Democrats and the teachers’ unions want Washington to raise teacher pay. In the House, Florida representative Frederica Wilson’s American Teacher Act would mandate a minimum national salary for public-school teachers of $60,000. In the Senate, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and the other usual suspects have called for the same mandated minimum in the Pay Teachers Act, which would cost $450 billion over the next decade.

This is a display of astonishing federal overreach, even in the Biden era. Proposing these schemes at a time of historic deficits and after a multi-year spending binge is harebrained. And it’s maddening to watch union leaders gloat about these bills after celebrating strikes and fighting to keep schools closed.

For all that, giving teachers a raise, at the state level, would be the right thing to do. Indeed, in recent years, successful conservative governors such as Florida’s Ron DeSantis, Arizona’s Doug Ducey, West Virginia’s Jim Justice, and Arkansas’s Sarah Huckabee Sanders have signed off on substantial teacher pay raises.

This is a chance to show that conservatives can deliver for educators and parents in ways that the Left cannot. Democrats need to placate a host of entrenched claimants. This means that they’re all for pumping money into schools, but they do so in ways that tend to further bloat bureaucracies, pad payrolls, and supersize benefits rather than increase paychecks, reward hard work, or honor excellence.

The public thinks teachers deserve a raise. Last year, 72 percent of respondents to the annual Education Next survey said that teacher salaries should be higher, and just 4 percent said they should be lower. (Among Republicans, the split was 56 percent to 7 percent.) Even when told how much teachers in their state earn (which is invariably more than expected), respondents broke 60 percent to 4 percent for higher pay.

The public has a point. The National Education Association reported this spring that, in 2021–22, the average teacher’s salary was $66,745. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics has it a bit higher, at $67,680 as of May 2021, but I’ll use the NEA figure here.) Sixty-six grand isn’t peanuts, but it is below the $70,000 median for college graduates in all fields. To attract and retain the kinds of educators we want, we should aim to pay teachers more than the typical college grad makes. Another recent survey asked teachers how much they think teachers should earn. The median response was $80,000.

As I note in The Great School Rethink, communities benefit when teachers are capable and professionally compensated. And, contrary to union talking points, there’s no evidence that cheapskate taxpayers are the problem when it comes to directing money at public education. Since the publication of A Nation at Risk, the landmark 1983 report of the U.S. National Commission on Excellence in Education, per pupil spending, adjusted for inflation, has doubled. In 2019 (even before the massive infusion of federal pandemic aid), U.S. schools spent $16,774 per student.

But it can be unclear what taxpayers are getting for their money. Nationally, student achievement has been stagnant for a decade. Adding insult to injury, increases in school spending over time have done nothing to quiet concerns about teacher pay. Between 2012 and 2022, inflation-adjusted teacher pay fell by close to 4 percent even as real per pupil spending increased by 16 percent. In fact, falling pay and rising spending have been a pattern since the Clinton era. Why aren’t more dollars translating into more pay? Key culprits include the number of nonteaching staff, outsized benefits, and a truncated employee year.

Between 2000 and 2019, U.S. student enrollment grew by 5 percent. In that time, the teaching force grew by 9 percent (from 2.94 to 3.2 million), the ranks of principals and assistant principals grew by 37 percent (from 142,000 to 194,000), and district administrative staff grew by 88 percent (from 97,000 to 182,000). This is a long-standing trend in American education. Between 1950 and 2009, while student enrollment doubled, the ranks of nonteaching staff grew sevenfold.

As for benefits, Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab has estimated that just 66 percent of teacher compensation goes to wages; the remainder funds health-care and retirement plans. In the private sector, 71 percent of compensation goes to wages. Closing that gap would be enough to raise average teacher pay by about $5,000 a year.

And then there’s the fact that teachers typically work a 190-day contract year, with 10 to 15 days of paid leave (yielding 175 to 180 workdays). That compares with a standard 52-week contract for other full-time professionals, which, minus federal holidays and paid leave, amounts to 230 to 235 workdays. It’s tough to argue that people who work ten fewer weeks per year than most full-time professionals should receive salaries on par with those of the latter group. (This is a big reason why teacher benefits are so costly: Schools pay full-year benefits for 190 workdays.)

But no one wins when good teachers who like their work but need more money have to spend the summer tending bar or painting houses. Substantial numbers of seasoned educators would welcome the chance to work as full-year professionals in their field (for a commensurate salary), playing a role in managing crucial out-of-session district functions. But the requisite jobs simply don’t exist.

Finally, we’ve opted for a very long time to invest in teacher quantity rather than teacher quality. Back in 1970, the U.S. had a student–teacher ratio of about 27 to 1. Today, the ratio is more like 15 to 1. (That this ratio generally doesn’t translate into small classes is a story of contracts and staffing decisions, but that’s a tale for another day.) If current talk of teacher shortages has you thinking that the practice of adding teachers much faster than we’re adding kids is ancient history, think again. Since 2018, U.S. schools have added 32,000 teachers even as enrollment has declined by 1.2 million kids.

Relative to student enrollment, we’ve nearly doubled the number of teachers since 1970 (this in addition to all that new nonteaching staff). If we’d instead put those dollars into teacher salaries, average teacher pay in the U.S. in 2021–22 would have been about $120,000. Actually, that’s an underestimate. Take into account the savings from paying benefits to fewer teachers, and average teacher pay today would be north of $140,000.

For policy-makers willing to buck the teachers’-union bosses and lead boldly, it’s wholly possible to elevate teacher pay dramatically. As noted, teachers say an $80,000 annual salary, up from the national average of $66,745, would be fair. State leaders can make that 20 percent bump a reality, without a nickel in new spending.

Here’s how, in four steps.

First, arrest schooling’s quantity-over-quality trade-off. Instead of lamenting the perennial “teacher shortage,” school leaders should allow natural attrition to reduce the teaching force by 10 percent. (Given enrollment declines, this would increase student–teacher ratios by one to two kids per teacher.) Putting the salary and benefit savings into teacher pay would yield a salary bump of $10,000.

Second, revamp benefits to reflect private-sector norms, increasing wages from 66 percent of compensation to 71 percent. That shift would help with recruiting, as it would particularly benefit younger teachers and people changing careers. (Meanwhile, current retirees and soon-to-retire educators should be grandfathered, with changes phased in.) Rightsizing benefits in this fashion would translate to a $5,000 bump in pay.

Those first two steps alone get average pay to a bit over $81,000.

Third, prune the bureaucracy. Trimming the nation’s nearly 400,000 district and school administrative staff by 20 percent over a five-year period (via attrition when possible) would return their numbers to where they stood during the Obama presidency. Administrative ranks would still have grown 25 percent since 2000, or about five times as fast as student enrollment.

Finally, use the savings from administrative attrition to fund twelve-month lead-teacher positions (with commensurate paid leave) for 15 percent of teachers. Selected teachers would work an extra ten weeks a year, with their salary bumped to match, and would gain a path to promotion without having to become administrators. This would keep veteran educators in the classroom and give them more professional authority over crucial tasks. For instance, practitioners are better suited than bureaucrats to developing curricula and vetting instructional materials; any resultant downsizing of the full-time bureaucracy would be a boon. Lead teachers could play a crucial role in engaging parents (scheduling visits with incoming families to discuss expectations, meeting with parents to address current students’ needs and challenges, etc.), training incoming teachers, and advising administrators on how to ensure that the technology procured and adopted is actually useful in the classroom.

The result would be national teacher salaries of $81,000 for ten-month and $101,000 for twelve-month positions, yielding a weighted overall average of $84,000.

Now, boosting teacher pay by more than 25 percent is a good start, but much more is possible.

Programs such as Opportunity Culture, developed by the North Carolina educational-consulting firm Public Impact, and Arizona State University’s Next Education Workforce reimagine teaching as a team endeavor. Veteran educators supervise and support more junior or specialized colleagues, with duties and compensation to match their levels (think of a medical team). Apprenticeship programs such as a model being pioneered in Tennessee can make it less costly and time-consuming to become a teacher.

Then we can start to get more creative. It’s obviously a win to get more students in the classrooms of our strongest teachers, so long as those teachers don’t feel put upon. Meanwhile, skilled teachers are generally better able to handle larger classes. States could allow outstanding teachers the choice to take on additional students and be compensated accordingly ($2,500 or $3,000 per student). If accomplished teachers were permitted to take on an additional six students, they’d earn a bump of up to $18,000 a year, more students would be well served, and weaker teachers would have more manageable classrooms. Think teachers would balk at this deal? Think again: Researchers have found that more than 80 percent of teachers said they’d prefer the extra cash to a smaller class size.

New research on Act 10, an education policy of former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, has demonstrated the benefits of bringing more freedom to the teacher labor market. After that 2011 law enabled school systems to move away from restrictive step-and-lane pay scales in favor of more flexible models, those that did so boosted pay for effective educators and for those teaching in “high-needs” areas for which it’s harder to find teachers (e.g., science and math — prospective teachers of those subjects have more-lucrative options outside education — and special education). There was also evidence that these pay systems led to increased academic achievement.

While putting even a portion of these ideas in practice would push average teacher pay in Massachusetts or California well north of $100,000 a year, there are other states where even taking all these steps may not suffice to boost salaries. In those states, new investment may be appropriate, but only if it’s used to fund an overhaul rather than to subsidize the status quo.

The kind of agenda outlined here has many virtues. It puts more money into teachers’ pockets. It gives teachers more agency in their professional lives. It downsizes the bureaucracy. It makes the profession more appealing to new graduates or career-changers, helping to alleviate the incessant hand-wringing about teacher shortages. By reducing the number of bodies school systems have to hire, it permits them to hire more selectively.

Thanks to bureaucracy, benefits, and bloat, a torrent of school spending has yielded only a trickle of pay for classroom teachers. Progressives are seemingly content to keep bankrolling that arrangement. It’s time to rethink it.