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The liberal Economic Policy Institute published a white paper Tuesday showing that in “2015, public school teachers’ weekly wages were 17.0 percent lower than those of comparable workers—compared with just 1.8 percent lower in 1994.” Even when factoring in the trade-offs between wages and benefits, teachers still come in at 11.1 percent less than similarly educated professionals.
EPI has studied this trend for more than a decade: ”Our body of work has documented the relative erosion of teacher pay. In 1960, female teachers enjoyed a wage premium compared with other college graduates. By the early 1980s, the teacher premium became a penalty, and the female teacher pay gap post-1996 has widened considerably.” Over the 20-year period that began in 1996, EPI researchers Sylvia Allegretto and Lawrence Mishel found as wages for college graduates increased, wages for teachers fell by $30 a week. They also found:
"The erosion of relative teacher wages has fallen most heavily on experienced teachers. Year after year, the most experienced teacher cohort has undergone a prolonged deterioration in relative wages throughout the entirety of our analysis.”
In not a single state nor the District of Columbia do teachers receive pay comparable to that of other college graduates. EPI found that unionized teachers have a lower relative wage gap than those without collective bargaining. But the gap is still large for teachers represented by a union. Part of that can be chalked up to the damage done to teaching staffs by the drastic public sector layoffs of the Great Recession. Many of those teaching positions have still not been restored.
Over the past few decades, there have been significantly lower numbers of people entering the education field and a significant increase in the numbers of veteran teachers who leave mid-career for other jobs. A recent survey of college-bound students found only 5 percent of them interested in an education career. That is a 16 percent drop between 2010 and 2014. How much the pay gap is a factor in this shift isn’t known, but it stands to reason that it have at least some impact.
Some other details from the report:
- Measured in 2015 dollars, average weekly wages of public-sector teachers fell from $1,122 to $1,092 in the 1996-2015 period. Weekly wages of all college graduates rose from $1,292 to $1,416 in the same period.
- In 1960, female teachers earned 14.7 percent more in weekly wages than comparable women workers in other fields. In 2015, women teachers earned ‑13.9 percent less in weekly wages than comparably educated women in other fields.
- For men it’s worse. The male teacher wage gap was -22.1 percent in 1979 and improved to ‑15.0 percent in the mid-1990s. But it worsened in the late 1990s, and by 2015, it clocked in at ‑24.5 percent.
- The wage gap has hit experienced teachers harder than rookies. The relative wage of the most experienced teachers has fallen from a 1.9 percent advantage in 1996 to a 17.8 percent penalty in 2015.