Teachers Are on the Front Lines of Public Health. Let’s Pay Them Like They Matter.

In high school, back in the mid-1990s, I stood before a full auditorium. When asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I responded: “Rich.”

To my teen brain, in a rural area of Missouri, rich meant $100,000 a year — quadruple what my household brought in. It was dreaming big.

Decades later, in a world with more billionaires than ever — about 3,000, according to Forbes — the average starting salary for K-12 teachers in the 2023-24 school year was $58,409 in California and $46,526 nationwide, according to the National Education Association. That’s not dreaming big. It’s settling for too little.

I pursued a career with teaching at the center of it, knowingly sacrificing my earlier dreams of being rich, yet fully expecting secure housing as a professor. The year I received tenure, 2019, I spent months living in a shelter. Did my housing instability impact my work life? How could it not? Housing and transportation security matter for our well-being.

Data shows I’m not alone. Too many K-12 teachers and university faculty struggle with housing instability, a direct consequence of the wage penalty on the teaching profession. Teaching has long been underpaid and devalued because it’s seen as women’s work. Like caregiving and nursing, teaching is a pink-collar profession — treated as an extension of women’s unpaid domestic labor, and compensated accordingly. We devalue women and their work; thus, we pay teachers too little.

When we short-change teachers, we don’t just leave them with fewer resources to navigate the housing market, or push and burn them out, we also deplete them, undermining the very resource on which students rely. Data that I and another researcher collected over more than two decades show that where teachers are paid less, youth mental health suffers more.

Youth mental health is in freefall. Nearly 40 percent of LGBTQ+ youth have contemplated suicide. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 30 percent, or nearly 1 in 3, teen girls seriously considered suicide in 2021. That same year, the surgeon general declared youth mental health a national crisis. Boys die from suicide at four times the rate of girls. In 2023, 9.5% of high school students had attempted suicide.

Educators are often the first line of support for struggling youth. Yet, schools remain under-resourced and too many teachers are expected to manage the socio-emotional health of their classrooms without adequate support or training. These threadbare circumstances are taking a toll. The 2024 Merrimack College Teacher Survey found that 48 percent of public school teachers reported their mental health interfered with their ability to teach.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Research that I co-authored with Javier Corredor of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia backs this up: Our longitudinal study, using 25 years of data, from 1991-2016, shows that investments in public education, specifically teacher salaries, correlate with lower teen suicide risk at the state level. Even when accounting for a range of economic, religious, and socio-cultural variables, we found that higher pay tracked with lower teen suicide risk.

This evidence confirms what we all know: money matters. School resources, including teacher pay, are part of the public-health infrastructure. Investing in educators is not just about fairness, it’s about survival.

Nationally, the average teacher salary is $72,030. What would it take to raise this value to $272,030? Not a miracle, just political will.

To be sure, reorganizing our economy to invest justly in teachers is not easy. It takes public commitment amidst competing societal needs. It takes imagination to envision an alternate and better world, one where we invest in our youth and fund our teachers. And, with our national dialogue increasingly leaning away from public education, these goals can seem nonsensical. However, we should all fear a system that fails to care for and educate its youth. Efficiency is all the rage these days, but it is wildly inefficient to underpay the people who facilitate the growth of our collective future.

If we want a healthy, renewable society, the classroom space is a great place to start — with well-supported educators and thriving students. Let’s stop saying we appreciate teachers and start proving it, in policy, in practice and in pay.