Posted on 11/02/2011 9:56:26 AM PDT by neverdem
Education Secretary Arne Duncan thinks public-school teachers are “desperately underpaid” and has called for doubling teacher salaries. In a new paper co-authored with Jason Richwine of the Heritage Foundation, I look into whether teachers really are desperately underpaid, or underpaid at all. Jason and I find that the conventional wisdom is far off the truth.
At first glance, public-school teachers definitely look underpaid. According to Census data, teachers receive salaries around 20 percent lower than similarly educated private-sector workers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says teachers’ benefits are about the same as benefits in the private sector. But both the salary and benefits figures are dubious.
Most teachers have Bachelor’s or Master’s degrees in education, and most people with education degrees are teachers. Decades of research has shown that education is a less rigorous course of study than other majors: Teachers enter college with below-average SAT scores but receive much higher GPAs than other students. It may be that a degree in education simply does not reflect the same underlying skills and knowledge as a degree in, say, history or chemistry. When we compare salaries based on objective measures of cognitive ability — such as SAT, GRE, or IQ scores — the teacher salary penalty disappears.
And the real world bears this out: Contrary to teachers’ insistences that they could earn more outside of teaching, we show that the typical worker who moves from the private sector into teaching receives a salary increase, while the typical teacher who leaves for the private sector receives a pay cut.
If salaries are about even, benefits push teacher pay ahead. The BLS benefits data, which most pay studies rely on, has three shortcomings: It omits the value of retiree health coverage, which is uncommon for private workers but is worth about an extra 10 percent of pay for teachers; it understates the value of teachers’ defined-benefit pensions, which pay benefits several times higher than the typical private 401(k) plan; and it ignores teachers’ time off outside the normal school year, meaning that long summer vacations aren’t counted as a benefit. When we fix these problems, teacher benefits are worth about double the average private-sector level.
Finally, public-school teachers have much greater job security, with unemployment rates about half those of private-school teachers or other comparable private occupations. Job security protects against loss of income during unemployment and, even more importantly, protects a position in which benefits are much more generous than private-sector levels.
Overall, we estimate that public-school teachers receive total compensation roughly 50 percent higher than they would likely receive in the private sector. Does this mean that all school teachers are overpaid? No. But it does mean that across-the-board pay increases are hardly warranted. What is needed is pay flexibility, to reward the best teachers and dismiss the worst.
— Andrew G. Biggs is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
IMHO, it needed reposting.
You can’t compare pay between private sector and public sector because most private sector jobs don’t come with retirement. Only two of the companies I worked for over 33 years are still in existence. When the others got bought out, they took the retirement plans with them. The two that still exist had periodic layoffs which public sector employees don’t suffer from. I left both of them because I was laid off. Figure in the 30+ years of retirement and take the money to present value and you’ll see that public sector employees are much better paid than private sector employees.
A year salary for 6 months of work...only in the government....
The value of an employee is not determined by his level of education but by the scarcity of the skill set he brings to the occupation.
Supply and demand should determine teacher salaries just like it does for everyone else. Right now their are thousands of new teachers coming out of school looking for jobs and salaries should be falling. Most other professions have taken salary hits along with layoff’s. We also don’t see lots of people leaving the profession for greener pastures.
A while back when the economy was booming some high cost of living cities had a hard time recruiting teachers and salaries had to be increased to get help..but not now.
I know her story is unique and not all teachers make what she did. But the job does have room for growth and those teaching now no doubt will eventually make more.
Teachers are not underpaid.
Which is why Public school Teachers can be had for $18,000 a year if you push. we crank out so many more than are needed.
However, it is logical to conclude that since salary is not based on merit that some teachers are grossly underpaid and some teachers are grossly overpaid.
It's probably close to 10 months when you add in the prep at the start of the school year and the shutdown period at the end. Still a very sweet deal. A number of teachers I've known over the years have also taken summer jobs- waiter, bartender, lifeguard, etc.
QFT
My mom got a raise last year. 3%. She stopped teaching in 1988.
She has now been getting her pension longer than she taught.
I love my Mom...and even she cannot believe her good fortune. She knew she had it good, but not this good!
Also why do over half the new teachers out there leave education after 5 years for other careers?
School Districts today are more worried about kids not passing benchmarks than rewarding excellent teachers.
More accountability is needed, of teachers, parents, and students. Much of the problem goes right back to the family. In low income urban areas, the schools are disaster zones, where as in many suburbs the schools are functioning quite well. Money doesn't correct such problems.
I have little respect for teachers. For the most part, teachers are indoctrinators for the socialist, communist agenda. They are part of the culture along with hollywood to destroy families and our conservative values.
Teachers generally work from the last week of August through the last week of June. Of course down south they start earlier and stop earlier.
After the first couple of years the prep time is minimal.
So pretty much divide their salary by 83% to get a comparable private sector salary.
Whether or not it is accurate, you first have to determine the “unit of work” and establish a value. Then establish a consistent way to measure it across the different curriculums. Then you need to adjust the base salary and benefits against a scale of cost of livings across the country. Of course in NYC the cost to live is higher than rural Maine.
After doing all of that, you can figure it out.
Or was the question rhetorical.
(I used to do that crap for my job. And no teacher taught us...we figured it out all on our own.)
They have 45 million of food stamp recipients and expect them to vote democrat - now the teachers. Of course the unions are in the bag. They know how to do it!!
I’m a public school teacher, and I would say that in non-union states the hard workers are underpaid and the sit-at-the-desk-and-hand-out-worksheets teachers are overpaid. Union teachers are ALL OVERPAID.
We may not get a lot, but holy **** we get the summer.
When the smell of lilacs and honeysuckle begin to waft through the late spring air, you know it’s almost time to turn off your alarm clock. It’s a feeling that supersedes elation.
“The value of an employee is not determined by his level of education but by the scarcity of the skill set he brings to the occupation.”
Good point. The tendency today, in our over educated world, is to count the number of degrees. In 18.5 years of education, I had just two “teachers.” I call them teachers, as opposed to somebody who stands in front of a class talking. A “teacher” can make difficult concepts understandable to a wide range of students with varying abilities and backgrounds. These two could have taught their subjects to a brick wall.
Those I know, and it is more than a few, left because of working conditions, i.e. lack of discipline, poor administrators, too much interference in the actual classroom, etc. I never heard one say it was the pay.
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