Educational news about Personality development, career guidance, Leadership Skills and more in Edubilla.com ...

Average teacher salaries have increased, moving Iowa to 25th place in the national rankings, according to data contained in the annual Condition of Education report issued Thursday by the state Department of Education.

Salaries for Iowa’s 34,725 teachers increased by an average of 2.7 percent to $55,356 in the 2014-15 school year, the report indicated. That moved Iowa up one spot from its previous national ranking and placed Iowa sixth out of 12 Midwest states for the 2013-14 school year.

The state’s total per-pupil expense was $10,240 in the 2013-14 school year, up from $9,888 the year before, the report indicated.

“One of the critical functions of the Iowa Department of Education is to provide and interpret education data,” state education agency director Ryan Wise said in a statement. “The Condition of Education report provides valuable feedback about our students, educators and school districts across a number of statewide measures.”

The report provides a wide range of state-level data, including shifts in student population and demographics, teacher salaries and characteristics, student achievement results and school financial information, Wise said.

Highlights of the statewide data through the 2014-15 school year included a student population of 480,772 in Iowa’s 338 public school districts, a total that was up from 478,921 the previous school year and represented an increased makeup of 21.8 percent minority students. The percentage of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunches was down slightly to 41 percent.

Slightly more than 90 percent of Iowa high school students graduated and the percentage of students who took a higher-level mathematics course, including calculus and trigonometry, was unchanged from the prior year, according to the report.

Roughly two of every three high school students took the ACT college entrance exam, and the composite score was up slightly at 22.2. Also, the report indicated that the percentage of schools equipped with 50 megabytes or more of bandwidth climbed to 71.9 percent in the 2014-15 school year from 60.1 percent in 2013-14 and 44.4 percent in 2012-13.