Americans and their political leaders claim to highly value the teachers who are the key to meeting the unrelenting demands for improved public schools. Yet they continue to deny teachers adequate compensation.
The foregoing is the opening paragraph of an April 9 Tom Paine piece entitled Undervaluing Teachers. The author is Dick Meister, a journalist based in San Francisco who has spent many years covering labor and education issues. An exploration of the article provides some useful data about teacher compensation, although I think Meister does not fully explicate all the reasons for the pattern he finds. I will, after going through his data, attempt to do so.
The basis of Meister's analysis is a recent survey by the American Federation of Teachers which found the mean teacher pay in 2005 a bit over $47,000, which is only 2@ more than it was the previous year. That compares with an inflation rate during that year of 3.5%. Beginning teachers averaged about $32,000 in 2005, up about 3%, and as he notes, often simultaneously had to confront paying off thousands in student loans at the same time as they had to pay high housing costs, to the point where even renting an apartment in the communities in which they taught was a real stretch and purchasing a home was totally impossible.
I will not do too much direct quoting - you can read the entire piece fairly quickly. There are two paragraphs I want to be sure you have read before my comments:
All 22 of the other professions, such as engineering, accounting, computer programming and the law, that the Labor Department lists as requiring college degrees, paid much better—an average of $16,000 a year better. Teachers, who must have master’s degrees and who average 16 years of experience, did do better than workers generally—but only six percent better.
The situation hasn’t improved much over the years. After adjusting for inflation, it turns out that teachers averaged just $487 more in 2005 than they did 10 years earlier, as compared to the $4,600 increase of the average worker in private industry. The teachers’ 2005 average actually was $800 lower than their average in 2003.
The AFT worries that if there is a continuation of current trends of nominal teacher pay increasing so much less than inflation and the average pay of other occupations, we will quickly reach a point where etachers make less than do average workers, and that the position of teachers compared to other occupations will continue to deteriorate. Remember this point. AFT urges raising teacher pay 30% over the next decade to an average of $61,000, and that this would cost about $15 billion a year, just over 3% of the current total costs of K-12 public education. Remember this as well.
The key to Meister's arguments is that all that has happened
when parents, the general public and government officials are holding teachers accountable for the perceived failures of the educational system, and demanding that they do much more than they’re already doing, for less than they might make doing something far less demanding.
and he concludes by stating
It’s absolutely clear, in any case, that Americans will have to start putting much more money into teacher salaries if their demands for improved schools are ever to be realized.
Pay is not the only issue - the related issues of lessened health and pension benefits discourage many from entering and/or staying in the field. But I intend to focus on the pay issues, even though the article says one in three of those who leave in teaching in the first 10 years cites low pay as the primary reason.
Wwe have seen recent screeds (the term is deliberately used) from people like Jay Greene of the Manhattan Institute who argue that compared to other professions teachers are overpaid. Those calculation are usually based inappropriately on the stated hours a teacher is in school (as if we did no work outside) and the length of the school year, minus holidays. Thus a nominal hourly wage is computed, even though the government agency which provided the data which Greene used says that the data cannot be used in such a fashion. I am also aware of how often the work of Eric Hanushek (now at Hoover Institute) is cited to "prove" that there is no correlation between increasing school expenditures and increased school performance (not that I am a fan of using test scores for such a purpose), even though his work has been taken apart by people such as Laine, Hedges, and Greenwald, and Alan Krueger has reanalyzed the data Hanushek used to demonstrate how he misused and misinterpreted that data.
There are some critics of education who argue for differential pay based on the shortage of teachers in things like science, math, and certain key foreign languages. Some argue on the basis of shortages of people entering engineering and technical fields, and the increasing use of H1B visas to obtain foreign workers for such fields. Yet right here is a contradiction. One reason for the shortage of American workers in such fields is that the pay and security of such jobs has disappeared in recent years, in part because of the ability of American corporations either to import workers or export jobs.
At the same time we regularly hear criticisms of the quality of those entering teaching programs as based by their SAT scores (as if those scores bore any relationship to the ability to teach - they are at best a weaker predictor of first year college performance than are high school transcripts, and increasingly they are optional at a number of good or even outstanding post-secondary institutions). But let's use the economic argument: if we want better quality teachers the pay for teaching clearly must be more competitive with that for other occupations for which college can prepare one, otherwise it is hard to attract quality students to a career in teaching.
Here I need to note one weakness in the argument as presented by Meister. I do not believe you can use one national mean figure as a basis of comparison. First, there are incredible difference, both for starting pay and mean pay across the country. This is in part a function of cost of living, but it is also often a function of the wealth of the local district, and their willingness to pay more to attract and keep better teachers. Second, an overall mean salary is distorted by the high turnover in early years. Since the overwhelming majority of teachers have their pay based on a combination of seniority and education (and some of the latter is obtained while one is teaching), high turnover in the earlier years inevitably distorts the mean to the left - the lower end of the pay range. But while I offer this cautionary note, I also note the phenomenon of high turnover in the early years of teaching is not new, thus the comparisons of relative positioning of teacher pay versus other occupations or versus increases in the cost of living remains valid. There is also no accounting for what may bve a new phenomenon, which is that of experienced teachers retiring earlier - those who often stayed past the date upon which they COULD retire seem to be increasingly declining to continue in the classroom - this will be having an impact upon an overall mean pay number, although there is not as yet good data on this.
Let me return to the items I asked you to remember. This nation needs to decide how important it thinks education is. The educational expenditures that have been increasing - for testing and test prep for example - do not lead to any real increase in effective learning. Tests provide information, but if that information is not meaningful in the first place, nor provided in a timely enough fashion to assist in modifying instruction, the expenditure does not improve learning.
Second, there is no doubt that we have seen an increasing lack of respect for the craft of teaching. We see it regularly in attacks on the quality of people entering the field, in attacks on the unions that attempt to obtain and maintain livable wages and decent working conditions for teachers and for educational paraprofessionals. Pay is a part of this. Why submit oneself to the abuse for lower pay than one could obtain in other fields, and for far less aggravation? I think here of a teacher in my building, a very experienced gym teacher and coach, who makes more money painting houses than he does for a similar amount of time working in the school. Or of the guy in the room next to me in one school who as a first year teacher with a Masters in a relatively high-paying district made about the same amount of money as he did for working weekends as a waiter in one of DC's best known restaurants.
We know that decreasing class size and overall teacher load have a significant impact upon student learning. But we lack both the classrooms and the teachers to accomplish the reductions,and even at current rates of pay the costs to achieve this are phenomenal. Some might argue that the reductions are more important than paying current teachers more, and thus approach the issues as a zero sum game. We must lose that mentality.
If we think education is important, we ought to be willing to totally reexamine how we approach it. That includes the recruiting and retention of qualified classroom personnell. And to address that, we will have to address the issue of teacher compensation. We should look not only at what the costs will be, but also what benefits will accrue as a result of changing our approach to teacher compensation and utilization. I suspect that the costs may be far higher than the $15 billion per annum cited by Meister, but I also suspect that, properly evaluated, the benefits that we obtain as a result will be several times as great.
Meanwhile, if we do not want to continue digging ourselves into a deep hole educationally, we need to address the issue of the compensation of the teachers we currently have that we want to keep. The more experience we lost the harder it will be to expect that other educational policies will result in more learning. If teacher compensation continues to lag compared either with inflationary pressures or with the increases available in other professions, we will find an increasing number of experienced teachers leaving the field while they could still be productive, and fewer qualified people willing to enter the field. The resulting lower average compensation may keep costs down, but it will not assist us in improving the education of our students.
And that is probably enough for one diary.