Macomb County teacher Todd Bloch says his take-home pay has changed very little in the past decade, and certainly hasn’t kept pace with inflation.

Some years, his district froze salaries to balance its budget, said Bloch, a seventh-grade science teacher at Warren Woods Middle School. But even when Warren Woods has given raises, it’s been offset by rising contributions for health care and retirement, he said.

Those hit hardest by stagnant teacher pay are his younger colleagues, Bloch said.

“I’m an 18-year veteran and my pay went up quickly” before the 2008 recession hit, he said. “I do feel badly for younger teachers whose pay hasn’t gone up, and they’re paying off big student loans. They’re getting crushed.”

The average teacher salary for a Michigan public-school teacher was $61,908 for 2017-18, according to data recently released by the Michigan Department of Education. The average peaked at $63,024 in 2009-10, and has stagnated around the $62,000 level in recent years.

Average salary of Michigan public school teachers, 2011-12 to 2017-18. (Source: Michigan Department of Education)

Michigan teachers are still above the national average of $60,483. But the national average is up 11 percent since 2009-10, compared to the 2 percent drop in Michigan. When factoring inflation, Michigan teacher salaries dropped by 16 percent between fall 2009 and fall 2017.

“The average is literally less" than it was a decade ago, said David Crim, a spokesman for the Michigan Education Association. “We’d take stagnation over regression."

Among those somewhat sympathetic to the teacher salary issue: Ben DeGrow, director of education policy for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a free-market think-tank rarely on the side of the MEA.

DeGrow says Michigan teachers earn good money compared to teachers nationwide, especially considering Michigan’s cost of living is below the national average. “In that regard, teachers in Michigan do better than almost every other state,” he said.

But, DeGrow said, “I understand why teachers feel at a comparative disadvantage. Teachers aren’t seeing an increase in their take-home pay," largely because of the increase in benefit costs.

“Students everywhere need good teachers,” DeGrow said. “I think spending more money on effective teachers is something we can all get behind."

Average 2017-18 teacher salaries by school district

The database here shows the 2011-12 and 2017-18 average salary for each Michigan public school district and, when available, for charter schools. The database also lists the number of full-time-equivalent teachers, which factors in part-time instructors.

You can type in the name of a district or charter school or call up an entire county.

The state calculates the averages by dividing the district’s total expenditure on teacher pay by the number of full-time-equivalent teachers as reported to the state. These figures do not include benefits, but it does include pay beyond base salaries, such as stipends for coaches.

The averages reflect not the district’s salary schedule as well as staff composition. A district with a less-experienced staff will have a lower average than a staff with a higher proportion of more experienced teachers.

Two other caveats: Averages can be skewed when a district payroll includes teachers not included in the FTE count -- for instance, if the district is handling paychecks for teachers employed by an intermediate school district. In addition, averages in very small districts can be affected when administrators are also teachers.

The average teacher salary is not available for many charter schools because staff fall into the category of contract employees.

Below is a map that shows average salary by county. You can click on a county to see the underylying data.

Why pay has stagnated

Several factors have depressed teacher wages in recent years:

Raises have been minimal in recent years, and wage rollbacks have occurred in some districts.

Baby Boomers at the top of the salary scale are retiring and being replaced by younger, less expensive teachers. In 2011-12, teachers with at least 30 years in their district comprised 6.3% of all Michigan public school teachers. By 2016-17, that dropped to 2%. Meanwhile, the proportion of teachers in the first year at their director increased from 5.7% to 10% of the teaching pool.

Finally, the increase in charter schools appears to have driven down salaries. The Legislature lifted the cap on the number of charter schools in 2011, and charters enrolled about 10% of the public school population in 2017-18. Charters tend to pay less than traditional public schools.

Take-home pay has been impacted by increases in the employee contributions for health care and retirement. In 2011, Michigan passed a law requiring school employees to pay at least 20 percent of their health-care premiums. A 2017 law closed the state’s defined-benefit pension plan to new employees, who were put into a 401(k) plan.

Where DeGrow and Crim vehemently disagree is the underlying cause of the stagnant wages.

