PlainTeacher

PlainTeacher Guide

Guides & Analysis

Data-backed guides on teacher salaries, school finance, and NCES methodology.

Highest-Paying School Districts for Teachers

The top 50 school districts in America ranked by estimated average teacher salary. See which districts pay the most.

Teacher Salary by State: All 50 States Compared

A comprehensive comparison of average teacher salaries across all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

How to Read NCES Finance Data

A plain-English guide to the NCES CCD F-33 survey — what it measures, how it is collected, and how to interpret the numbers.

Understanding Per-Pupil Spending

What per-pupil expenditure means, why it varies so widely across districts, and how it relates to teacher compensation.

How to Use District Data When Negotiating Teacher Pay

Practical strategies for using NCES finance data in salary discussions.

How to Compare School Districts Using Finance Data

What per-pupil spending and salary estimates reveal about district quality.

Understanding the Teacher Shortage by the Numbers

NCES data on staffing variation, salary competitiveness, and where shortages concentrate.

How US Public Schools Are Funded

Understanding federal, state, and local revenue streams and their impact on districts.

Methodology

Our guides are based on publicly available data from authoritative government sources. All statistics, ratings, and figures cited in these guides are drawn directly from official datasets and publications, with sources clearly referenced throughout.

We aim to present complex government data in plain language that is accessible to general audiences. When methodologies differ between data sources or change over time, we note these variations inline. Our editorial process includes regular reviews to ensure accuracy and timeliness of the information presented.

Why PlainTeacher Publishes Guides

The data on this site is faithful to the public record, but public records are rarely self-explanatory. Codes, categorical fields, thresholds, and regulatory terminology can confuse even frequent researchers. Our guides translate those specifics into plain English so that a non-expert reader can interpret a record page correctly and so that a professional reader can quickly confirm our interpretation. Guides are written by our editorial team, drafted by our editorial team for structure, and reviewed before publication to ensure that the underlying regulation, methodology, or historical context is represented accurately.

What You Will Find Here

Every guide focuses on a single, researchable question -- usually something a visitor might type into a search engine. We cite the original source wherever we state a specific regulatory threshold, dollar figure, date, or fact-about-the-world. We do not invent numbers, do not quote unreliable secondary sources, and do not paraphrase source material so aggressively that its meaning shifts. If you notice a factual drift or a sentence where our summary disagrees with the linked source, email the correction and we will update the guide.

Guides Are Not Professional Advice

Reading a guide is a good first step -- it orients you to the vocabulary, the process, and the known edge cases. It is not a substitute for talking to a licensed professional. Guides here do not establish a professional relationship, do not constitute advice tailored to your circumstances, and do not account for recent changes that may not yet be reflected in the upstream dataset. Use them to understand what you are looking at and to form better questions to bring to a qualified advisor.

How We Decide What to Write

We pick guide topics by looking at real visitor questions -- search queries that land on the site without a good destination, emails from readers asking for explainers, and patterns in the data that deserve a sustained write-up. We favor topics where a short, honest, well-cited guide genuinely helps over topics that merely drive traffic. When we get a topic wrong, we correct it and note the update; when we get feedback that a guide missed an angle, we add a section rather than rewriting from scratch.