The Myth of Teachers Being Underpaid
It’s part of the religion of liberalism that teachers are vastly underpaid. We are supposed to reduce their workload while vastly increasing their pay.
I’m sure I’m not the only one that had teachers with the nerve to indoctrinate their captive classes to their union point of view that they needed a raise. Of course we believed what our teachers said then. Now it’s time to examine what we were told.
The question of whether or not they are paid comes down to two points. 1) Can you hire teachers and 2) who do you compare teacher pay with.
In the first case I would say that there are plenty of applicants for teaching positions. In the case of specialties that are hard to fill (math and science teachers) the problem is that the teacher unions insist that all teachers be paid alike. Allowing the market to set teacher pay would certainly solve the problem. It looks to me that teachers have the best job they can get and that’s why they generally stay around. Many teachers hang around even when it appears that they hate their job.
The second question is generally a taboo. Liberals don’t want an honest discussion. If they compare teacher pay it’s with how much a CEO of a large corporation earns. Fortunately I was able to find someone who actually did the research, although it hasn’t received much coverage.
The first question in my mind would be to compare the pay a teacher who works for the public schools with a private school teacher. The private schools compete with public schools when in comes to hiring the best teachers. It’s generally acknowledged that private schools do an excellent job of educating our kids. So they must be hiring good teachers at fair wages.
The most compelling evidence that teachers are not on average underpaid comes from the world of private schools. The last comprehensive analysis, performed during the mid-1990s, indicated that average private school salaries were slightly less than 60 percent of average salaries in the public schools (though the gap between public and private schools narrows substantially when religious private schools are excluded from the analysis. See Michael Podgursky’s article, “Fringe Benefits,” on p. 71 of this issue). There is no reason to believe that this differential has changed dramatically in the past few years. In other words, a public school teacher might make more than $40,000 in annual salary, while a private school teacher with similar levels of experience and education would earn $25,000.
So teachers in private schools are earning 40% less than a public school teacher. Interesting.
How do teaching salaries compare with other professional occupations:
Using data on household median earnings from the U.S. Department of Labor, I compared teachers with seven other professional occupations: accountants, biological and life scientists, registered nurses, social workers, lawyers and judges, artists, and editors and reporters. Weekly pay for teachers in 2001 was about the same (within 10 percent) as for accountants, biological and life scientists, registered nurses, and editors and reporters, while teachers earned significantly more than social workers and artists. Only lawyers and judges earned significantly more than teachers—as one would expect, given that the educational training to become a lawyer is longer and more demanding.
Teachers, moreover, enjoy longer vacations and work far fewer days per year than most professional workers. Consider data from the National Compensation Survey of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which computes hourly earnings per worker. The average hourly wage for all workers in the category “professional specialty” was $27.49 in 2000. Meanwhile, elementary-school teachers earned $28.79 per hour; secondary-school teachers earned $29.14 per hour; and special-education teachers earned $29.97 per hour. The average earnings for all three categories of teachers exceeded the average for all professional workers. Indeed, the average hourly wage for teachers even topped that of the highest-paid major category of workers, those whose jobs are described as “executive, administrative, and managerial.” Teachers earned more per hour than architects, civil engineers, mechanical engineers, statisticians, biological and life scientists, atmospheric and space scientists, registered nurses, physical therapists, university-level foreign-language teachers, librarians, technical writers, musicians, artists, and editors and reporters. Note that a majority of these occupations requires as much or even more educational training as does K–12 teaching.
The author of this report goes on to point out that when you consider the generous benefits packages teachers get they are even further ahead in pay.
The question is should your family make even more sacrifices in order to pay your kids teachers more than you are earning?
The simple solution to the question of teacher pay is to break up the public school monopoly and educate our children through vouchers. That will introduce the market into the education industry.
