Elementary school teachers
Official title Elementary School Teachers, Except Special Education (SOC 25-2021)
Also called Elementary teacher, Grade school teacher, Primary school teacher, K-5 teacher, 1st grade teacher
In brief
In May 2025, BLS counted 1,388,390 US elementary school teachers, with median pay of $63,970 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2003, the highest was 1,544,300, in May 2009. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 160,000 from 1870, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for elementary school teachers: Chromebook + Google Classroom, 2012 to 2020.
What the sources say
Official outlook
BLS projects little or no change in employment from 2025 to 2035 (-0.4%).
AI exposure studies
- 31.1% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023
- 0.0044 estimated probability that the whole occupation could be computerised, over an unspecified number of years. Not a forecast of job losses. Frey and Osborne, 2013
Since the 2013 prediction
In 2013, Frey and Osborne put this job's probability of computerisation at 0.0044. BLS counted 1,344,240 of these jobs in May 2013 and 1,388,390 in May 2025 (+3%, a change derived by Future History).
Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend. In May 2021 BLS changed how it estimates these counts (a model-based method using three years of survey data) and moved fully to the 2018 occupation codes, so part of a change across 2021 can come from the method rather than the work.
Last updated .
Cite this page
Future History. (2026, October 11). Elementary school teachers: jobs and pay since 1870 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-2021
Future History. "Elementary school teachers: jobs and pay since 1870." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-2021.
@misc{futurehistory_25_2021, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Elementary school teachers: jobs and pay since 1870}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-2021}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }
The access date is today's date on your device.
≈ $62,330 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)
Horace Mann becomes the first Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education: the pivotal moment in the professionalization of the American elementary teacher. Over twelve years and twelve Annual Reports, he establishes state-funded normal schools (beginning at Lexington, 1839), advocates age-graded classrooms, standardized curriculum, and sustained teacher training. His successful argument that women were naturally suited to teach young children, and would do it for lower wages, both opened a profession to women and embedded a wage penalty that persists, in attenuated form, to the present day.
43 educators gather in Philadelphia to found the National Teachers Association, later the National Education Association (1870). Zalmon Richards is elected first president. Membership does not open to women until 1866. By 1957, NEA membership exceeds 700,000; by 2018, 2.7 million. The founding is the moment the elementary school teacher stops being a local hiring (at the pleasure of a school committee, replaceable at will) and starts becoming a member of a national profession with shared interests and a collective voice.
The American Federation of Teachers is founded in Chicago with eight locals, welcomed into the AFL by Samuel Gompers. While the NEA focused on professional status, the AFT from the beginning asserted the right of teachers to organize as workers. The AFT's push for collective bargaining, culminating in the United Federation of Teachers' landmark New York City contract in 1962, transformed the economics of elementary teaching in major urban districts, replacing the discretionary salary decisions of local school boards with negotiated single-salary schedules keyed to experience and education level.
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act is signed by President Johnson on April 9, 1965: the first major federal investment in K-12 public education. Title I directs $1.06 billion (of a total $1.3 billion authorization) toward schools serving high concentrations of low-income students. ESEA fundamentally changes the elementary teacher's professional context: federal accountability, federal curriculum standards, and federal funding now flow into every classroom. The ESEA has been reauthorized eight times since 1965, most recently as the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA, 2015): each reauthorization adding new requirements on elementary teachers.
"A Nation at Risk", the April 1983 report from the National Commission on Excellence in Education, launches four decades of accountability reform. Though its most specific recommendations concern secondary curricula, the report's alarm about teacher quality and compensation reshapes elementary education too: standardized testing of basic skills, merit pay debates, and the eventual No Child Left Behind Act (2001) all trace their political genealogy to this document. For elementary teachers, the accountability movement adds layers of mandated assessment, documentation, and data reporting to a job already crowded with instructional demand.
No Child Left Behind Act signed January 8, 2002, requiring that all public school teachers in "core academic subjects" achieve "highly qualified" status. For elementary teachers this meant new credentialing requirements: a bachelor's degree, state certification, and demonstrated content knowledge in subjects taught. NCLB also mandated annual standardized testing in reading and mathematics in grades 3-8, creating the test-prep pressure that critics argued narrowed elementary curriculum by squeezing out art, music, physical education, and social studies in schools under pressure to raise literacy and numeracy scores.
