Teacher salaries lower where students are poor

A study released by the Education Department yesterday reveals schools serving low-income students receive less local and state funding for teacher salaries than schools serving higher-income students, confirming long-suspected financial inequity by education experts.

Sam Dillon of The New York Times reports the data collected comes from 84,000 public schools that reported salary expenditures to receive emergency federal money under the 2009 stimulus bill. Salary inequities began to accumulate after the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act passed. Under the law, districts were required to prove the money was being distributed equally among their low and high-income schools, but a loophole "allowed school systems to report educator salaries using a districtwide pay schedule, thus masking large salary gaps between the higher-paid veteran staffs in middle-class schools and the young teachers earning entry-level pay in poor parts of the district," Dillon reports.

The Education Department said in a statement that alleviating the inequities would not be difficult: "Providing low-income schools with comparable spending would cost as little as 1 percent of the average district’s total spending, but the extra resources would make a big impact by adding between 4 percent and 15 percent to the budget of schools serving poor students." (Read more)