In his 2023 State of the Union address, President Joe Biden called for public school teachers to get a raise but offered no specifics on how that could be done. Here, Michael Addonizio, an education policy expert at Wayne State University, provides insight on the current state of teacher salaries, whether a collective raise is in order and how one might be achieved.

1. Do teachers really need a raise?

In many school districts, the answer is: Yes.

According to a 2022 study from the Economic Policy Institute – a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank that addresses low- and middle-income workers’ needs – the teacher “wage penalty” - that is, how much less teachers make than comparable workers - grew from 6.1% in 1996 to 23.5% in 2021. Put another way, the average weekly wages of public school teachers – adjusted for inflation – increased just US$29 from 1996 to 2021, from $1,319 to $1,348 in 2021 dollars. Meanwhile, inflation-adjusted weekly wages of other college graduates rose $445, from $1,564 to $2,009, over the same period.

Teacher wage gaps vary widely from state to state, but in no state does teacher pay equal or exceed pay for other college graduates.

Adding benefits to the analysis does not change the picture. Although teachers generally receive a higher share of their compensation as benefits than other professionals do – usually health insurance and retirement plans – this difference does not offset the teachers’ growing wage penalty. Teachers’ “total compensation” penalty reached 14.2% in 2021. This is a 23.5% wage penalty offset by a 9.3% benefits advantage. This total compensation penalty for teachers grew by 11.5 percentage points from 1993 to 2021, according to the Economic Policy Institute analysis.

2. Where do teacher raises typically come from?

Public school teacher salaries are generally set by local school districts. Districts establish salary schedules where teacher base pay is determined by years of teaching experience and education credentials or graduate credit hours. Contracts are negotiated at the district level, so that teachers in different schools within a district are covered by the same salary schedule.

These schedules, sometimes referred to as “step-and-lane” systems, can vary substantially from district to district. District contracts may differ in the annual pay increases for experience or the relative importance given to experience versus credentials. Contracts may give larger annual pay hikes to less experienced teachers than to veteran teachers, or the reverse may be true.

Where does the money come from? Fully 93% of school districts’ operating revenue comes from state and local sources. Nationally, on average, states provide 47% and local districts provide 46%.

Rising concern over low teacher salaries has prompted many states to pass appropriations to boost local salary schedules across the board. In 2021, 25 states enacted or introduced legislation to raise teacher pay. Ten of those states have statewide teacher salary schedules, while eight have minimum teacher salary requirements.

Among the states with statewide salary schedules, state initiatives raised pay and expanded eligibility for bonuses. In states with minimum salary requirements, lawmakers sought to raise these minimums and provide incentives for districts to hike salaries across the board. Elsewhere, state efforts focused on general salary increases for teachers.

However, despite these state efforts, teacher salaries continue to lag well behind other professional salaries in many states.

3. Can federal funds be used?

No, not as a long-term solution to the problem of low teacher pay. Federal funds are too limited in amount and there’s not enough flexibility to finance general pay raises for teachers.

The federal government provides about 7% of K-12 revenue, and the money is designated for specific programs. In general, these funds are intended to supplement funding for schools with at-risk youth, including children with learning disabilities or children from low-income households.

During recent economic downturns – the Great Recession of 2008 and the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown – the federal government provided K-12 schools with emergency aid to supplement diminished state and local revenue. The COVID relief was exceptionally substantial, with the American Rescue Plan providing school districts with $190 billion.

This federal aid, however, while unprecedented in amount, has two key limitations: it is one-time aid and not all districts share in it. Districts that do receive these funds must be careful not to make them part of their annual operating budgets without solid plans for state or local replacement funds.

Many districts have revealed plans to use these federal funds to hire new teachers or to pay teachers bonuses for extra work in an effort to mitigate COVID-related learning loss. Paying bonuses to current teachers would avoid the need to lay off teachers when the emergency aid runs out.

In addition, a revised American Teacher Act has been introduced in Congress. The bill would establish a four-year grant program for states to encourage local districts to raise base teacher salaries. The bulk of these funds would go to districts with teacher salaries below $60,000.

The bill would award grants to states that enact and enforce laws establishing a statewide minimum teacher salary requirement of $60,000. Details continue to be worked out, including refining the definition of a “teacher” to avoid paying unqualified staff with federal funds. The bill would address a pressing problem, but state participation would be voluntary and the program would expire in four years. And passage is uncertain.

To achieve lasting teacher pay hikes, it’s going to have to take place in state capitols and local school boards.