COVID-19 school closures begin in March 2020; within two weeks virtually every US elementary school has closed. The pandemic-era NAEP (2022) documents the sharpest decline in fourth-grade reading scores in thirty years: 3 points on the national average, with the lowest-performing students falling furthest. Public education loses an estimated 233,000 teachers between 2019 and 2021. Elementary teacher vacancy rates in high-poverty schools remain elevated through 2024. The "learning loss" at grades K-3 becomes a defining policy crisis of the 2020s, accelerating investment in AI-assisted reading-intervention tools (Amira Learning, Microsoft Reading Coach) as districts seek scalable ways to recover lost ground.
ChatGPT launches November 30, 2022. The effect at the elementary level is almost entirely on the teacher side of the desk: unlike secondary schools, where AI-generated student essays immediately threatened assessment integrity, elementary-age children are still learning to read and write, there is no plagiarism crisis for a second-grader's invented-spelling journal entry. The disruption falls instead on teachers' administrative time: by 2025, elementary teachers using MagicSchool AI, Brisk Teaching, or Diffit report saving multiple hours per week on lesson planning, differentiation, IEP-goal drafting, and parent communications. A Gallup–Walton survey (2025) finds that teachers using AI weekly save an average of 5.9 hours, six weeks of time over a school year, primarily from administrative preparation tasks.
Will AI replace elementary school teachers? What the research says
Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.
Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.
What's changing day to day for elementary school teachers
Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.
AI is sitting alongside you hereDraft and send parent/guardian communications (progress updates, concern notices, reading-level reports, and conference summaries) using MagicSchool AI's parent email generator to produce a professional first draft, then adding the specific behavioral and academic observations only the classroom teacher possesses before delivering via the school SIS or communication platform.
Draft and send parent/guardian communications (progress updates, concern notices, reading-level reports, and conference summaries) using MagicSchool AI's parent email generator to produce a professional first draft, then adding the specific behavioral and academic observations only the classroom teacher possesses before delivering via the school SIS or communication platform.[7],[12]
MagicSchool AI's parent email generator produces professional, tone-appropriate drafts, but elementary parents respond most to one specific, observed detail about their child ("Jaylen independently chose a chapter book at lunch on Tuesday; that's a real confidence shift"). That specificity is only available to you and transforms a form letter into a relationship-building touchpoint. Add the one concrete observation per email; invest the recovered draft-writing time in the in-class observation that makes that sentence possible.
AI is sitting alongside you hereDesign and deliver differentiated math and literacy lessons using AI tools, prompting MagicSchool AI to generate a standards-aligned lesson plan first draft, then using Diffit to produce reading passages at multiple Lexile levels for the same content, and personally adapting the output for the specific mix of learners in the room (ELL students, advanced readers, students with IEP accommodations).
Design and deliver differentiated math and literacy lessons using AI tools, prompting MagicSchool AI to generate a standards-aligned lesson plan first draft, then using Diffit to produce reading passages at multiple Lexile levels for the same content, and personally adapting the output for the specific mix of learners in the room (ELL students, advanced readers, students with IEP accommodations).[7],[13],[5]
MagicSchool AI users report saving several hours per week on lesson planning, rubric writing, and differentiation tasks: treat this as prep-time capital to invest in the in-room differentiation that AI cannot execute: the moment during a math lesson when you notice a student adding by counting all instead of counting on, and pivot on the spot. The AI plan is a starting scaffold; the in-room adaptive instruction is the professional value.
AI is sitting alongside you hereGenerate rubrics, formative assessment questions, and progress-monitoring tools using MagicSchool AI, producing standards-aligned rubrics for writing pieces, math problem sets, and science observations as first drafts, then calibrating scoring criteria against the district's grade-level expectations and exemplar student work before sharing with students and families.
Generate rubrics, formative assessment questions, and progress-monitoring tools using MagicSchool AI, producing standards-aligned rubrics for writing pieces, math problem sets, and science observations as first drafts, then calibrating scoring criteria against the district's grade-level expectations and exemplar student work before sharing with students and families.[7],[14]
MagicSchool AI generates standards-aligned rubrics from a prompt in seconds, eliminating the rubric-drafting sessions that eat into planning time. The professional value-add is calibration: a rubric for 2nd-grade opinion writing must distinguish "meets standard" from "approaching" at a level of specificity that only someone who has read hundreds of 2nd-grade essays can establish. Use the AI draft as the starting scaffold, then calibrate against your own stored exemplars and your district's benchmark papers.
Where elementary school teachers go next
Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.
- Education Administrators, Kindergarten through Secondary
- US median pay
- $105,870 (May 2025)
- BLS outlook 2025-35
- -0.3%
- Training and Development Specialists
- US median pay
- $69,280 (May 2025)
- BLS outlook 2025-35
- +10.8%
- Educational, Guidance, and Career Counselors and Advisors
- US median pay
- $64,330 (May 2025)
- BLS outlook 2025-35
- +2.9%
What each move takes
Education Administrators, Kindergarten through Secondary
Elementary teachers are a primary pipeline for K-12 instructional leadership: assistant principal, instructional coach, literacy coach, and curriculum director roles all draw heavily from classroom teaching ranks. The 2025-2026 AI policy pressure on schools (building acceptable-use policies for student AI tools, evaluating EdTech vendors like Amira and Lexia for ESSA evidence compliance, managing parent communication about AI in the classroom) has created urgent demand for school leaders with deep classroom experience and AI-tool literacy. Elementary teachers who have led reading initiative rollouts (Lexia, Amira) and built classroom AI protocols are now among the strongest candidates for literacy-coach and assistant-principal tracks.
How has the work of elementary school teachers changed since 1789?
The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.
Hornbook, spelling book, and Bible: oral instruction in the common school
In the early American common school, the teacher's only instruments were a few shared texts, often a hornbook (a printed sheet mounted on wood, protected by a thin layer of translucent horn) or Noah Webster's "blue-backed speller," and for reading, the Bible. Instruction was almost entirely oral: the teacher called a child to the front, the child recited from memory, the teacher corrected. There was rarely a blackboard; there were rarely enough books for every child. The teacher's craft was essentially the management of a single-room space containing children of every age, the maintenance of order, and the ability to hear individual recitations while keeping the rest of the room occupied.
McGuffey Readers + blackboard and chalk: the first standardized elementary curriculum
William Holmes McGuffey's Eclectic Readers, first published in 1836 and eventually selling more than 120 million copies, gave American elementary teachers, for the first time, a graded, standardized curriculum. The six-reader series moved children through progressively harder texts, instilling reading comprehension, moral instruction, and exposure to American literature in a sequence that a teacher could follow reliably. Simultaneously, the slate blackboard (adopted rapidly in American schools from the 1820s onward) gave the elementary teacher a shared visual surface for the first time: arithmetic problems, spelling words, and reading lessons could now be displayed to the entire class at once rather than delivered child-by-child. The combination of a standardized text and a blackboard created the basic architecture of the elementary classroom that would persist, largely unchanged, for a century.
Effect on the workThe McGuffey system enabled the transition to age-graded classrooms (one grade per teacher) rather than the chaotic multi-age one-room school, increasing the number of teaching positions needed per school. It also created the first mass market for educational publishing: a market that would eventually become the multi-billion-dollar textbook and curriculum industry.
Mimeograph and ditto machine: the first reproducible classroom materials
A.B. Dick's mimeograph (1887), and later the spirit duplicator ("ditto machine") that succeeded it in mid-century classrooms, gave elementary teachers their first ability to put the same piece of paper in every child's hands. Worksheets, spelling tests, arithmetic drills, and reading packets became practical at classroom scale. The distinctive purple-ink smell of a freshly mimeographed worksheet is one of the most universally cited sensory memories of mid-twentieth-century American elementary schooling. The photocopier (Xerox 914, 1959) began displacing both machines in the 1970s, bringing faster reproduction and cleaner copies, though the per-copy cost remained a point of teacher-administrator friction.
Overhead projector: first shared visual display for whole-class teaching
3M debuted its classroom overhead projector in 1962; within five years it was selling more than a hundred thousand units per year in American schools, aided by National Defense Education Act (1958) federal funding. For elementary teachers, the overhead projector moved instruction from chalk-at-the-board to prepared transparency slides: the first form of lesson materials teachers could create in advance, reuse across years, and annotate in real time. It structured the elementary lesson around a visible shared focus in a way that oral recitation never had.
Apple IIe and the classroom computer: Apple's Education push
In January 1983, Apple donated thousands of Apple IIe computers to eligible California schools, putting personal computing into elementary classrooms at scale for the first time. By 1987, more than one million Apple IIs were in American schools. For elementary teachers, the classroom computer first appeared as a single machine in the corner: a reward station where advanced students could play The Oregon Trail or practice typing. The Apple Education sales operation built relationships with every major school district; when schools eventually moved to Chromebooks, the infrastructure for district-level device purchasing that Apple had pioneered made the transition faster.
