The Poor Teacher Canard Redux – Part I

“Mid-and Late-Career Teachers Struggle With Paltry Incomes” is the latest flawed study to claim that American teachers are underpaid.

Leave it to the left-leaning teacher-union-friendly Center for American Progress to come out with a flatulent report lamenting the allegedly lousy state of teacher pay in the U.S. Even worse, much of the acolyte media dutifully bought the study hook, jive and half-truth. A writer for Huffington Post, tightly clutching a moist hanky, whimpered,

While the report recognizes that low teacher pay is not news – especially when it comes to low entry-level salaries – researchers were interested in seeing if the salaries of mid- and late-career teachers ‘were high enough to attract and keep the nation’s most talented individuals.’ However, in a profession where teacher turnover costs up to $2 billion annually, the results they found are quite depressing. 

Where to begin?!

Let’s start with Andrew Biggs, American Enterprise Institute researcher and scholar, and Jason Richwine, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, who released a study in 2011 in which they found that teachers are actually overpaid. What their study includes – and the Center for American Progress’ conveniently omits – are the perks that teachers typically receive as part of their compensation package, like excellent healthcare and pension packages that aren’t counted as “income.” Armed with data, the authors make a solid case. They find,

Workers who switch from non-teaching jobs to teaching jobs receive a wage increase of roughly 9 percent, while teachers who change to non-teaching jobs see their wages decrease by approximately 3 percent.

When retiree health coverage for teachers is included, it is worth roughly an additional 10 percent of wages, whereas private sector employees often do not receive this benefit at all.

Teachers benefit strongly from job security benefits, which are worth about an extra 1 percent of wages, rising to 8.6 percent when considering that extra job security protects a premium paid in terms of salaries and benefits.

Taking all of this into account, teachers actually receive salary and benefits that are 52 percent greater than fair market levels. (Emphasis added.)

Needless to say, this was beyond the pale for American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten. She promptly bashed the report, insisting that it’s full of “ridiculous assertions” and countered with half-truths and threw in a little class warfare as red meat for her members:

The AEI report concludes that America’s public school teachers are overpaid — something that defies common sense — and uses misleading statistics and questionable research to make its case.

If teachers are so overpaid, then why aren’t more 1 percenters banging down the doors to enter the teaching profession? Why do 50 percent of teachers leave the profession within three to five years, an attrition rate that costs our school districts $7 billion annually?

Kim Anderson, advocacy director at the National Education Association, ignored the data and went for the lachrymose,

Talented individuals turn away from this rewarding profession because they are forced to choose between making a difference in the lives of students and providing for their families.

Actually, the AEI report wasn’t the first to explode the “poor teacher” myth. Back in 2007, researchers Jay Greene and Marcus Winters, then with the Manhattan Institute, found:

Education policy discussions often assume that public school teachers are poorly paid. Typically absent in these discussions about teacher pay, however, is any reference to systematic data on how much public school teachers are actually paid, especially relative to other occupations. Because discussions about teacher pay rarely reference these data, the policy debate on education reform has proceeded without a clear understanding of these issues.

This report compiles information on the hourly pay of public school teachers nationally and in 66 metropolitan areas, as collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in its annual National Compensation Survey. We also compare the reported hourly income of public school teachers with that of workers in similar professions, as defined by the BLS….

Among the key findings of their report:

• According to the BLS, the average public school teacher in the United States earned $34.06 per hour in 2005.

• 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.

• Full-time public school teachers work on average 36.5 hours per week during weeks that they are working. By comparison, white-collar workers (excluding sales) work 39.4 hours, and professional specialty and technical workers work 39.0 hours per week. Private school teachers work 38.3 hours per week

• 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.

• Compared with public school teachers, airplane pilots earn 186% more; physicians, 80% more; lawyers, 49% more; nuclear engineers, 17% more; actuaries, 9% more; and physicists, 3% more.

• Public school teachers are paid 61% more per hour than private school teachers, on average nationwide.

• The Detroit metropolitan area has the highest average public school teacher pay among metropolitan areas for which data are available, at $47.28 per hour, followed by the San Francisco metropolitan area at $46.70 per hour, and the New York metropolitan area at $45.79 per hour. 

Of particular interest to Golden Staters, the California Policy Center (publishers of UnionWatch) has posted Transparent California, a valuable website which is “dedicated to providing accurate, comprehensive and easily searchable information on the compensation of public employees in California.” From it we learn that the average full-time teacher in California made $84,889 last year, and about 34,750 teachers were paid more than $100,000 in total compensation. It’s important to note that CPC includes all income in its reporting – base pay, overtime, health and pension benefits and other forms of compensation, while again, the CAP study misleadingly includes only base pay.

Despite unassailable research, the “poor teacher” myth is still widely believed, in large part due to those who benefit from spreading it. Most notably, the teachers unions exploit this falsehood as a tactic to con teachers into believing that the union is their only avenue for salary enhancement. The unfortunate truth for teachers is that unions actually prevent them from earning more money. Look for more on this in an upcoming post.

Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues.