Maine teachers have among the lowest pay, fewest students in the country, study finds

Roll over and click each state above to see which states WalletHub ranks best and worst for teachers — with No. 1 being the best.

WalletHub, the finance website which frequently cranks out data analyses ranking states against each other across a variety of criteria, this week released its determination of the best and worst states for teachers to work.

Like with all WalletHub studies — and there are a lot of them — this represents a broad comparison of largely statistical information, put through a formula the site’s researchers came up with to reach an overall conclusion about relative conditions.

Other researchers could pick different statistics to weigh, or come up with a different formula to use in deciding which states are good and which are bad. So while this is a decent conversation starter, it’s not beyond reproach or the final ultimate ranking.

Given those disclaimers, WalletHub found Maine among the bottom half of states in terms of work environments for teachers, at No. 39 nationally.

Massachusetts, Virginia and Minnesota were the top three, in order, while West Virginia, North Carolina and Arizona were the bottom three.

The biggest knock on Maine, at least in terms of these particular rankings, was the average pay for its teachers.

teachers pay

According to the National Education Association, which WalletHub used as a source, the average annual salary for teachers in Maine is just less than $45,000, with first-year teachers making an average salary of nearly $32,000.

TeacherPortal.com, which added some job survey numbers and private data analyses to its review of NEA figures, has placed the average annual salary for Maine teachers up at more than $48,000. That’s comparably a little better, but still 15th worst in the country, with teachers in 10 states making averages of $60,000 per year — including two where the typical salary is more than $70,000.

On the flip side, WalletHub found that the student-teacher ratio in Maine was far favorable to most other states.

student teacher ratio

Again, according to the NEA, there are 11.9 pupils in Maine for every teacher, a smaller group than all but a few other states (there are 9.4 students per teacher in Vermont, for comparison).

Now, to be clear, that number is skewed for Maine by a range of island and otherwise remote schools where just a few students attend — in full disclosure, my wife is a teacher, and I don’t recall her ever having a class of just 12 students. I imagine teachers in places like Portland and Lewiston, for instance, are used to regularly having classes of 20 or more pupils.

But statistics are statistics, and many other states can probably claim outliers as well.