Crim blames state funding. “It underlines the state’s dramatic disinvestment in education over the past seven, eight years,” he said.

Crim pointed to a $2 billion tax cut for businesses in 2011, under then-Gov. Rick Snyder. To offset the loss of business tax revenue, Snyder and the GOP Legislature diverted part of the revenues from the state’s School Aid Fund to cover the state’s contributions to its 15 public universities.

“That was the beginning of the downward spiral,” Crim said.

Not true, DeGrow says. “The funding is up, so it’s a question of how that money is used.”

Michigan public school districts collectively spent $14.5 billion on operations in 2017-18 compared to $14 billion in 2011-12, a 3.6% increase. In 2017-18, districts spent an average of 86.4% of operating budgets on salaries and benefits compared to 86.7% in 2011-12.

But broken down by salaries vs. benefits, the picture changes.

Money going to salaries is down: $6.9 billion in 2017-18 compared to $7.4 billion in 2011-12. Also down is districts’ collective expenditures on health care: $1.2 billion in 2017-18 compared to $1.5 billion in 2011-12.

That’s more than offset by the spike in retirement costs. Districts’ share of Social Security contributions and contributions to the Michigan Public School Employees Retirement System totaled $3.3 billion in 2017-18 compare to $2.3 million in 2011-12. Yet much of the increase in retirement costs is supporting retired teachers vs. spending that helps who are still working.

Michigan public school districts spent on an average of 86.7% of their operating budget on salaries and benefits in 2011-12 compareed to 96.4% in 2017-18. (Source: mischooldata.org)

Pay equity

Ken Ferguson, a teacher for 20 years, sees the issue from the vantage point of three different districts: He’s a teacher for Grosse Pointe Public Schools; his wife teaches in Detroit Public Schools, and Ferguson is a member of the West Bloomfield school board.

Ferguson has seen his pay go up in recent years, mainly because he left Detroit Public Schools for the Grosse Pointe job four years ago. But his wife’s pay “nosedived” during the recession and “is just creeping up now.”

“There was a four-year period between 2008 and 2012 where we probably lost 20% of our take-home income,” he said.

Ferguson and Bloch say the two biggest issues with teacher pay are the impact on younger teachers and the pay inequity between different districts.

On the first issue, Bloch and Ferguson say the pay freezes in recent years have disproportionately impacted young teachers. That’s because new teachers traditionally started out low, but have received an annual “step” increase in addition to a cost-of-living raise. In the past decade, many districts have balanced their budgets by freezing or slowing step increases, which means it can take much longer to move up the salary schedule.

“We have teachers who are four, five years in and earning $35,000. That’s forcing them out of the classroom," Crim said.

“One in five teachers are leaving the classroom,” Crim added. “That the highest ever. We’ve never seen that kind of turnover."

He also pointed to the decline in college students studying to be teachers.

In fall 2018, Michigan State University had 705 freshmen studying to be teachers in its College of Education, a 38 percent drop from 2011. Another data point: The number of new teachers hired by schools outpaced the number of certifications issued by teacher preparation programs in 2016, according to MDE. It was just the second time that’s occurred since 2010.

On the second issue, Ferguson pointed to his own household. “My wife earns about $20,000 less than me for what is essentially the same job,” he said That’s because teachers in Grosse Pointe earn significantly more than teachers in Detroit.

“There’s a big pay gap between struggling districts and healthier districts,” Ferguson said.

That fuels turnover, especially in metro Detroit, where there are more than 200 public school districts and charter schools in Wayne, Oakland Macomb counties, and the average annual salary ranges from more than $80,000 at Walled Lake to less than $40,000 as some charter schools.

And that often means the high-poverty communities most in need of the best teachers are the least able to recruit and retain them, Bloch and Ferguson said.

“The turnover really hurts kids,” Bloch said. “Poor districts just can’t keep good teachers.”

Bloch said he understands that teaching will never be a high-wage profession. With that in mind, he said, "when districts can give steps and raises, it’s a fair system. But when you have pay freezes, it creates all sorts of problems.

“$80,000 is a fair wage for a teacher,” he said. “$40,000 is not."