The relationship between per-pupil school spending and the teacher workforce is not linear or simple, but it is documented. Districts with constrained budgets face compounding disadvantages in recruiting and retaining qualified teachers: lower salaries make them less competitive in labor markets where college graduates have many options, and the working conditions that underfunding produces — larger classes, inadequate support staff, deteriorating buildings — independently drive experienced teachers toward better-resourced schools. The result is a systematically less experienced teacher workforce in schools that research consistently identifies as most dependent on teaching quality.
Salary Levels and Per-Pupil Spending
Teacher salaries represent the largest single expenditure in any school district budget, typically accounting for the majority of instructional costs. How much a district can pay teachers is a function of its revenue — local property tax capacity, state formula allocations, and categorical grants. Districts with higher per-pupil spending can, in principle, offer higher salaries; districts with lower spending are constrained.
In practice, however, the relationship between rising overall per-pupil spending and teacher salary growth has become increasingly decoupled. Education Next reports that in inflation-adjusted terms, average teacher salaries nationally fell from approximately $75,152 to $70,548 between 2002 and 2022 — a 6 percent decline — even as per-pupil spending rose by 36 percent over the same period. The divergence reflects rising benefit costs, particularly pension obligations, which have consumed a growing share of compensation budgets without generating equivalent take-home pay.
The NEA’s Rankings and Estimates report for 2023-24 documents wide state-level variation in teacher salaries: California ($101,084), New York ($95,615), and Massachusetts ($92,076) at the high end; Mississippi ($53,704), Florida ($54,875), and Missouri ($55,132) at the low end. These state-level averages mask district-level variation within states, where high-property-wealth districts can supplement state salaries substantially through local revenue.
The 74 Million’s analysis of district-level data found that over a two-decade period, while school spending rose 31 percent per student in real terms, the average salary paid to district employees fell by 2.5 percent. Had salaries merely kept pace with total education spending growth, the average employee would have received approximately a $22,000 raise. The gap reflects how districts have allocated new resources — toward pension obligations, non-instructional staff, and compliance costs rather than base teacher compensation.
The implication for lower-funded districts is that salary competitiveness is doubly constrained: they have less total revenue, and a larger share of that revenue is absorbed by fixed benefit obligations, leaving less available for competitive salaries.
Teacher Vacancy Rates: High-Poverty vs. Low-Poverty Districts
The difference in vacancy rates between high-poverty and low-poverty school districts is among the most consistently documented findings in school staffing research. NCES data from October 2024 found that nationally, 3 percent of all public school teaching positions were vacant, with 35 percent of schools reporting at least one teaching vacancy. But the distribution is uneven: schools with student bodies comprising more than 76 percent students of color reported multiple vacancies at a rate of 26 percent, compared to 14 percent for schools with fewer than 25 percent students of color.
Earlier NCES data from the 2022-23 school year showed that only 43 percent of high-poverty schools were fully staffed, compared to 59 percent of low-poverty schools. About 40 percent of public schools with over 75 percent minority populations reported multiple teaching vacancies, compared to 19 percent of schools with less than 25 percent minority populations. These gaps persisted even following the COVID-era federal relief spending that directed additional resources toward higher-poverty districts.
The consistency of this pattern across multiple years and data sources indicates a structural disparity rather than a temporary post-pandemic disruption. High-poverty districts face chronic difficulty filling positions, particularly in the subjects most directly tied to student college and career readiness.
The Rural Staffing Crisis
Rural districts face a distinct variant of the teacher shortage that overlaps with but is not identical to the urban high-poverty shortage. According to the Learning Policy Institute’s 2024-25 teacher shortage factsheet, rural districts are particularly impacted due to smaller tax bases that prevent offering competitive salaries, greater distance from educator preparation programs, and chronic difficulty filling vacancies that results in higher reliance on out-of-field teachers.
The Federation of American Scientists’ analysis documents that a 2020 study of California school districts found rural districts posted an additional 12 teacher vacancies for every 100 teachers compared to their urban counterparts, and also struggled more to fill vacancies with qualified staff, hiring twice as many emergency-certified educators.
The Education Commission of the States reports that 57 percent of rural districts noted challenges in hiring world language teachers compared to 36 percent of urban counterparts, and that rural teacher shortages disproportionately impact students from low-income households, students of color, and students with disabilities.
States most frequently identified as shortage areas in 2024-25 were special education (45 states), science (41 states), and math (40 states). These three areas — which have had documented shortages since at least 1990, when the Department of Education began collecting this data — represent precisely the subjects where rural and high-poverty districts struggle most.
