Teacher Salary Summarizer

David J. Bauer
7/17/19

How much do teachers make?

A recent article in the La Crosse Tribune informed readers of a public database maintained by the state that provides compensation information for local government employees including teachers in the La Crosse School District.

Note: La Crosse is a city in the state of Wisconsin in the United States.

I thought it would be useful to develop a Shiny tool to interactively summarize the salaries of teachers based on user selection of selected variables. The variables include Gender, Race/Ethnicity, Degree, Experience (Years), and Age (Years).

The tool could easily expand to include additional variables and/or school districts in Wisconsin.

Useful for whom?

Many parties consider teacher compensation an important issue; here are several:

Job seeking teachers like to know what salary to expect in a particular district.
Current teachers like to know how their compensation compares with peers.
District administrators need to know salaries for budgeting purposes.
Union officials need to know salaries to inform collective bargaining.
Taxpayers need to know like to know salaries since public sector compensation is a common political issue.

Example raw data.

The table below presents the first 5 rows of teacher data used by the Shiny tool.

library(tidyverse) # for dplyr code used in script
library(knitr) # for kable
source("teacherdata.R") # script to get and clean data
kable(head(teach,5))

Gender	Race/Ethnicity	Degree	Experience	Salary	Age
Female	White	Masters	37.5	73954	59
Female	White	Bachelors	13.0	49797	38
Male	White	Masters	10.0	64684	38
Female	White	Bachelors	13.0	46937	40
Male	White	Masters	5.0	52061	29

Important Links.

Use this link to access the Shiny tool:

https://gnosticneuron.shinyapps.io/lacrosseteachers/

Want to check out the database of public employee compensation for the state of Wisconsin? Here's the link:

https://publicstaffreports.dpi.wi.gov/PubStaffReport/Public/PublicReport/AllStaffReport