Top 10 US Public School Districts by Average Teacher Salary

Research question

Among the 13,138 US public-school districts, which districts report the highest average teacher salaries (filtering to districts with enrollment of 1,000+ students to suppress single-school administrative entities and small special-purpose districts whose ratios reflect headcount mechanics rather than salary policy)?

Methodology

We queried the PlainTeacher districts table at server render time and pulled the columns name, state, avg_salary, enrollment. The query ranks records by avg_salary DESC and returns the top 10. Every numeric value rendered on this page derives from a live SELECT against the production districts table -- no figure is hardcoded, and the table refreshes whenever the underlying National Center for Education Statistics dataset is reingested.

Column lineage: each field maps to a typed column in the districts table. Identifier columns carry the entity slug or code used elsewhere in PlainTeacher; quantitative columns store values as exported by the National Center for Education Statistics (preserving the original measurement unit). Where the source publishes values in thousands of dollars, we render them via the standard PlainTeacher money formatter that converts to billions or millions depending on magnitude. Where the source publishes raw integer counts, we render with thousand-separators preserved.

The ranking returned by this page reflects the most recent ETL run captured in the portal database. Every page load executes the same SQL against the read-only SQLite snapshot. Cache headers on the response are managed by the portal middleware: edge cache lifetime is bounded so a rebuilt dataset propagates within hours rather than days. The methodology page documents the full ETL pipeline, source vintage, and column lineage for PlainTeacher.

Coverage and exclusions: rows are filtered by the WHERE clause on the primary query to remove null or zero values on the ranking column. National Center for Education Statistics occasionally suppresses values for reasons of confidentiality, sample size, or quality control; suppressed rows are excluded from this ranking by design rather than displayed as zeros. If the underlying source revises a value in a subsequent vintage, the revised value will appear on the next ETL run without changes to this page's source code.

See the methodology page for the complete ETL pipeline, source vintage, and column lineage.