SMART Board + reading intervention software: interactive whiteboard and early personalized learning
SMART Technologies' interactive whiteboard arrived in elementary classrooms through the 2000s, transforming the front of the room into a touch-sensitive display teachers could use to drag, annotate, and interact with digital content. Simultaneously, a generation of reading-intervention software (Lexia Reading, Accelerated Reader, Reading A-Z) moved the elementary classroom toward the first data-driven differentiation: a child's reading level was now tracked in a database, and the software could assign texts and exercises calibrated to their exact performance. For elementary teachers, this created a new professional expectation: not just managing a classroom but interpreting reading-assessment dashboards and adjusting small-group instruction accordingly.
Chromebook + Google Classroom: the 1:1 personal-device era
In 2012, Chromebooks held less than 1% of the K-12 device market. By 2016 they accounted for 58% of mobile devices shipped to US schools. Google Classroom (launched 2014) gave elementary teachers a free platform to distribute assignments, collect work, and communicate with families. For elementary teachers, working with children ages 5-11 who are still learning how to read and type, the device created both new instructional opportunity (adaptive reading apps, drawing tools, interactive math) and new classroom-management demands (keeping a six-year-old on task with a screen in front of them is a different skill entirely from keeping a teenager on task).
COVID-19 pandemic: forced remote instruction via Zoom
When US schools closed in March 2020, elementary teachers faced a harder transition than any other grade band. Teaching phonemic awareness, guided reading, and early number sense to five- and six-year-olds over video (to children who cannot yet read the chat, cannot manage their own technology, and need physical proximity to feel safe) was an entirely different challenge from teaching high schoolers remotely. Many kindergartners and first-graders effectively lost a year of foundational literacy instruction. The NAEP 2022 "Nation's Report Card" documented the sharpest decline in elementary reading scores in thirty years. Pandemic attrition was severe: public education lost hundreds of thousands of teachers between 2019 and 2021, with early-childhood and elementary disproportionately affected.
Effect on the workPost-pandemic, elementary teacher vacancy rates in high-poverty and rural schools remain well above pre-pandemic norms. The pandemic accelerated the shift toward instructional aides and paraprofessionals filling positions previously held by licensed teachers: a structural change with implications for educational quality that will take a decade to fully measure.
ChatGPT and AI lesson-prep tools: the administrative hour reclaimed
ChatGPT launched November 30, 2022. Within eighteen months, tools built on large language models (MagicSchool AI [3 million+ teachers by 2025], Brisk Teaching, Diffit, Khanmigo, Amira Learning) had found their way into elementary classrooms in ways that were qualitatively different from the ChatGPT-cheating crisis in secondary schools. Elementary children are not writing five-paragraph essays; they are learning to read. The AI impact at the elementary level was almost entirely on the teacher's side of the desk: lesson plan drafts, reading-level differentiation of a text, parent email responses, substitute plans, IEP-goal suggestions. A Gallup–Walton Family Foundation survey (2025) found that teachers using AI tools at least weekly saved several hours per week, equivalent to six weeks over the school year. RAND's American Teacher Panel survey (2023-24) found that large share of elementary teachers had used generative AI tools: lower adoption, but the savings are just as real for those who use it.
Effect on the workThe AI tools save administrative hours but do not reduce headcount: class-size ratios are set by state law and union contracts, and the developmental core of elementary teaching (early literacy acquisition, social-emotional scaffolding, identifying learning disabilities before formal diagnosis) remains outside what any current AI system can perform.
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Browse all rolesElementary School Teachers, Except Special Education employment and pay by year
In other countries
The latest figure each country's statistics agency publishes for this job. Each uses its own occupation definition, survey basis and currency, so the numbers are not directly comparable with each other or with the US figures.
Canada (NOC 41221)
- Employment, 2020
- 295,900, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021: number of persons with employment income in NOC 41221 Elementary school and kindergarten teachers, Canada, reference year 2020. A recipients basis (anyone with employment income during the year), slightly broader than a point-in-time employed count. Statistics Canada Open Licence.
- Median pay, 2020
- C$80,000, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021 (Table 98-10-0586): median employment income for NOC 41221 Elementary school and kindergarten teachers, Canada, reference year 2020, full-year full-time workers (the basis comparable to the US OEWS full-time median). Statistics Canada Open Licence.
