The Manhattan Institute has written a report based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data for teachers called How Much Are Public School Teachers Paid?. Key findings:
* 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.
Lefties will no doubt complain about the method, especially the use of per-hour wages, but it strikes me as legitimate. We all take work home, but we don’t all get summers off. An even more impressive case for the high pay of teachers would include the hourly value of pensions and other benefits, not to mention no-cut contracts. Face it, there are many reasons for poor education in the US, but low teacher pay isn’t one of them.
Link: Joanne Jacobs.
Colleges and universities in the US are doing a great job. They are not cheap, but the quality is high. I have concerns over the inflation of costs of higher education, just as I have about the cost of health care.
So, why does public primary and secondary education not measure up to the quality of higher eduction in this country?
The money spent per student per year seems to be comparable to tuition in college, about halfway between community college and university tuition. The National Center for Education Statistics projects the total cost of a year of K-12 public school to be $8800 for 2002, with an average pupil-teacher ratio of 16:1.
Maybe it’s because of the way K-12 education is run. There seems to be a lot of administration overhead to deal with all the strings attached to the money that funds the schools. There also seems to be a lot of money spent on pensions for retired teachers and teachers that are not as effective as they should be.
I think we would be a lot better off if the government let us spend the money in a competitive market, just like we do for higher education. That won’t wipe out state schools; they seem to be doing well in a public vs. private university system.
It would probably mean more efficient and higher quality public schools if they had to compete. It would certainly create a better market for special needs education, which is where public K-12 schools seem to be doing the worst job.
I’ve enjoyed your blog enormously. This post explains why every “professional specialty and technical worker” slaves to get a teaching certification, and jumps at the chance to get a public school job.
Oh… wait…
But, I have enjoyed your blog, and benefited from reading it. Please, please, correct yourself.
Don’t make it about what “Lefties will” or not; make it about who at least tries to tell the truth, or not.
You can start here for reality based commentary:
“Jay Greene’s persistent misuse of data for teacher pay comparisons”
Mahattan Institute “research” appears, to me, to border on fraud.
Kudos to Doc Searls and all his kind.
Yes, I expected there would be criticisms of the method, but I think it’s legitimate. School teachers don’t put in the same hours as the rest of us, and wage comparisons that ignore this fact aren’t legitimate. The wage gap figures for men and women generally fall into the same trap, as the most significant factors explaining it are career choice, seniority, and hours worked.
If you think the “method… legitimate” then you can surely point to:
1) corroboration for it from other research and peer review.
2) conservatives (i.e. Jeffrey Hart) affiliated with the Manhattan Institute, as opposed to bushvoters (Jay Greene, Peggy Noonan, Bill Kristol, etc.) who lack even the grace to have apologized yet.
3) an exodus of “architects… psychologists… chemists… mechanical engineers…” etc. to the evidently more lucrative career of teaching in public schools.
4) proof that you can read #3 with a straight face.
Look at your posts, and make every “Lefties” (or Righties) remark a red flag; whenever I find that kind of language (worse, when I hear it come out of my own mouth) I know the brain has gone into neutral and something else has taken over.
Regardless, we know so much more about learningteaching today that we ought to rebuild our educational system from the ground up.
There are a lot of people in the world who want summers off, and are willing to pay for the privilege, Janus.
Thus, you ignore all four points; seriously, I’ve read more of blog and I can only suggest that you get in touch with reality. Read books, instead of just Amazon reviews of them; use google, or even go to an actual physical library, instead of repeating economic fallacies; criticize specific statements that people make instead of just insulting them… Oh! Senseless to have written even this much. I feel disappointed. You can so obviously do so much better.
Dude, this isn’t Wikipedia and I don’t have to answer every pedantic question with a research cite. It’s my opinion that the hourly wage method is one legitimate way to examine teacher pay. If you disagree, fine, but this isn’t a dispute that can be resolved on an ad hominem basis.
If a public school teacher works 30 hours a week instead of 40, and 39 weeks a year instead of 52, their salary may look good on an hourly basis, but not so good on a yearly basis.
Is there anything illegitimate about those comparisons? What “method” should one use to compare compensation? Should we bring the value of other benefits and retirement pensions into it, as well?
I think it’s legitimate to factor in the retirement benefits and they’re measurable. Some public employees retire with a bigger check every month than they made when they were working.
The value of no-fire clauses is harder to measure, but it would be nice to be guaranteed a paycheck for life after two years on the job as long as you don’t have sex with too many young people, and that’s effectively what they have.