The Cost of Teaching
The Cost of Teaching
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In Ojai, where I'm from, it's pretty common conversation to remark on the rapidly increasing cost of living. While California as a whole is known for this issue, Ojai in particular is notably bad; on an anecdotal level, my home price has multiplied by almost 8x since my parents purchased in the 90s. Having two parents that teach, I've also long been interested in how California compensates its teachers, and for this project I brought these two topics together. Where is the hardest for teachers to live?
Data on both of these topics is readily available; the California Department of Education requests information on teacher salaries every year using form J90, publishing the data here. I used Zillow for an up-to-date measure of housing costs, as they publish research-quality data here. To tie everything together, I used a handy shapefile of all California school districts, published by California State Geospatial here. Importantly, these datasets all include matching attribute data that we can use to join their tables together.
Form J90 data has resolution down to the individual school districts, including which county they're in, while Zillow only matches data at the county and city level. After joining the relevant attributes together, I used QGIS's field calculator to divide them and normalize as a fraction, giving us the map to the left.
Some relationships are instantly visible: increased cost of living all across the coast; the Bay Area's impressively magnified values driven mostly by housing; and high values in the deserts, driven by low teacher starting salaries. The worst school district for teachers is Saddleback Valley Unified in Orange County, where teacher salaries start at $30,000 while houses start at almost $1.1 million.
Although this data is informative, it only takes into account housing costs on a county level. I was interested not only in state-level comparisons, but also how my hometown school district compares with others in the county. In order to make this comparison, I downloaded Zillow data at the city level, then manually created a "City" attribute for each school district in Ventura County in order to create a spatial join, subsequently using the field calculator to create the same normalized measure above at the county level. The result is seen to the right; it shows that Ojai Unified School District is indeed the hardest place for teachers to live in the county. The graph of this data, seen below, shows just how pronounced this discrepancy really is. As you move along the trend line, houses get cheaper and salaries get higher; Ojai Unified is at the furthest left point of the line.
These two graphs demonstrate how this situation occurred. While the state of California distributes cost-of-living-allowance, or "COLA," raises to school districts, these funds often aren't commensurate with inflation alone, or otherwise aren't passed on to teachers as raises. This has allowed the actual inflation-adjusted entry-level pay for a teacher in Ojai Unified to not just stagnate, but actually decrease by almost 20% in 20 years, even as the average price of a home has increased by almost a factor of four. This situation, repeated in various towns and cities across California, is unsustainable. If we want to be able to send our children to the best public school system in the country, we must pay enough to attract the best teachers; as it stands, they are being starved out.
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