The Chicago teachers' strike has again focused Americans on the issue of public school teacher pay and benefits levels, especially in the midst of our continuing national economic struggles. A number of commentators, including the hometown Chicago Tribune's editorial board, have noted that teachers are doing quite well these days relative to others in the Windy City. So it was inevitable that a contrary narrative, namely that teachers are underpaid, would emerge. Typical is a posting on the NY Times Economix blog which cites a study from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development which finds a lag between teacher wages and those of other college grads. The blog posting then cleverly asks, Does It Pay to Become a Teacher? In doing so the post not only accepts the superficial OECD data on salaries (when there are far better studies here in the U.S. of what teachers actually earn), but it also assumes that teachers could have earned more money doing something else. That's not what the facts suggest.
Perhaps this shouldn't be necessary to point out to a blog called "Economix" but it is possible to track the earnings of teachers who leave the profession and do something else. One academic paper tracked Georgia teachers who left the profession and moved into the private sector and found they earned, on average, about what they did as teachers. A similar study of teachers who leave the field in Missouri found they earn less in the private sector, except for those with high standardized (ACT) test scores.
Andrew Biggs and Jason Richwine take a broader sample from the Survey of Income and Program Participation, a study following 50,000 households, which includes information on job changes. It found that teachers who shift to non-teaching jobs earn 3.1 percent less, while other workers who shift from non-teaching jobs to other non-teaching jobs earned 0.5 percent more.
Some might argue that teachers don't do well when they switch careers because they don't have the right degree to maximize earnings in the private sector. If they had just studied something else they would succeed in the private sector, the argument goes. But this assumes that all degrees are equally challenging and equally open to everyone. The evidence suggests otherwise. On SAT scores, education majors score on average in the 38 percentile among those going to college. On the GRE education graduates scored well below the mean. Another study of ACT scores found something similar. These studies suggest there is no pot of gold in general for teachers in other professions because merely comparing years of education among graduates in different fields is a misleading measure of graduates' abilities:
As both a direct measure of acquired knowledge and an indirect measure of innate ability, teacher education does not compare well to education in other fields. The result is that years of education could be a highly misleading measure of teacher skill, write Biggs and Richwine.
Indeed, all things considered public school teachers do quite well, despite the misleading OECD figures. Although OECD's broad studies can be useful in comparing countries to each other, once the OECD starts trying to drill down into the data it inevitably produces results that are simplistic. That's the case here.
For one thing,
the OECD just measures salaries, not benefits. Nor does the OECD adjust for the
shorter work year of teachers. One MI study that made these adjustments found
that:
"The average public school teacher was paid 36% more per hour than the average non-sales white-collar worker and 11% more than the average professional specialty and technical worker...and compared with public school teachers, editors and reporters earn 24% less; architects, 11% less; psychologists, 9% less; chemists, 5% less; mechanical engineers, 6% less; and economists, 1% less."
The report noted that not only do teachers work on average 4 hours a week less than other white collar workers, but of course their salaries are typically based on a 185-195 day work year.
Andrew Biggs and Jason Richwine take this analysis further by looking at a detailed valuation of benefits, including some benefits, like pensions, whose cost and value are not accurately tracked by standard government data. They include other benefits virtually unprecedented in the private sector, like retiree health care insurance. The pair estimate that for every dollar of salaries public school teachers earn, they earn almost another dollar in benefits. By contrast, private sector benefits cost employers about 43 cents for every dollar of salary.
I think voters
understand much of this even without drilling down into the numbers, which is
why we've seen a number of reform governors and mayors of both parties elected
in recent years promising education reform and control of school budgets.
Teacher pay is not a standard metric, so its difficult to quantify,
obviously a philosophy teacher should not expect to make more than a math or science teacher, salaries vary by states and benefits. Given
illinois is a pro-union state , I would not expect most if not many teachers to be underpaid but the point of contention seems to also be non-financial matters that could turn into it , aka merit pay,
then there is the issue of elementary school teaching, for instance while it can be harder and dealing with slow learners and such and hyper kids, less technical subjects can be easier to teach, while there is debate as to whether teachers work over the summer and grading papers and projects so teaching is not a 9-5 job, it is also true a teacher does not have to clean toilets, mine copper, use guns,
so while it may not be an easy job, it may not be as unpleasant, and coupled with a decent middle-class or private sector wage not including pension benefits then its safe to say they are either fairly paid or at-least slightly overpaid
Teaching isn't a 9-5 job all that often. It is quite often a 7-3 job, or an 8-4 job. Mine is an 8:15-4:15 job; however, at least 5-6 times per month it's a 7:45-4:15 or 8:15-4:45 job because of meetings that we cannot have during the course of the day due to parents' schedules or due to the schools' schedule of not having any time throughout the day to have a "staff meeting" because our clients show up every single day for the entire day. Then again, it is never simply an 8 hour day, period, because there is not enough time in the day to do the planning necessary for the following days/weeks ahead...oftentimes it is a 10+ hour day each and every day. When I was coaching, I worked 70+ hour weeks quite often...coaching paid me an extra $2,000 a year for those 20 hours a week for several months at a time. Was it worth it? Monetarily, no. But most teachers don't care about the money so long as it is coming in and we can actually live off of it.
Teachers make too much. There are so many teachers making well over $100,000 in Illinois as salary, not including benefits. This is to work on average a 10 month year. Teachers are babies... enough said, they do not need a pay increase as their benefits and pay are already enough. It would be different if we had some of our most educated and influential students becoming teachers, then pay should be increased, but with the average teacher only reaching 38th percentile on GRE's and other aptitude tests they should in fact take a pay decrease. Most of our teachers in Illinois do not deserve to be making $100,000 unless they have been teaching for 30 years or more, and they should not be making a penny more.
I have been meaning to post something like this on one of my blogs and this has given me an idea. Cheers.
Teachers being underpaid is a joke that has gone too far. They have weekends holidays and summers off and still get pain the same as say a critical care nurse working weekends and holidays year round saving lives!!! Wow, give me a break and cry me a river! What is it you think you are worth? What ever it is it will never be enough to you whinning teachers. And, by the way, most of you are not that good anyway.