Posted on 06/01/2018 9:59:37 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
An honest teacher-pay debate requires careful attention to the facts.
This spring’s teacher walkouts have spurred renewed attention to the question of teacher pay. The topic is a serious one, warranting the extensive reportage it’s received. At times, however, the media’s progressive sympathies, the allure of hard-luck tales, and concerted PR by teachers’ unions have yielded some questionable coverage. A recent case has been the spate of stories suggesting that teachers routinely reach into their own pockets to spend extraordinary sums on classroom materials.
“There is no other job I know of where the workers subsidize what should be a cost borne by an employer as a necessary ingredient of the job,” American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten has thundered. Numerous recent stories have echoed her sentiment, repeatedly stating that the average teacher spends nearly $500 a year, unreimbursed, on school supplies. “The average teacher spends $479 a year on classroom supplies, national data show,” read a typical headline in Education Week. The Washington Post reported the same finding, in a story headlined “Teachers shelling out nearly $500 a year on school supplies, report finds.” A Time story explained, “Nearly all public school teachers report digging into their pockets to pay for school supplies, spending nearly $480 a year.”
Such claims make for attention-grabbing headlines. But, as with some of the other assertions made in the teacher-pay debate, they can be misleading. It’s less that the coverage is “wrong” than that it’s credulous and sometimes deceptive. So, let’s take a moment to clear things up.
The data in question are drawn from the 2015–16 National Teacher and Principal Survey, a nationally representative study of teachers and principals in public schools, conducted by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Using the survey results, NCES calculated average teacher spending for the 94 percent of teachers who said that they spent money out of pocket — excluding the 6 percent of teachers who did not report such spending, though the coverage frequently skips past that qualifier. (Including those other teachers lowers the average by about $30 a head.)
In reporting the “average” figure, news outlets have made the odd choice to focus on mean spending rather than the more typical median figure. There’s a reason most such data are reported in terms of medians (e.g., “median household income”). The median, after all, is the figure midway between the top and bottom of a distribution, meaning it represents the middle of the pack. A mean, on the other hand, can be dramatically moved by a few outliers. Including Warren Buffet or Bill Gates in a sample of average household income would make the typical household look much wealthier than it really is; similarly, a small number of teachers claiming big outlays can move the mean a lot. Indeed, NCES says that just one in five teachers reported spending more than $500, and the median teacher reported spending $297 — or about 60 percent of the widely quoted $479 figure.
Even these qualifications elide the real concern, however, which is the trouble with placing too much weight on a self-reported figure like this one. Journalists have generally ignored the problem inherent in asking respondents about how much they claim to do a good or noble thing. Self-reporting in such cases is highly susceptible to what social scientists term “social-desirability bias”: the tendency of respondents to say things that cast them (consciously or subconsciously) in a more favorable light. Studies show, for instance, that respondents substantially overestimate the number of days per week that they exercise, claim to watch the news three times as much as they actually do, and dramatically over-report their weekly worship-service attendance.
Now, let’s be clear. We are not suggesting that teachers are lying about their spending. But we are suggesting that, when teachers filled out the survey, precious few probably took the time to comb through twelve months’ worth of receipts and credit-card statements. Most of them probably guesstimated, and it’s safe to assume that their guesstimates tended to be on the high side.
We have no desire to diminish the real sacrifices many educators make, much less to deny that some teachers do indeed dig deep into their own pockets on behalf of their students. Spending even $100 or $200 per year out of pocket, especially for a teacher making $45,000 per year, is a big deal, and we don’t mean to suggest otherwise. But serious conversations about teacher pay should be informed by accurate data and careful analysis. Public deliberations about how much teachers should be paid, and whether raises ought to be funded by new taxes or cuts to other programs, are best served by reporting that meets that standard.
— Frederick M. Hess is the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. R.J Martin is a research assistant at AEI.
Honestly if it was that. You did it wrong. Sorry but no way should that be true and if I had to guess it was on non-essentials.
I know from my sending my kids through school most teachers tried to pass that off to parents with their list of ‘required’ supplies.
I mean now students have to ‘rent’ lockers and locks; pay ‘fees’ to be a freshman, sophomore, junior or senior; pay fees for particular classes for offsetting expenses (labs, materials, etc.) My “free” education gets more expensive each year.
As a country we pay in excess of $1 Trillion Dollars at every level for school funding and no teacher should have to buy supplies out of pocket. No kid should have to buy supplies or books either. Too much of the Education funding seems to go to administrative salaries and they need to be cut in half and bingo you have solves your funding problem for more money.
I taught middle school Science for 35 years and definitely spent at least $500.00 a year on supplies.
Our guy takes it all
You are so very wrong. My wife has taught in Ga schools for 32 years. The starting pay for any teacher that is not at the college level, is far less than $50,000. In fact after 32 years, it is not $50,000. The main problem of student disrespect, and the low beginning wage, has created a huge turnover problem within most of the school systems.
I always wondered why these teachers never claim the spending as an unreimbursed business expense.
I sure would. I once claimed a pair of skis that I used solely for a volunteer ski club I helped run.
Good for him
My guess is teachers take it all and their union dues too
$32,217
******
Not bad when you add in the benefits and long vaca for losers that couldn’t pass a real major...
How much does a typical auto mechanic spend on tool in a year to do his/her job ?
I typically spend about $300. Since I teach high school I don’t spend what elementary school teachers do. Some years I spend more or less, depending on how parsimonious I can be.
Over the past 3 years I’ve spent 1075, 819, 867. According to the receipts I kept. That’s not counting the occasional lunch money I “loaned” knowing it most likely wouldn’t come back. No big deal. I do my job.
‘I think that is nice of them, but I don’t believe they should get raises because THEY want to be charitable.”......
I never said they asked for raises. In fact they never asked for reimbursements either, they did it out of compassion for the kids needs, not their own. Believe it or not, there are people out there that don’t need repayment for doing a good deed. Things are not always about money.
It goes to the superintendent’s pay. Ours was finally kicked out, well, paid to leave after he charged the school to build his personal house, dry cleaning, etc. The school board turned a blind eye until the new math books never showed up one year. The money was never paid back. The state educ. board claimed there wasn’t a paper trail to prosecute him. Horse hockey.
Yup.
I was posting in a hurry and didn’t read it carefully enough.
I taught at an under-funded, urban Catholic high school for 8 years. I guarantee you that few if any of my colleagues spent more anywhere near $250-%500 on school supplies.
There were many teachers who gave generously of their time, which is awesome, but they didn’t give out of their back pocket for supplies. What some may have spent money on was student fundraisers and casual help for kids and families, which can add up over a school year.
Me, I spent several thousand dollars on supplies every year simply because I detested the inefficiencies we faced, such as crappy computers and other electronics, constantly broken copy machines, and bad books. I bought my own sound/video/projector equipment for my classroom, sent nightly orders to Kinkos to pick up on the way in to work the next morning to avoid the copy machine rush/breakdown, and funded my own websites for the students.
I regularly bought used computers and monitors to deliver to families who didn’t have them (2005-12) and my wife and I endowed a scholarship for kids who were at risk of dropping out from financial hardship (focusing on working moms who made good salaries but could barely keep up w/ tuition — my favorite mom was one who made just above the poverty line and who realized that dumbasses around her refused raises that put them over some government threshold; she told me, “I work for my money!” God love her!)
So, no, most teachers don’t spend a nickle on their jobs, but some do. Similarly, most teachers suck at their job, but some are amazing.
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