Corey Turner

The average teacher's salary rose to nearly $75,000 in the last school year.

But after adjusting for inflation, NEA researchers estimate that teachers' real earnings actually declined by nearly 5 percent over the past decade.

The report includes lots of other data, too.

Public schools' student-to-teacher ratio held steady at around 15 to 1, and the federal role in helping fund public schools continued to decline, with federal dollars estimated to make up just 7 percent of schools' funding this year.

Corey Turner, NPR News.

Yeah, you bet.

So think of school choice as a spectrum, right?

So on one end, you've got public school choice, things like magnet programs and open enrollment policies that allow kids to apply to other public schools, either in their home districts or maybe in a neighboring district.

And then you move over a little bit and somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, you've got charter schools, which are technically public schools, but they're managed independently and they're often exempted from oversight.

And then finally, at the other end of the spectrum, you've got private school choice.

And the idea here is to use public dollars to help families pay for private, even religious schools using things like vouchers or education savings accounts known as ESAs.

And today, Aisha, I want to take you to Iowa because they have the full spectrum, including one of the most generous private school ESA programs in the whole country starting this school year.

The state's offering any child in Iowa $8,000 a year to spend in a private school.

Right?

So back in January, Republican Governor Kim Reynolds made clear she's done with the old public school system status quo.

For Reynolds and other Republicans pushing for more school choice, the point here isn't just to help families move from school A to school B. The idea really is to put pressure on the public schools to improve by creating competition.

Well, I want to start back in January.

We're at a school board meeting for the city's public schools.

It's known as the Cedar Rapids Community School District.

Serves about 14,000 kids.