Teacher salaries in Alaska are slightly ahead of the national average, but significantly behind the cost of living in the state.
New data from the Alaska Department of Labor indicate that other states have been quicker to adjust the salaries of educators to compensate for higher costs, while Alaska – at one time the most attractive state for teachers to work – has fallen further behind.
You still hear people grumble occasionally about teacher pay. They work only nine months of the year, yet draw higher salaries than many year-round workers.
At one time, Alaska teachers really were the kings and queens of the hill. In 1980, according to a report in the latest issue of Alaska Economic Trends from the state Department of Labor, teacher pay in Alaska was 170-percent of the US national average. Today, New York pays its teachers the most, and it’s just 140-percent above the national average. Alaska teachers also had a pension plan that paid them a percentage of their salaries for life, along with full medical benefits (known today as “Tier I”). All told, labor economists argue that it gave Alaska a huge competitive advantage attracting teachers, despite a higher cost of living and the adjustment to remote rural life.
But that gravy train has long since left the station. Alaska pays the tenth-highest average teacher salaries now, and the post-retirement benefits have all but disappeared.
This is Mike Vieira, the president of the union representing teachers in Sitka (the Sitka Education Association) speaking to the school board during contract negotiations in the spring of 2022.
“They (Tier III teachers) don’t have the flexibility to wait for their salary to increase because they need to take those dollars and put them in account and let them sit for as many years as possible, so that they can have a chance of success in retirement,” Vieira said. “They don’t have access to Social Security. They have one leg to stand on in retirement and it’s based on the amount of money that they earn today.”
Beginning in 2006, all new teachers in Alaska had to save for retirement, if they were to have a retirement at all. No Social Security, and no monthly pension checks.
Still, the tenth-highest salaries in the nation is not too bad, right? That might pencil out, except Alaska is among the five most expensive states to live in. That list includes Hawaii, Massachusetts, California, and New York. And while all those states used to trail Alaska in teacher pay, they’ve done better keeping up with rising costs. New York, Massachusetts, and California are 1, 2, and 3 in teacher pay nowadays. Hawaii is just behind Alaska, at number 16.
The economists in the state Department of Labor trace the dropoff in Alaska’s teacher salaries to the mid-1990s, when an statewide retirement incentive program saw many older, highly-paid teachers leave their jobs, to be replaced by less expensive younger teachers. That knocked Alaska’s average pay quite far down the list, and it’s never rebounded.
And inflation has done the rest. According to the Trends report, national inflation over the last three decades was 108-percent, and Alaska is one of only four states to raise teacher salaries by less than 70-percent over those 30 years.
And teachers have been hit particularly hard. Adjusting for inflation, real wages for all other workers in the state have risen one-percent since the millennium, those with bachelor’s degrees have seen almost a 5-percent increase. Teachers, meanwhile, have experienced a real wage decrease of about 4-percent in the last 20 years.
The Trends report comes just as Alaska’s school districts are preparing to write their budgets for next year. Most of those budgets are teacher salaries. In Sitka, it’s about 80-percent – and yet, not enough. Sitka School Board president Tristan Guevin is one of many advocates across the state who believe Alaska’s education budget should account for inflation, and reverse over 20 years of declining teacher pay. His frustration was evident at a board meeting one year ago.
“Our teachers need and deserve better pay and benefits. But as a school board and as a district, we have no way to raise revenues, so are largely at the mercy of the state and local government, and by extension, Alaska and Sitka residents,
And based on data in Trends, the opposite may be happening. Teachers who began in 2020 “started at least 3 percent lower than those in the past, and that pay gap has expanded over time.”
