Sanders to Introduce Legislation Mandating Minimum $60,000 Pay for Teachers

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) speaks in Washington in a file photograph. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Amid controversy over woke agendas and declining test scores, a call for higher salaries for America’s public school teachers has gained bipartisan support.

In revisiting an idea first introduced last year by Democrats, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has re-proposed tripling federal funding of teachers’ paychecks that would guarantee them a minimum annual salary of $60,000.

Sanders, who recently assumed command over the influential Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, wants to secure the increased funding under legislation called the Teacher Pay Act that he says he intends to introduce.

He proposes raising the funds for the guaranteed wage threshold by increasing the estate tax on America’s wealthiest taxpayers.

Backed by Republican Governors

“Let’s be clear. If we can provide over a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the top one percent and large corporations, please don’t tell me that we cannot afford to make sure that every teacher in America is paid at least $60,000 a year,” said Sanders at a Feb. 13 meeting he hosted entitled “Respecting our Teachers: A Town Hall on the Teacher Pay Crisis in America.”

Sanders, who introduced the idea back in 2019, resurrected it following President Joe Biden’s call for higher teacher wages in his Feb. 7 State of the Union Address.

While Republicans have been reluctant to support federal legislation to set minimum salary standards for teachers, at the state level GOP governors have already enacted similar policies to the one proposed by Sanders.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, and Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves are among several Republican state leaders who have already signed into law minimum starting pay for teachers after Biden’s union address.

Newly-elected Arkansas Gov. Sara Huckabee Sanders, also a Republican, introduced an education reform package that proposes raising a starting teacher’s salary in the state from $36,000 to $50,000.

According to Huckabee, Arkansas teachers are paid the lowest starting salary in the South.

She, like the other governors and Sanders, has pitched the pay hikes as an overdue answer to what has been characterized by the media, educators, and political pundits as a crisis-level teacher shortage and a suggested solution to troubling test score results among public school students across the nation.

Not Everyone Agrees

But not everyone agrees with that assessment nor that public school teachers are underpaid.

Andrew Biggs, Senior Fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, has been studying and disputing the claim for years. He told The Epoch Times that the average teacher salary in the United States is already around $65,000.

On top of that, he said, are generous benefits including unprecedented pensions, paid vacations, taxpayer-funded loan forgiveness programs, and premium health coverage packages with no copays enjoyed by teachers.

“On average teachers receive fringe benefits that are generally worth twice as much as someone working in the private sector,” he said.

Biggs, who made a video challenging claims of a national crisis of underpaid teachers and teacher shortages, said those claims exist, but only in pockets such as in poor communities where it’s hard to attract teachers or in specialized fields that require more education.

“There are shortages of teachers in certain specialized areas ... mathematics, sciences, some special ed, and languages—these tend to be fields where people with those skills have a lot of job options outside of teaching,” he said, “and so you don’t get shortages in those areas.”

Biggs also points out that teachers work 10 months a year compared to other workers whose earnings are based on a 12-month work period and their comparisons are thus skewed.

Last year, Republican lawmakers in Arkansas scrutinized the Department of Education’s (DOE) claim of a “severe teacher shortage” in the state.

Sen. Jimmy Hickey (R-Texarkana) said at a hearing that lawmakers “hear that rhetoric all the time” and became incensed when DOE Deputy Commissioner Dr. Ivy Pfeffer, said she couldn’t produce any “definite numbers” to back up the shortage claim.

Bipartisan Skepticism

The skepticism is as bipartisan as the support for more teachers and higher wages for them.

In an in-depth analysis discrediting the claim of a national teacher shortage, the left-leaning Atlantic ran an article subtitled “The narrative doesn’t match the numbers” and mocked the National Education Association’s characterization of it as a “five-alarm fire.”

Two weeks earlier, Forbes ran a piece by senior contributor Peter Greene, a former English teacher who analyzes educational trends in the United States that also took the claim to task.

“If I can’t buy a Porsche for $1.98, that doesn’t mean there’s an automobile shortage,” wrote Greene.

He accused policy and political leaders of “exploiting” what he said is in reality a “set of working conditions driving teachers from the classroom.”

At his town hall meeting, Sanders—who has garnered multitudes of endorsements from some of the largest teacher unions in the country in his political campaigns including his run for President in 2016—claimed that 300,000 school teachers left their jobs during COVID and that it has resulted in a current shortage of 200,000 public school teachers in the United States.

He also said that 44 percent of public school teachers have quit over the past five years due to low pay.

Sanders said that wages for public school teachers are so low that in 36 states, the average public school teacher with a family of four qualifies for food stamps, public housing, and other government benefits.

“That is simply disgraceful,” he said.