The Underpaid Teachers Myth
There’s a common perception in this country that public schools are underfunded, and that if they could only spend as much as private schools do, they’d be in clover. When it is pointed out that the average private school tuition is around half of total public school spending per pupil, defenders of the status quo counter that tuition only covers a fraction of total costs.
So wouldn’t it be interesting to know how much private schools actually spend, in total, per pupil? Well now we do, at least for the state of Arizona. . . .
Teachers make up 72 percent of on-site staff in Arizona’s independent education sector, but less than half of on-site staff in the public sector. In order to match the independent sector’s emphasis on teachers over non-teaching staff, Arizona public schools would have to hire roughly 25,000 more teachers and dismiss 21,210 non-teaching employees.
When teachers’ 9-month salaries are annualized to make them comparable to the 12-month salaries of most other fields, Arizona independent school teachers earned the equivalent of $36,456 in 2004 — about $2,000 less than reporters and correspondents. The 12-month-equivalent salary of the state’s public school teachers was around $60,000, which is more than nuclear technicians, epidemiologists, detectives, and broadcast news analysts. It’s also about 50 percent more than reporters or private school teachers earn.
I wonder what effect these numbers will have on the flood of education stories about how desperately underpaid public school teachers are… given that those teachers are earning the equivalent of 50 percent more than the journalists who cover them.
Probably none, given that the myth of the underpaid teacher is one of those sacred cows most in the mainstream media seem unwilling to slaughter.
The full study is available here.
Here are some other tid-bits of information from the study:
- Graduation rates among private schools are higher.
- College acceptance rates for graduates of private schools are higher.
- The facilities at private schools are in better repair.
And, most shockingly of all, the private schools pretty much out-perform public schools in every single area, both academic and administrative, all while spending several thousand dollars less per pupil than public schools do.
So how can private schools do this? For one thing, private schools aren’t a government monopoly so they actually have to perform well in order to attract students. For another, private schools don’t hire union teachers.
The evidence to suggest that private schools are better, because of market forces, than public schools is pervasive and overwhelming. What we should be concluding from it is this: In order to improve education in this country we shouldn’t be throwing more and more money at the problem. We should be introducing the market forces that cause public schools to perform so well into the public school system. That means school vouchers and parental choice laws.
Teachers unions will, of course, oppose this. They did in Florida where they got a parental choice program shot down by the courts despite clear evidence that the program was working to significantly improve test scores, especially among minority students.
Rober Hogan
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