IES Blog

By Lauren Musu-Gillette and Tom Snyder

Teachers play the primary role in the delivery of elementary and secondary instruction. About half of all public school staff were teachers and an additional 12 percent of staff were instructional aides in 2012. NCES collects a wide range of information related to teaching and teachers. One topic of high interest to current and potential teachers, as well as school officials, is the average salary for teachers. In fact, some of the most frequently visited tables on the Digest of Education Statistics webpage are those tables that present data on teachers’ salaries.

Data on teacher compensation and salaries are available from the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), collected by NCES. Salary data from this survey can be presented by teachers’ characteristics, such as sex, race/ethnicity, and years of full-time teaching experience. For example, in 2011-12 the average base salary for full-time teachers was $53,070. In addition, about 42 percent of full time teachers received supplemental pay for activities such as coaching, student activity sponsorship, or teaching evening classes, with an average value of $2,530. Some teachers had additional earnings from bonuses and summer employment.  

Teachers with more years of experience or higher levels of education received higher salaries on average. For teachers with one year or less of full-time teaching experience, the base salary for full-time teachers in 2011-12 was $40,540 compared to $64,820 for teachers with 30 or more years of experience. Data are also presented on base salary by highest degree earned. Teachers with a master’s degree and 30 to 34 years of experience had an average salary of $69,420 compared to an average of $58,510 for those teachers with a bachelor’s degree and the same amount of experience.  Overall, teachers with a bachelor’s degree or a master’s degree earned less in 2011-12 than in 1990-91, after adjusting for inflation. Average salaries are also available by state for teachers with a bachelor’s degree as their highest degree, or a master’s degree as their highest degree.

More recent information using estimated salaries show salary trends over a longer time period for teachers at both the state and national level in current and constant dollars. For example, the estimated average teacher salary at the national level in constant 2012-13 dollars was $39,329 in 1959-60, $57,152 in 1989-90, and $56,383 in 2012-13. 

By Brittney Fraumeni, NCER Intern

Each year, the Institute of Education Sciences’ two research centers offer unpaid internships for undergraduate or graduate students interested in learning about the research grant making process and contributing to the work of the centers.  Internships are coordinated through the U.S. Department of Education’s student volunteer office and are available throughout the year.  For application information, please see the ED Student Volunteer Unpaid Internship Program.  

This summer Brittney Fraumeni, a doctoral student in Psychological Science at DePaul University interned with the National Center for Education Research (NCER). At the end of her internship, Brittney reflected on her summer with NCER. 

What brought you to the internship?

By Sarah Grady

NCES collects a lot of data from students, teachers, principals, school districts, and state education agencies, but a few of our data collections directly survey members of the American public using residence as a first point of contact. Why? Some information about education in the U.S. cannot be collected efficiently by starting with schools or other institutions. Instead, contacting people directly at home is the best way to understand certain education-related topics.

The 2012 National Household Education Survey (NHES) included two survey components:

• The Early Childhood Program Participation (ECPP) survey, mailed to parents of children ages birth to age 6 and not yet enrolled in kindergarten
• The Parent and Family Involvement in Education (PFI) survey, mailed to parents of students in kindergarten through grade 12

The ECPP survey provides information about children from the perspective of their parents and includes questions about:

• Factors that influence choices of childcare arrangements 
• Characteristics of childcare providers and cost of care 
• Participation in home activities such as reading, telling stories, and singing songs 

The items on this survey provide a wealth of information about how America’s children are learning and growing at home as well as the characteristics of the children who are in different types of care arrangements, including having multiple care arrangements. 

NCES’s administrative data collections like EDFacts tell us a great deal about the sizes and types of schools in the U.S., while surveys like The National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS) and the School Survey on Crime and Safety (SSOCS) tell us about school policies, school climate, and teacher attitudes and experiences. But NHES is the source for information about students’ and families’ experiences with schooling, irrespective of school affiliation. Parents with students attending all types of schools in the U.S.—public, private, charter schools, schools that were chosen rather than assigned by the school district, even parents who educate their children at home rather than send them to a school—respond to the survey and answer questions about topics such as:

• Involvement in education-related activities 
• Involvement in school activities 
• Satisfaction with the school 
• Parental expectations for children’s education   
• Homeschooling practices 

In 2016, NHES will field the Adult Training and Education Survey (ATES), which will provide data about adults’ educational and work credentials, including professional certifications and licenses. This survey meets an important need for more information about where and how adults acquire the skills they need for work. The ATES will start with a random sample of U.S. adults rather than a sample of postsecondary institutions, which enables NCES to collect information about a broader array of credentials than could be collected by reaching students through postsecondary institutions. In short, NHES data allow us to understand how the American public is experiencing education so that we can better respond to the changing education needs of our people—be they young children, K-12 students, or adults.

