Teaching Salaries and Inequality: An Expected but not Seen Outcome

Abstract

This research project looks into a specific endogenous intervention in Texas in 1999, where the Texas legislature passed an across the board salary increase for all teachers of $3000. The goal of this research is to use the intervention to help explain certain education indicators, specifically ones dealing with education inequality. Previous research in this field has primarily looked into the opposite relationship, as there is strong evidence to support that low-income schools have often paid a compensating wage differential to teachers. In Texas, though, a statewide salary increase has offered a unique opportunity to study how teacher salaries affects things like education inequality. As such, the project’s findings support that increasing teacher salary has a positive effect on reducing education inequality.