Cal. Education Code § 42238.015

(a) The Legislature finds and declares all of the following: (1) According to 2023 findings from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), inflation-adjusted average weekly wages of teachers have been relatively flat since 1996, finding that the average weekly wages of public school teachers (adjusted only for inflation) increased just twenty-nine dollars ($29) from 1996 to 2021, from one thousand three hundred nineteen dollars ($1,319) to one thousand three hundred forty-eight dollars ($1,348) (in 2021 dollars), where, in contrast, inflation-adjusted weekly wages of other college graduates rose from one thousand five hundred sixty-four dollars ($1,564) to two thousand nine dollars ($2,009) over the same period — a four hundred forty-five-dollar ($445) increase. (2) The EPI also found that the teacher wage penalty, when comparing wages of teachers to other professions with similar educational and certification requirements, grew to a record high in 2021 at 23.5 percent nationally and 17.6 percent in California, up from 6.1 percent in 1996. (3) Even when taking other benefits into account, the teacher total compensation penalty grew by 11.5 percentage points from 1993 to 2021. (4) When Proposition 98 was approved by voters in 1988, it set as a target for school spending per pupil to “equal or exceed the average annual expenditure per student of the 10 states with the highest annual expenditures per student for elementary and high schools.” This target is embedded in Section 8.5 of Article XVI of the California Constitution. (b) Therefore, it is the intent of the Legislature to establish a public education transparency and accountability lens to better inform the Members of the Legislature as to the impacts of the state budget on the pay and benefits of the education workforce by reporting salary and benefits data of certificated and classified employees and the impacts on the professional respect and competitiveness of pay and benefits for classified and certificated employees.