United Kingdom (UK SOC 2314)
- Employment, 2025
- 400,000, ONS ASHE 2025 Official statistic Report an errorONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (Table 14): employee jobs in SOC 2314 Primary education teaching professionals, United Kingdom, 2025 (ASHE "number of jobs", thousands x1000; excludes self-employment). Open Government Licence v3.0.
- Median pay, 2025
- £42,031, ONS ASHE 2025 Official statistic Report an errorONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (Table 14.7a): median gross annual pay for all employee jobs in SOC 2314 Primary education teaching professionals, United Kingdom, 2025. Open Government Licence v3.0.
Australia (ANZSCO 2412)
- Employment, 2025
- 166,700, ABS Labour Force Survey March 2026 Official statistic Report an errorABS Labour Force Survey (Detailed), table EQ08: employed persons in ANZSCO 2412 Primary School Teachers, national (summed across sex and state/territory), annual average of 4 quarterly estimates.
- Median pay, 2025
- A$115,752, ABS Employee Earnings May 2025 Official statistic Report an errorAnnualised (x52) from A$2,226 median weekly earnings. ABS Survey of Employee Earnings and Hours, May 2025: median pay for full-time non-managerial employees paid at the adult rate, before tax. Surfaced via the Jobs and Skills Australia occupation profile for ANZSCO 2412.
View all 33 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
| Year | US employment | Annual pay (median unless marked) | Source | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1870 | 160,000 | n/a | Est., NCES Researched context | Report |
| 1900 | 310,000 | n/a | Est., NCES Researched context | Report |
| 1920 | n/a | $800 | Est., National Center for Education Statistics Researched context | Report |
| 1930 | n/a | $1,420 (average) | NCES Researched context | Report |
| 1940 | 600,000 | $1,441 (average) | Est., NCES (employment) Researched contextNCES (pay) Researched context | Report |
| 1950 | n/a | $3,010 (average) | NCES Researched context | Report |
| 1960 | 960,000 | $4,800 | Est., NCES (employment) Researched contextEst., NCES Digest Table (dt09_078) (pay) Researched context | Report |
| 1980 | 1,200,000 | $15,500 | Est., NCES (employment) Researched contextEst., NCES Digest Table (dt09_078) (pay) Researched context | Report |
| 1990 | n/a | $30,500 | Est., NCES Digest Table (dt09_078) Researched context | Report |
| 2000 | 1,409,140 | $40,500 | BLS OEWS 2000 (employment) Official statisticEst., NCES Digest Table (dt09_078) (pay) Researched context | Report |
| 2003 | 1,432,800 | $42,160 | BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statistic | Report |
| 2004 | 1,422,840 | $43,160 | BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statistic | Report |
| 2005 | 1,486,650 | $44,040 | BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statistic | Report |
| 2006 | 1,509,180 | $45,570 | BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statistic | Report |
| 2007 | 1,538,030 | $47,330 | BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statistic | Report |
| 2008 | 1,544,270 | $49,330 | BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statistic | Report |
| 2009 | 1,544,300 | $50,510 | BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statistic | Report |
| 2010 | 1,485,600 | $51,660 | BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statistic | Report |
| 2011 | 1,415,590 | $52,840 | BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statistic | Report |
| 2012 | 1,360,380 | $53,400 | BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statistic | Report |
| 2013 | 1,344,240 | $53,590 | BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statistic | Report |
| 2014 | 1,353,020 | $54,120 | BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statistic | Report |
| 2015 | 1,381,430 | $54,890 | BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statistic | Report |
| 2016 | 1,392,660 | $55,800 | BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statistic | Report |
| 2017 | 1,409,140 | $57,160 | BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statistic | Report |
| 2018 | 1,410,970 | $58,230 | BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statistic | Report |
| 2019 | 1,430,480 | $59,670 | BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statistic | Report |
| 2020 | 1,364,870 | $60,940 | BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statistic | Report |
| 2021 | 1,329,280 | $61,400 | BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statistic | Report |
| 2022 | 1,394,200 | $61,690 | BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statistic | Report |
| 2023 | 1,410,070 | $63,680 | BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statistic | Report |
| 2024 | 1,393,310 | $62,340 | BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statistic | Report |
| 2025 | 1,388,390 | $63,970 | BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statistic | Report |
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