Tue, Jun 4, 2019 1:10 a.m.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-underpaid-teachers-myth-11558565415
The 'Underpaid Teachers' Myth
Applying the same method, telemarketers don't make enough and nurses are overpaid.
Are public-school teachers really underpaid? It's a claim often made during teacher pay disputes, but the same data and statistical methods that produce the "teacher salary gap" lead to some ridiculous conclusions—such as that nurses and firefighters are dramatically overpaid, while telemarketers deserve better compensation.
Take the annual reports on public-school teacher pay produced by the Economic Policy Institute—a Washington think tank whose board includes the president of the American Federation of Teachers. The 2019 edition claims the nation's public-school teachers were underpaid by a record 21.4% in 2018, with state-level teacher-pay penalties ranging from 0.2% in Wyoming to 32.6% in Arizona. The think tank's figures have been mentioned hundreds of times in media coverage of disputes over teacher pay in states such as Arizona, Kentucky and Oklahoma.
To measure the teacher pay gap, EPI researchers compare teacher salaries with the salaries of people who have the same number of years of education and the same demographic characteristics. This model assumes that education is interchangeable—that a bachelor's degree in education has the same market value as a bachelor's in engineering, and a master's in education is worth the same as a master's in business administration.
In the real world, employees are paid not only for the number of years they sat in a classroom, but according to the supply of and demand for the skills they developed there—skills that obviously vary across occupations. Nursing, for example, demands both technical knowledge and enormous attention to detail, as even a momentary lapse can endanger a patient's life. You can't reasonably conclude that nurses are "overpaid" simply because they earn more than typical college graduates. And it's just as illogical to assume that teachers are underpaid because they earn less—yet dozens of state and national media sources repeat the EPI figures as fact.
If you accept the Economic Policy Institute's findings, ludicrous conclusions follow. We used the same census data and the same techniques to figure out if other professions were "overpaid" or "underpaid." We could just as easily write papers publicizing the 25% "firefighter pay premium" or the 10% "massage therapist pay penalty" based on their methods. We could complain that aerospace engineers are overpaid by 38%, and we could demand justice for telemarketers who are shortchanged by 26%.
If public-school teachers were truly underpaid, we might expect teachers to reap much higher salaries when they switch to nonteaching jobs. They don't. We also might expect to see public-school teachers paid less than those in private schools. In fact, public-school teacher salaries are roughly 16% higher than in nonreligious private schools. We might expect that teachers would receive lower salaries than people whose jobs had similar skill requirements. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' National Compensation Survey, which includes job-skill requirements, fails to show a teacher pay penalty.
If any salary gap does exist, it is likely made up through teacher pensions, which are far more generous than private sector 401(k)s. The grass isn't always greener outside the classroom.
Mr. Richwine is a public-policy analyst based in Washington. Mr. Biggs is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
2 comments:
I remember seeing statistics that teachers colleges had the students with the lowest SAT scores of any college. Some of the stupidest people I have ever met were teachers. I had a high school science teacher who didn't understand Archimedes principle of displacement or Galileo's experiment--and taught the entire class wrong. Then consider that teachers have the entire summer off plus Christmas break, spring break, and many holidays. No matter how bad they are, they never get fired. Meanwhile teachers indoctrinate students with leftist, anti-white, and anti-American propaganda. And teacher's unions continually push for higher and higher taxes claiming it is "for the children" when they are only feathering their own nests. Finally, look at how poorly American kids do on international tests in spite of the enormous money paid for their education. No, considering what we are getting, teachers are highly OVERPAID.
The pension plans too are extraordinarily generous. What the teachers do is take no sick days and not personal days for the last three years of teaching. Then those days are credited toward the pay of the last month of work before retiring. That adds up to two months wage for the final until death pension pay out. A very choice and desirable retirement.
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