The rural salary gap is a specific mechanism driving this shortage. Rural districts often cannot match the starting salaries offered by suburban or urban districts with higher property tax bases, creating a persistent competitive disadvantage for the teachers who are most in demand.
What Research Shows About Teacher Experience and Outcomes
The importance of staffing stability and teacher experience for student outcomes is well established in research. The Learning Policy Institute’s review of 30 studies published within the 15 years prior to 2016 found consistent results: teaching experience is positively associated with student achievement gains throughout a teacher’s career, not just in the early years. The review found that gains in effectiveness are steepest in initial years but continue to be significant as teachers reach the second and often third decades of their careers.
Beyond test scores, the research found that students of more experienced teachers are more likely to do better on other measures, including attendance. Teachers’ effectiveness increases at a greater rate when they teach in supportive and collegial environments and accumulate experience in the same grade level, subject, or district — factors directly undermined by high-turnover schools where institutional stability is difficult to maintain.
RAND’s research on teacher impact establishes the broader context: among school-related factors, teachers matter most to student achievement, with a teacher estimated to have two to three times the impact of any other school factor including services, facilities, and leadership. This finding makes the systematic disadvantage in experienced teachers at high-poverty schools particularly consequential — it means that the students most dependent on high-quality teaching are the least likely to consistently have it.
The Cost of Teacher Turnover
Teacher turnover in underfunded schools is not just an educational problem — it is a financial one, and the financial cost compounds the educational harm. The National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (NCTAF) pilot study, which examined five school districts including Chicago, Milwaukee, and smaller rural districts, found substantial variation in per-teacher replacement costs:
- In Granville County, North Carolina (a small district): approximately $10,000 per teacher who left
- In Jemez Valley, New Mexico (a small rural district): $4,366 per leaver
- In Milwaukee: $15,325 per teacher leaver
- In Chicago: $17,872 per leaver, with total annual turnover costs estimated at over $86 million
The same study found that teacher turnover rates were almost a third higher in low-income urban school districts, and that the highest turnover rates occurred in schools where 75 percent or more of the student body was eligible for free and reduced-price meals.
A separate analysis cited in the ISM teacher turnover literature estimates replacement costs at $20,000 or more per teacher who leaves an urban school district. At those rates, a school losing ten teachers a year — not unusual in a high-poverty urban or rural school — faces $200,000 or more in annual turnover costs before accounting for the instructional disruption of constantly rebuilding a faculty.
High-poverty schools spending scarce resources on teacher turnover are in a self-reinforcing cycle: inadequate funding creates working conditions that drive experienced teachers away, turnover consumes resources that could have been invested in retention and improvement, and the loss of experienced staff further diminishes the instructional quality that might have improved outcomes and attracted stable teachers.
Salary Schedules and Funding Interactions
Most public school districts use step-and-lane salary schedules that compensate teachers based on years of experience and academic credentials. These schedules create a structural interaction with funding levels: districts that can afford to hire and retain teachers over many years have workforces that progress up the salary schedule, producing higher average salaries — which in turn require higher funding levels to sustain.
When a district loses experienced teachers and replaces them with entry-level hires, it temporarily reduces salary costs, creating a perverse financial incentive for high-turnover districts to remain high-turnover. The teachers who stay longest and cost the most in salary terms are often those who leave for better-funded schools — taking their experience and the investment the district made in their development with them.
Districts facing enrollment decline face an additional complication: when student population falls, per-pupil revenue may hold steady or increase while total revenue falls, making it difficult to maintain the staffing levels that keep salary costs manageable per pupil. Charter school expansion and declining enrollment interact with this dynamic in states where per-pupil allocations follow students out of the district while fixed costs remain.
The Pattern in Practice
The convergence of these factors — lower salaries, higher vacancy rates, greater difficulty filling specialized positions, higher turnover costs, and less experienced workforces — produces a systematically different labor market for teachers in high-poverty and underfunded districts. This is not a consequence of those schools being less desirable workplaces in some abstract sense; it is a documented outcome of specific funding structures that create concrete competitive disadvantages in compensation, working conditions, and career development.
The research connecting teacher quality to student outcomes, and funding levels to teacher quality, does not establish a simple dollar-per-outcome relationship. But it does establish that the systematic concentration of less-experienced and less-stable teaching in the schools that research identifies as most dependent on high-quality instruction is a structural feature of how American school funding currently operates.
This article was researched and drafted with AI assistance under human review. See our full AI and editorial practices.