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For school teachers in the United States, seniority is much more determinative of earnings than subject taught.1 Because precollegiate teaching salaries are so closely tied to years served, school teacher earnings data from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Teacher and Principal Survey are presented here by career stage, with the earnings of new teachers compared to those of both midcareer teachers and educators with three decades or more of classroom experience.

Endnotes

  • 1Median earnings of humanities teachers were very similar in 2017–2018 to those of teachers in every other subject area. (U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], National Teacher and Principal Survey, “Public School Teacher Data File,” 2017–18. Data analyzed by NCES staff at the request of the Humanities Indicators. The Indicators thank Julia Merlin at NCES for her generous assistance.

I-23a: Earnings of K–12 Humanities Teachers, by Years of Teaching Service, 2017–2018*

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* Includes regular full-time teachers. Earnings include base salary, as well as payment for extracurricular activities and other services provided to the school or larger school system (the latter includes merit pay bonuses, state supplements, etc.) but exclude summer earnings.

Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), National Teacher and Principal Survey, “Public School Teacher and Private School Teacher Data Files,” 2017–18. Data analyzed by NCES staff at the request of the Humanities Indicators. Special thanks to Julia Merlin at NCES for her generous assistance. Data presented by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators (www.humanitiesindicators.org).

The graph displays, for earnings at each career stage, a set of statistics referred to as the interquartile range, which describes the range of “typical” or “usual” characteristics exhibited by a population of persons or objects. Quartiles are statistics that divide the observations of a numeric sample into four groups, each of which contains 25% of the data. The lower, middle, and upper quartiles are computed by ordering the values for a particular variable (in this case, teacher earnings) from smallest to largest and then finding the values below which fall 25%, 50%, and 75% of the data. The lower and upper quartiles are the endpoints of the interquartile range. The middle quartile is also known as the median.

Personnel included in the humanities teacher count are those whose main teaching assignment was in area or ethnic studies, art history, civics, communication, composition, English, English as a second language or bilingual education, government, history, language arts, languages other than English, literature or literary criticism, Native American studies, philosophy, or reading. Not included are what the National Teacher and Principal Survey refers to as “general” educators in the elementary and middle grades who spent a portion of their time teaching language arts, reading, history, and other humanities material. These educators’ earnings were similar earnings to those of humanities teachers.

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