Teacher Pay is Prosperity-Proof
In my title, I paraphrase Sylvia Allegretto, an author of a grim new Economic Policy Institute report on the steady deterioration of teacher pay over recent decades.
Teachers, it seems, are among the only professionals who get shafted at both the best of times and the worst of times. Over the past decade, Allegretto and her co-authors find, the compensation gap separating teachers and similarly-educated professionals in other fields has grown by almost 11 percent. What's worse, the gap is especially large for experienced teachers: "The brunt... has fallen on senior teachers (45-54), whose pay deficit within their age group has grown by 18.0 percentage points among women (who comprise the vast majority of teachers) since 1996."
The report's authors devote significant time to dispatching silly, but oddly persistent, claims that teachers' hourly wages are better than those of engineers, economists and other white-collar professionals. Such claims assume that teachers work fewer than 8 hours a day, and they all but ignore the lesson planning, paper grading, student advising, coaching and general paper pushing that swamp teachers' calendars. (Have the champions of the wealthy teacher argument ever met any teachers?)
The growing teaching penalty seems particularly perverse at a time when even the most benighted education policy pundits acknowledge the critical importance of attracting and retaining the most effective teachers.
See The Teaching Penalty: Teacher Pay Losing Ground, by Sylvia Allegretto, Sean Corcoran and Lawrence Mishel.
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Some Teachers are Underpaid but Others are Overpaid
There are indeed plenty of teachers out there who are not paid what they deserve given how hard they work. However, there are also a number of them out there who are paid more than what they're actually worth. The pay scale in the town where I grew up tops out in the $80k's. Certain of those teachers absolutely are worth every single penny (and possibly more!) But there are also some at the school receiving the exact same pay who are doing a mediocre job. Ideally, they should be let go, but at the very least their pay ought to reflect their performance.
As for the blanket assertion that people who criticize teacher pay don't personally know any teachers, that's nonsense. Both my father-in-law and mother-in-law are recently retired schoolteachers and my sister-in-law is a schoolteacher too. None of them worked more than 40 hours/week even including grading and lesson prep time.
Pummeling the Policy Pundits on Pay
Claus. You summarized aptly many of the issues at hand when it comes to pay teachers more. I too find it curious how those policy pundits who call for new ways to recruit and retain teachers are so unwiling and unwavering when it comes to increasing salaries. How do we entice bright AND prepared people into teaching when the average teachers' salary is over 14% lower than those of others in comparable occupations.
All we hear out of a number of the think-tanksters is the need to pay a few teachers more and perhaps the masses a good bit less. The EPI report totally debunks their theories and unpacks their assumptions--and in doing so turns their anti-teaching profession rhetoric into mush. Lots more needs to be done to pay teachers more as well.....check out the voices of our Teacher Leaders Network www.teacherleaders.org) and their "TeacherSolutions" report on pay for performance.
Thanks
Sean Corcoran here--one of the three co-authors on "The Teaching Penalty." Just wanted to say thanks for bringing attention to our report. You're absolutely right with respect to the petty arguments surrounding teachers hours and weeks worked. It's too bad we have to devote so much time and energy to the issue. Such arguments miss the big picture entirely, and are an unfortunate commentary on the state of the teaching profession, that observers find it appropriate to bean-count the number of hours teachers are spending on the job.
Keep up the good work, and I'm looking forward to reading more on the publicschoolinsights blog!
Sean Corcoran
New York University
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