Teacher pay study touts Arkansas improvements

A study conducted by The New Teacher Project says Arkansas has the highest teacher pay in the country, when you figure in cost-of-living factors, but the report is hesitant to draw further conclusions about the improvement of teacher recruiting and retention until more data is available on recent initiatives.

Released last week, the TNTP report titled “Moving Up: Promising Strategies to Address Teacher Shortages in Arkansas” is a follow up to a 2021 report titled “Missing Out,” which outlined some ways the state could fix its looming teacher shortage. Some of those recommendations were included in Gov. Sarah Sanders’ LEARNS Act.

The signature education bill raised minimum teacher salaries in Arkansas to $50,000 and provided one-time $2,000 raises to teachers earning more than $50,000.

“By increasing Arkansas’ minimum teacher salary from $36,000 to $50,000 annually, the state’s minimum teacher salary ranking catapulted from the bottom 10% to the top 15% of states in the nation, according to the National Education Association’s teacher salary benchmarks,” the TNTP report noted. “What’s more, Arkansas has the second lowest total cost of living, lower than every state with a higher minimum teacher salary. Adjusting for the cost of living, Arkansas has the highest minimum teacher salary in the nation.”

The report cautions that in other areas of teacher recruitment and retention – points ranging from licensure changes to financial incentives – there must be a wait-and-see approach to drawing further conclusions.

“In this paper, we highlight the promising statewide initiatives that Arkansas has undertaken in recent years to strengthen its teacher pipeline. While it will take time to see the full impact of these new initiatives, the state’s supportive licensure pathways and competitive financial value proposition for teachers position Arkansas as a state to learn from, and one that has gone from ‘Missing Out’ to ‘Moving Up’ in the recruitment and retention of effective teachers,” it said.

Other areas the TNTP report analyzes include:

• Financial incentives designed to recruit and retain teachers;
• Targeted loan forgiveness programs for educators;
• Scholarships for aspiring teachers;
• Reimbursements for licensing and exam fees; and
• Changes for paid parental leave.

“Given that it has only been a year since the passage of the LEARNS Act, it is too soon to draw any conclusions about the extent to which this legislation has sustainably strengthened Arkansas’ financial value proposition for teachers,” the report stated.

“In the 2025 legislative session, we anticipate that policy makers will need to address questions about the long-term availability of state funding to help school districts meet the minimum teacher salary,” it concluded.

You can read the full report here.