just twenty-nine dollars; The EPI also found that the teacher wage penalty, when comparing wages of teachers to other professions with similar educational and certification requirements, grew to a record high in 2021 at 23.5% nationally and 17.6% in California”

The relative teacher wage penalty pushes educator jobs to the bottom of the market since graduates are able to obtain higher wage jobs virtually anywhere else, leaving pupils with fewer veteran educators and larger class sizes, which are the two largest factors that increase pupil performance, according to the Learning Policy Institute.

“Data shows that teachers earn 23.5% less than their similarly educated peers, and countries like Finland and Singapore teachers’ salaries are competitive with jobs in engineering, law and business and nearly two-thirds of young adults recently surveyed site pay as one of the top three reasons why they are not interested in going into the teaching profession.”

Once funded, the bill will establish a new local control funding formula target grade span-adjusted base grant funding levels for school districts, charter schools, and county offices of education. The Legislature will fully fund the LCFF target base grants over seven years, with full implementation in the 2030–31 fiscal year, in order to increase salaries for classified and certificated staff working at school sites in school districts, county offices of education and charter schools by 50 percent by the 2030–31 fiscal year.

The department must report by November 1, 2024, on the progress of school districts, county offices of education, and charter schools in increasing salaries for classified staff assigned to a school site or sites.