Michael Addonizio, Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, Wayne State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Over the past century, the Earth’s average temperature has swiftly increased by about 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit). The evidence is hard to dispute. It comes from thermometers and other sensors around the world.

But what about the thousands of years before the Industrial Revolution, before thermometers, and before humans warmed the climate by releasing heat-trapping carbon dioxide from fossil fuels?

Back then, was Earth’s temperature warming or cooling?

Even though scientists know more about the most recent 6,000 years than any other multimillennial interval, studies on this long-term global temperature trend have come to contrasting conclusions.

To try to resolve the difference, we conducted a comprehensive, global-scale assessment of the existing evidence, including both natural archives, like tree rings and seafloor sediments, and climate models. Our results, published Feb. 15, 2023, suggest ways to improve climate forecasting to avoid missing some important slow-moving, naturally occurring climate feedbacks.

Global warming in context

Scientists like us who study past climate, or paleoclimate, look for temperature data from far back in time, long before thermometers and satellites.

We have two options: We can find information about past climate stored in natural archives, or we can simulate the past using climate models.

There are several natural archives that record changes in the climate over time. The growth rings that form each year in trees, stalagmites and corals can be used to reconstruct past temperature. Similar data can be found in glacier ice and in tiny shells found in the sediment that builds up over time at the bottom of the ocean or lakes. These serve as substitutes, or proxies, for thermometer-based measurements.

For example, changes in the width of tree rings can record temperature fluctuations. If temperature during the growing season is too cold, the tree ring forming that year is thinner that one from a year with warmer temperatures.

Another temperature proxy is found in seafloor sediment, in the remains of tiny ocean-dwelling creatures called foraminifera. When a foraminifer is alive, the chemical composition of its shell changes depending on the temperature of the ocean. When it dies, the shell sinks and gets buried by other debris over time, forming layers of sediment at the ocean floor. Paleoclimatologists can then extract sediment cores and chemically analyze the shells in those layers to determine their composition and age, sometimes going back millennia.

Climate models, our other tool for exploring past environments, are mathematical representations of the Earth’s climate system. They model relationships among the atmosphere, biosphere and hydrosphere to create our best replica of reality.

Climate models are used to study current conditions, forecast changes in the future and reconstruct the past. For example, scientists can input the past concentrations of greenhouse gases, which we know from information stored in tiny bubbles in ancient ice, and the model can use that information to simulate past temperature. Modern climate data and details from natural archives are used to test their accuracy.

Proxy data and climate models have different strengths.

Proxies are tangible and measurable, and they often have a well-understood response to temperature. However, they are not evenly distributed around the world or through time. This makes it difficult to reconstruct global, continuous temperatures.

In contrast, climate models are continuous in space and time, but while they are often very skillful, they will never capture every detail of the climate system.

A paleo-temperature conundrum

In our new review paper, we assessed climate theory, proxy data and model simulations, focusing on indicators of global temperature. We carefully considered naturally occurring processes that affect the climate, including long-term variations in Earth’s orbit around the Sun, greenhouse gas concentrations, volcanic eruptions and the strength of the Sun’s heat energy.

We also examined important climate feedbacks, such as vegetation and sea ice changes, that can influence global temperature. For example, there is strong evidence that less Arctic sea ice and more vegetation cover existed during a period around 6,000 years ago than in the 19th century. That would have darkened the Earth’s surface, causing it to absorb more heat.

Our two types of evidence offer different answers regarding the Earth’s temperature trend over the 6,000 years before modern global warming. Natural archives generally show that Earth’s average temperature roughly 6,000 years ago was warmer by about 0.7 C (1.3 F) compared with the 19th century median, and then cooled gradually until the Industrial Revolution. We found that most evidence points to this result.

Meanwhile, climate models generally show a slight warming trend, corresponding to a gradual increase in carbon dioxide as agriculture-based societies developed during the millennia after ice sheets retreated in the Northern Hemisphere.

How to improve climate forecasts

Our assessment highlights some ways to improve climate forecasts.

For example, we found that models would be more powerful if they more fully represented certain climate feedbacks. One climate model experiment that included increased vegetation cover in some regions 6,000 years ago was able to simulate the global temperature peak we see in proxy records, unlike most other model simulations, which don’t include this expanded vegetation.

Understanding and better incorporating these and other feedbacks will be important as scientists continue to improve our ability to predict future changes.

Ellie Broadman, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Climate Science, University of Arizona and Darrell Kaufman, Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Northern Arizona University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.