By Karen Douglas, NCER Program Officer

Improving students’ capacity to understand what they read in all subject areas is a primary focus of educators and policymakers. Educators and researchers have been focused on interventions to improve reading for decades, and a great deal of attention has been given to improving word level skills (such as phonemic awareness and decoding). In part, this focus can be traced to the ‘Simple View of Reading,’ a theoretical framework developed by Gough and Tunmer almost 30 years ago.

The Simple View states that readers need to both understand language and decode the symbols on the page in order to comprehend written text. The influential role of decoding on reading outcomes has been well studied, and many interventions have been developed that show good results in improving these skills for many students. But improvement in decoding skills, while necessary, has not generally been sufficient to improve reading comprehension.

In recent years, researchers have begun exploring the other part of the equation -- language. Most often, researchers use vocabulary knowledge as a proxy for language skills and a great deal of research is focused on improving vocabulary skills. Efforts to improve vocabulary generally show that students learn the new words they are taught, but generalized effects on vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension are elusive. It seems likely that in addition to understanding the meanings of individual words, students also need to know how words are constructed (morphology), how they are used in text (syntax and grammar), and how to make inferences from text in order to make sense of the wide variety of materials they must read.

The Reading for Understanding Research Initiative (RfU), funded in 2010 by IES, is addressing a broader conception of language in trying to improve reading comprehension. RfU provided funding for six research teams to study the basic processes that undergird reading comprehension, develop and test new curricula and instructional programs to improve it, and develop new assessments to provide a better measure of students’ capacity to read in authentic scenarios. Collectively, RfU researchers are studying the development of reading for understanding from prekindergarten through high school with the goal of creating new knowledge about what matters at each developmental stage in order for students to finish high school with sufficient reading skills for college and career. Each of these six teams has incorporated attention to aspects of language beyond vocabulary knowledge and several teams have published results that provide evidence of the potential of improved language skills for building reading comprehension. Abstracts for studies and publications to date can be found on the IES website.

In a recent article in Educational Psychology Review, my co-author Elizabeth Albro and I describe the purpose of the RfU Research Initiative, the goals of the six teams funded under the initiative, and progress made through 2014. As the work of the RfU Research Initiative comes to completion, the RfU researchers are positioned to make important contributions to what we know about the development of reading for understanding and how we can best improve it for all students. Expanded knowledge about the language skills that support reading for understanding and how to improve them will be a key component of this contribution. Stay tuned to Inside IES Research to learn more about what the teams are finding.

By Grace Kena

In February 2014, President Obama launched My Brother’s Keeper. This effort was designed to promote opportunity for and to unlock the full potential of the nation’s young people, including boys and young men of color, with help from government agencies, community leaders, private philanthropies, and businesses. As part of this initiative, federal agencies were asked to improve the accessibility of data that highlight both the challenges and the accomplishments of young people in progressing through the education system and entering the labor force. These statistics provide a composite view of recent trends for males and females across a variety of key dimensions.

Academic performance gaps in learning behaviors, knowledge, and skills, among children in various racial/ethnic groups are found as early as infancy,[1] preschool, and kindergarten[2]. In addition, children from lower-income families tend to have poorer educational outcomes than their peers from more well- off families, and relatively high percentages of males and females of color live in poverty. The latest data show that among 12th graders, the average reading and mathematics assessment scores for Black, Hispanic, and American Indian/Alaska Native 12th-graders were lower than the average scores for their peers. In addition, the percentage of Hispanic 18- to 24-year-olds who had not completed high school was higher than the average percentage. The percentages of Black, Hispanic, and American Indian/Alaska Native young men in this age group who were enrolled in college were also lower than the average, and the percentages of Black and Hispanic young men ages 25–29 who had earned a bachelor’s or higher degree were lower than the average for young men in this age group.

On the other hand, young people are making progress in education. For example, average mathematics scores increased between 2005 and 2013 for all male students as well as for Black and Hispanic students overall. The percentage of males ages 18–24 who had not completed high school decreased from 2000 to 2014 for most racial/ethnic groups, and the decreases for Black and Hispanic young men were among the largest. In addition, the percentages of Black and Hispanic young men in this age group who were enrolled in college increased from 2000 to 2013.

Percentage of male 18- to 24-year-olds enrolled in 2- and 4-year colleges, by race/ethnicity: 2000 and 2013

! Interpret data with caution. The coefficient of variation (CV) for this estimate is between 30 and 50 percent.

SOURCE: U.S. Department of Commerce, Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, 2013. 

More education data from the My Brother’s Keeper initiative can be found in the feature in The Condition of Education 2015, and on the My Brother’s Keeper data site. Information on changes to existing programs and the creation of new public-private partnerships designed to meet the needs of young people are available on the White House site. You can also learn more about the findings from the video below: