WA’s teachers are some of the best-paid in the nation. Where is the money going?
Teachers in the Evergreen State are among the best paid in the country.
Washington’s teacher salaries are the fourth-highest in the United States, according to the National Education Association. A News Tribune analysis also found that teacher salaries in Pierce County have increased by an average of about 82% over the last 10 years. The average salary for a teacher in Pierce County in the 2024-2025 school year is about $97,000.
Some Pierce County districts that have seen the biggest increases in average teacher salaries also find themselves in financial distress, according to a News Tribune analysis. Of the five school districts that saw the highest percent change in average teacher salary between 2014-2015 and 2024-2025, three have faced budget deficits in the millions, leaving them to implement extensive cuts to programs and positions.
Though personnel spending makes up the biggest chunk of school district budgets, experts say it’s hard to draw a causal relationship between districts’ budget problems and large pay raises for teachers. The trends point to a larger and more concerning conclusion, one that superintendents, experts and teachers union leaders seem to agree on: Washington’s education-funding system is broken, perhaps beyond repair.
What does the data show?
Between the 2014-2015 and 2024-2025 academic years, Tacoma Public Schools — the county’s largest district — saw the largest increase in average teacher salaries at 117.64%. The White River School District, which serves communities including Buckley and Wilkeson in East Pierce County, saw the smallest increase at 56.05%.
Teacher salaries at districts across the county increased steadily between 2014-2015 and 2017-2018. Starting with the 2018-2019 school year, salaries spiked significantly across the board. They continued to increase at a faster rate from then onwards, according to The News Tribune’s analysis.
The data paints a clear picture of the impact of the landmark lawsuit called McCleary et al. v. State of Washington, also known as just “McCleary.” In 2007, two families sued the state of Washington, alleging that it was not fulfilling its constitutional duty to “amply” fund education. After years of litigation, the state Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, opining that it was the state and not local levy dollars that should fund public education in Washington.
The case officially ended in June 2018. It changed the way the state distributed funding for education and in many instances made existing collective-bargaining agreements with unions obsolete, according to Rosalind Medina, chief financial officer for Tacoma Public Schools.
For many districts, the end of the McCleary lawsuit was the beginning of a new period of bargaining as local teachers unions sought raises and reworked contracts. Several local teachers unions went on strike amid the process.
Today, teacher salaries are informed by the new post-McCleary education-funding guidelines and union contracts, but also factors like the amount of education a teacher has and the number of extracurricular activities they are responsible for. Depending on the district, every few years district and teachers-union representatives sit down at the bargaining table to negotiate a new contract.
Decisions about how much money teachers should earn are largely the responsibility of district and union leaders. Ashley Murphy, chief financial officer for the Peninsula School District, wrote in an email that Peninsula’s school board “approves ratified collective bargaining agreements and total certificated salaries through the budget adoption process, but that is the limit of their involvement in setting teacher pay.”
School board members for the Peninsula, Franklin Pierce and Fife school districts referred The News Tribune to administrators for comments about teacher salaries.
What do districts and teachers have to say?
University Place School District superintendent Jeff Chamberlin and other superintendents The News Tribune spoke to agree that the salaries their teachers earn are well-deserved, especially given cost of living. They largely agreed that their districts spend roughly 85% of their operating budgets on salaries and compensation and weren’t surprised that average teacher salaries have increased an average of 82% across the county.
“We are a people business,” Chamberlin told The News Tribune.
“We live in the Puget Sound region, and it’s an expensive place to live,” he added. “We need to have salaries [so] that the people can do these jobs and afford to live here.”
Larry Delaney, president of the Washington Education Association, the state teachers union, said the group is happy to see the state’s teachers rank so high in compensation compared to other states. He said they’re still lagging behind those of people who work in professions that require the same amount of education.
“We want to be able to keep up,” Delaney told The News Tribune. “That’s what we advocate for at the state level.”
The union cited data from the Economic Policy Institute that identifies a “teacher pay penalty” — the wage gap between teacher salaries and salaries for their equally educated non-teaching peers. Washington’s teachers in 2024 had the 15th-highest pay penalty in the country, earning 28.1% less than those in other similarly-educated professions like nurses and accountants.
David Knight, an associate professor of education finance and policy at the University of Washington, said salaries for various professions have gone up in recent years, in part because the state’s economy has done well in the last decade. It would make sense for teachers to see raises as well, he said.
The state’s Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction shared a chart with The News Tribune showing that per capita income in the state increased about 90.1% from 2012 to 2025. Salaries for certificated instructional staff increased about 70.1%.
Angel Morton, president of the Tacoma Education Association, said there isn’t an amount or level of benefits that teachers could get that would be enough.
“Is there ever that in any profession? Because the cost of living continues to rise,” she told The News Tribune.
While each local teachers union might have different priorities, Delaney said when bargaining a new contract, unions might look for improvements to working conditions in addition to increases to salaries and benefits. Sometimes pay raises are the most cost-effective strategy to address working conditions when districts are facing financial difficulties, he said.
In a large school district like Tacoma, hiring enough teachers to reduce class sizes across the board would take a significant financial investment. The cheaper option, Delaney said, might be to make up for the increased workload that teachers face with larger class sizes by raising their salaries.
“If we can’t get to the root of the problem, then what we have to do is find a way to compensate educators for increased workload, increased stress that comes with larger classes,” he said.
“Larger class size is not academically beneficial to students or educators,” he later added.
Some say the state should set stronger parameters for salaries
The News Tribune spoke to state lawmakers who pointed out that despite Washington’s high ranking in the country for per-pupil spending and teacher salaries, students in other states far outpace Washington students on standardized test scores.
One study from Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab found that the state’s spending on education grew 110% from 2013 to 2024, reaching roughly $20,300 per student. Over that time, 8th grade scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in math fell by over 15 points. 4th grade NAEP scores in reading fell by close to 10 points.
Maxford Nelsen is director of research and government affairs for the Freedom Foundation, a think tank that seeks to make workers, including teachers, aware of their right to opt out of their local union. The organization stands in opposition to the WEA, which describes the think tank as an anti-union group on its website.
Teacher unions have a lot of clout in collective bargaining, Nelsen said in an interview.
“ … the way the law works and the way this plays out over time, it makes it very, very difficult for any district to hold the line on salary increases,” Nelsen said. “Certainly to pare anything back, or even to let people go or trim personnel costs.”
The solution, he said, is in adding “accountability mechanisms” for unions, elected officials and school leaders.
“Schools are always going to be broke,” he said. “We’re always going to be wondering why things aren’t improving, and it’s because the system … it’s just designed to continue marching in perpetuity in the direction of higher taxes and more funding and less accountability.”
Republican state Rep. Travis Couture (R-Allyn) told The News Tribune in January he believes some districts are offering pay raises they can’t afford.
“I’m not saying that we shouldn’t pay teachers what they’re worth, or that we shouldn’t pay them well,” he said. “However, if you don’t have a school to go to, then you don’t have a place for the teachers to go, to be able to pay for school.”
While he believes the Legislature should avoid cuts to schools until policymakers find a better solution, the state should provide “some kind of fiduciary protection” to keep districts from signing contracts that are out of their budget range, he said.
“Some reasonable minimums and maximums, you could call it, right, saying like, ‘Hey, if you don’t have … anything in budget reserves and your general fund is below a certain threshold then maybe we have to put some kind of rule in place to limit what you can sign yourself up for in the future,” he said.
That wouldn’t bar teachers from getting generous pay raises, he added, but “the schools need a little bit of help with setting some of these parameters … so that they don’t find themselves in binding conditions later.”
School districts in Washington enter binding conditions if they submit a budget to the state that contains a negative fund balance. Binding conditions are a set of financial benchmarks that state officials provide to districts to help them address their budget problems and is the first in a multi-step process of increasing state involvement in a school district’s finances. If a district can’t address its budget challenges through that process, the district could eventually dissolve, according to the state.
Delaney doesn’t buy that teacher salaries are the problem, especially, he said, when the state hasn’t maintained its “paramount duty” to fund education, as the McCleary lawsuit mandated, instead providing districts with insufficient funding.
