In April 2022, Texas AFT and Every Texan released The Lost Decade, which demonstrated how far Texas teacher and support staff salaries had fallen from 2010 to 2020. At that time, our research showed that, when adjusted for inflation, salaries for Texas public school teachers had fallen by an average of 4% since the 2009-2010 school year. Salaries for public school support staff, meanwhile, remained close to poverty-level wages.

Two years after the release of the report, an updated analysis using the latest salary data available shows the situation has only worsened, pushing educators’ and school employees’ compensation further behind inflation and exacerbating a growing retention crisis in our public schools.

The numbers from the 2023-2024 school year are stark:

• When adjusted for inflation, the average Texas teacher salary has declined by over 9% since the 2009-2010 school year, a figure significantly worse than the 4% decline in real wages between 2009-2010 and 2020-2021. In many districts, the drop has been much more severe with teachers losing nearly 20% of their earning power over this “Lost Decade and a Half”, including in Corpus Christi ISD (-20.48%), Lubbock ISD (-19.56%), and North East ISD (-18.87%). This decline in real wages reaches as high as 30-40% in some districts. 
• Texas teachers now make approximately $9,000 less on average than their peers nationwide, a gap that has widened since the 2022 report. Even when adjusting for differences in cost of living between states, Texas ranks a dismal 30th out of the 50 states and Washington D.C. for teacher pay and in the bottom 10 nationwide for per-student funding. 
• Salaries for school support staff in Texas have seen modest gains, but many roles remain close to poverty-level wages. Specifically, paraprofessional staff (e.g., educational aides and interpreters) and auxiliary staff (e.g., custodians, food service workers, bus drivers) have seen modest gains in average base pay over the past 12 years. But the average base pay for these two categories ($24,966 and $32,697, respectively) is less than half that of professional staff ($66,720 – including teachers, counselors, and school administrators), and stagnant pay over the past few years together with inflation have eroded those gains. For example, the average paraprofessional base pay has actually decreased by almost 2% since the 2011-2012 school year when adjusted for inflation.

Low and stagnant pay is a primary factor driving teachers and school staff to consider leaving their jobs in education. In a Spring 2024 Texas AFT membership survey, 45% of respondents named salaries as their top workplace concern, up from 34% in Fall 2021. The same survey revealed that 69% of school employees had considered leaving their jobs in the past year, an increase from 66% in Fall 2021.

While pandemic stresses and political attacks on public education (such as classroom censorship, the DEI ban, and anti-CRT witch-hunts) have undoubtedly taken a toll on teachers and staff, the report makes clear that turnover was a growing problem long before COVID-19, as even the most dedicated educators struggle to make ends meet on salaries that increasingly lag behind rising costs of living. With inflation hitting new highs since 2021, the pain has only grown more acute.

The consequences of failing to invest in competitive compensation are evident in Texas’ spiraling teacher turnover rate. Teacher turnover has been steadily increasing over the past 14 years, reaching a historic high of 21.4% in the 2022-2023 school year — nearly double the 11.8% rate in 2009-2010 and significantly up from 17.7% in 2021-2022.

For the first time, in the 2023-2024 school year, the count of newly hired teachers with no Texas certification has surpassed the count of new hires following all other preparation routes. 34% of all new hires are non-certified, including 31% of new public school district teachers and 59% of new charter school teachers.

Lost Decade: District-Level Breakdowns

A full list of updated school district-level Lost Decade (and a Half) analyses breaking down the changes in average salaries over time by staff type, including an accounting of the impact of inflation, can be found below: