Free Republic

One of the most common beliefs about American education is that teaching is an "underpaid" profession. Think tanks purport to calculate the "teacher pay gap." The media run stories about teachers taking second and third jobs to pay the bills. Politicians call for across-the-board raises. They all see raising teacher pay as a matter of simple fairness, as well as a way to attract better teachers and improve educational outcomes. They are all misguided. The highly publicized "pay gap" that dominates news headlines is the product of a simplistic methodology that, when universally applied, suggests that nurses, firefighters, and other...

In the Wayne-Westland Community Schools, high school math teachers are the lowest paid as a group and make on average almost $25,000 less a year than the physical education teachers. The high school science teachers make $11,000 less than the district’s gym teachers on average. The salaries are set by a six-year teacher’s contract Wayne-Westland agreed to in 2008 and runs through 2014. The salary schedule determines pay solely by years of experience and education background. On average, physical education teachers were the highest paid group and made $78,675 a year. Teacher gross salaries can also include pay for extracurricular...

He’s got guts– lots of guts! I’m not sure if this was a press conference or a townhall style meeting. But Hot Air is reporting that Chris Christie opened the meeting up for questions and when teacher, Rita Wilson, complained that if she made $3 per day, per student, she would be making $83,000 a year and she doesn’t make near that. Christie replied, “You’re getting more than that if you include the cost of your benefits.” Wilson continued by saying that she has a master’s degree and does not feel she was being fairly compensated. Christie said, “Well, you...

<p>Contrary to union propaganda, teachers are not underpaid. I say this as someone with 28 years of experience in conducting salary surveys and designing pay plans.</p> <p>According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, local elementary school teachers earn about the same average pay on an hourly basis as local reporters ($23.74). They also earn more than microbiologists ($20.60), zoologists ($17.36) and accountants ($22.49). Secondary school teachers even earn more per hour than civil engineers.</p>

The Summer 2003 edition of the education journal "Education Next" has statistics on teacher pay from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that match my own research. To quote: "Teachers earn more per hour than architects, civil engineers, mechanical engineers, statisticians, biological and life scientists, registered nurses, university-level foreign-language teachers, and editors and reporters." The statistics exclude benefits, which are far richer for teachers than for private-sector employees. On a related note, the web site of a private citizen has great graphs and stats on government spending. One graph shows how education productivity has declined by 70 percent over the last...