Executives with the state’s powerful Washington Education Association (WEA) union announced last week they plan to expand school closings by calling a strike for May 6th in the Lake Washington district, bringing to eleven the number of school districts subject to union action. The latest announcement will empty classrooms for the day of about 25,760 students, increasing to 70,000 the number of students affected by shuttered public schools.
Union executives have proposed the one-day strike action as a way to lobby state lawmakers to provide more money for teacher compensation in the 2015-17 budget. To understand whether teacher pay should be increased, however, it is important first to answer a natural question: How much do teachers make now?
Surprisingly, none of the extensive media reporting I’ve been following provides this basic information to the public. Otherwise sound news reporting by Wilson Criscione (Bellingham Herald), Kari Bray (Everett Herald), and Seattle Times staff only report that union executives want teachers to be paid more, a fairly obvious point.
The union position makes sense...for the union. In Washington public school teachers must pay union dues and fees to keep their jobs. The more money state lawmakers devote to teacher pay, the more teachers have available to pay the dues and fees required by the WEA and its affiliates. Union executives say any school teacher who fails to pay will be fired, so we can safely assume that the compliance rate for monthly payment is around 100%.
Parents, policymakers and the public, however, can’t make sense of the union’s position without some sense of how much teachers receive now. To find out, I checked with the website of the state Superintendent’s office, OSPI. Here is what I found (all figures are for a ten-month work year):
- Statewide, average teacher pay including benefits is $83,000
- In Seattle, average teacher pay including benefits is $88,800
- In Lake Washington, average teacher pay including benefits is $82,600
- In Bellingham, average teacher pay including benefits is $90,300
- In Arlington, average teacher pay including benefits is $98,700
- In Ferndale, average teacher pay including benefits is 92,000
- In Stanwood-Camano, average teacher pay including benefits is $93,200
For more detail, see Table 19 from the website of the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, which provides average teacher salary and benefits in all of Washington’s school districts for 2014-15: https://www.k12.wa.us/safs/PUB/PER/1415/ps.asp.