“I get that there’s financial challenges at the state, I do, but to blame the union for bargaining living wages for educators and that’s the problem, that somehow we would be better if educators had substandard wages, that doesn’t pass the sniff test for me,” Delaney said.
Medina, Tacoma Public Schools’ CFO, said it’s “disingenuous” for legislators to say that teachers in Washington make too much money when they have the authority to set statewide parameters and limits on those salaries and choose not to.
“Those parameters are consistently ignored and that also then results in districts being unable to stop the salary train,” Medina told The News Tribune.
Rep. Sharon Tomiko Santos, a Seattle Democrat who is also the chair of the House Education committee, said she doesn’t think there is any one factor contributing to districts in Washington facing financial problems.
She said the state Legislature could pass legislation that could curb teacher salaries, but — “it would be a political fight, and I don’t think that that would be an easy political fight,” she told The News Tribune.
The underlying problem
Delaney said it’s easy for teachers and WEA to be the villains. He said the real culprit is rising costs that continue to plague both districts and their employees in the 2020s.
The News Tribune found that for many districts, spending on insurance and utilities increased at a much faster rate than teacher salaries — though spending on salaries is still by far the largest piece of the pie.
For example, the Puyallup School District spent about $1 million on insurance in the 2014-2015 school year (not including insurance for student transportation, which is recorded on budget forms in a separate category). In 2024-2025, the district spent about $5 million, an increase of almost 400%. The district spent 60% more on utilities over the same period, from about $5 million to $8 million.
Districts don’t spend nearly as much on utilities and insurance as they do on salaries. The Puyallup School District spent about $192 million on certificated salaries in the 2024-2025 school year, which includes salaries for teachers and other employers with certificated status in the district such as counselors and nurses. That’s about 45% of its $431 million total in general fund expenditures, compared to about 1.9% for utilities and 1.2% on insurance.
Chamberlin said the revenue that districts receive comes from three sources: state apportionment, local levy dollars and federal funding. Teacher salaries are covered by some combination of the three, with state apportionment doing much of the heavy lifting. A previous News Tribune analysis found that state apportionment for Pierce County districts has increased by 107% in the last 10 years.
Districts are left in a tough spot when collective bargaining agreements call for raises for teachers, but federal funding hasn’t increased, he said.
“That is really at the heart of many of the district’s financial issues, is that they’re struggling to provide those year-over-year increases to every employee because we have this fragmented funding system,” Chamberlin said.
In addition to rising costs, some have criticized regionalization, the state’s attempt to provide school districts in areas with a higher cost of living with more funding to account for those costs. A district like the Bethel School District in the 2024-2025 school year received a 6 percent adjustment for regionalization compared to the Tacoma School District’s 12%. Both districts look to hire teachers from the same regional hiring pool, leaving Bethel with less to attract qualified teachers.
Knight said it’s hard to say definitively whether teacher salaries should or shouldn’t be higher. There’s broad consensus in the research community that investing in teachers has economic benefits, and higher teacher salaries have been linked to less turnover — which improves students’ academic outcomes, he said.
“It’s probably also a question of values, what we want to invest in as a society,” he said.
Those values become abundantly clear when legislators make cuts to programs known to result in positive student outcomes, Knight said. The most recent legislative session came with a variety of cuts in that category, like the $27 million cut to the Transition to Kindergarten program, a free program that prepares kids to start kindergarten.
“We are literally targeting K-12 funding cuts to where the dollars have the most impact,” he said. “We’re just backwards when it comes to how we’re thinking about educational funding.”
The disconnect between what happens in Olympia and the reality in schools goes deeper than politics, he told The News Tribune in a follow-up email. There’s a lack of understanding about how school finance works.
“You can never remove politics from policy decisions,” he wrote. “But our problems in Washington state are deeper than just politics. Fundamentally I think the legislature fails to understand that money matters in schools — the research community has reached broad consensus on this issue — and the right types of investments have a real, measurable impact on children.”
Isabela Lund contributed reporting.
