Back in the day, teachers earned more than other comparable workers, but now shrinking education budgets and subsequent cuts in teacher pay place them behind their peers. According to a new study by the Economic Policy Institute, teachers now earn 11.1 percent less than other professionals in comparable fields.

Teacher pay has been on the decline for decades, and teacher compensation has gotten so bad that current teacher pay is almost 2 percent less than it was in 1999, according to the Department of Education. It’s no wonder we’ve seen a rise in teacher strikes across the country. According to the EPI study:

The mid-1990s marks the start of a period of sharply eroding teacher pay and an escalating teacher pay penalty Average weekly wages of public school teachers (adjusted for inflation) decreased $27 from 1996 to 2017, from $1,164 to $1,137 (in 2017 dollars). In contrast, weekly wages of other college graduates rose from $1,339 to $1,476 over this period.

The issue of compensation for teachers isn’t just about individual workers; it’s about the quality of education that our children deserve to have. “Providing teachers with a decent middle-class living commensurate with other professionals with similar education is not simply a matter of fairness,” the authors of the EPI study wrote. “Effective teachers are the most important school-based determinant of student educational performance.”