Regular reader Lloyd Lofthouse has gathered some useful information on teacher salaries.
He writes:
Here’s a link to a map that was published by The Washington Post that shows the average annual public school teachers pay for each state for 2013. Now, to be clear, an average means many teachers are paid less and some paid more.
Then here’s an opinion piece by Dave Eggers that appeared in the New York Times in 2011
The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries. What does Eggers say? Here’s a pull quote:
At the moment, the average teacher’s pay is on par with that of a toll taker or bartender. Teachers make 14 percent less than professionals in other occupations that require similar levels of education. In real terms, teachers’ salaries have declined for 30 years. The average starting salary is $39,000; the average ending salary — after 25 years in the profession — is $67,000. This prices teachers out of home ownership in 32 metropolitan areas, and makes raising a family on one salary near impossible.
So how do teachers cope? Sixty-two percent work outside the classroom to make ends meet.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Be sure to consider….NewYork is
1. Salary is 34% higher than the national average and New York City is more
2. New York is the highest compensated state in union
3. Pension and healthcare add 62% to the total while private sector is estimated at 30% in NYC
4. Vacation time and other time off total about 200% more than similar compensated profession in private sector in New York city
5.. The “package” for New York City teachers is twice the base average salary in the nation
Be sure to consider this:
1. The cost of living in New York is astronomical, as it is in New Jersey. Even in the current housing market, teachers cannot buy houses on the average salary in their own markets.
2. (See number one above.)
3. Pensions and benefits are part of total compensation for the work done, and these types of compensation are more affordable for districts to provide than actually paying teachers what they are worth monetarily. As well some states are not making their pension contributions while the teachers are paying more. Therefore, pensions are being funded on the backs of those who may not actually have access to their deferred compensation when they retire. Finally, teachers all over the country are paying more and more each year into their health benefits. Some states ask for a percentage of salary to go toward health care benefits thus penalizing their most experienced teachers
4. There is no such thing as “vacation” time for teachers. They are not paid for the days when schools are closed for holidays or winter, spring, or summer recess. If you think they get paid for these days, how do you think districts can expect teachers to work make-up days for inclement weather at the end of the school year? Do districts pay them extra for these extra days? No, because the days off for inclement weather are unpaid days off and the make-up days from the original schedule were originally UNPAID summer recess days. Therefore, teachers are called in to work these days–days that you call “vacation” days–with no extra pay. If your “vacation” time was taken away, you would expect to be paid. Teachers have no vacation time, period. They have unpaid forced days off and sometimes these days are not planned in the schedule. On top of this, I guarantee that the majority of teachers are doing work from home on snow days.
5. (See number one above.)
Stop cherry-picking statistics to favor a false point. Teachers are among the lowest paid professionals in their regions. National averages mean squat without COL stats attached to them.
I was being charitable by calling it vacation time. So lets make an adjustment. Since you are only paid for the nine months you teach (we won’t get picky and talk about Thanksgiving Holidays and Christmas Holidays, Spring break and Yon Kippur, etc), divide that (annual?) salary by 75% to reveal what your adjusted salary would be if you worked 12 months. The New York state average is now $100,372 before pensions and health care which in NYC would give you an complete compensation package of approximately $162,602 per annum. I didn’t use this calculation before because I knew it would draw flack and i didn’t want to “cherry pick” facts, but your argument calls for a response. And of course I understand the cost of living is higher, and yes, I believe New York teachers should earn more than Iowa. My point is simple. Compared to the rest of the nation’s teachers, and many, many professionals, New York City teachers are very highly compensated. I did not say improperly so, or you don’t deserve it.
I would add pay, pension and health care comparisons must take into account the type of job and qualifications. A favorite tactic of the anti teacher types is to lump in entry level, unskilled jobs in comparison with teaching to skew the numbers.
Other tactics by the anti-education crowd is to annualize teacher pay, ignore social security benefits for private sector jobs (teachers do not receive SS in our state), and include administrative salaries.
Also, salaries are usually compared using median, not average, to avoid the effect of outliers or skew. But in teachers case, the skew may be towards lower salaries since many leave within 5 years.
Call it the “summer layoff”. My employment agreement is for 10 1/2 months. Just like a 6 month consulting contract in business, workers are paid only for the terms of the agreement.
And I clear $21,800/yr after paying much more for pension and health care than my private sector relatives. That puts my family on food stamps. We aren’t going to solve poverty by putting teachers in it.
Gipper. Then I vote we raise other teachers salaries. See my previous comment on food stamps.
There’s two types of people in this debate. One that views education as an investment in the future, the other that views education as an annoying line item cost.
We don’t get paid for Christmas and Easter vacations, just like we don’t get paid for Suumer break. We get certain paid holidays and are compensated for between 180 to 185 days per year.
And we all paid into the NYS retirement system (which is extremely solvent).
The average salary is deceiving. I can assure you that many districts do not approach that average until the teacher is close to retirement age, if then.
Most starting salaries are in the low 30s (at least in Western New York). Those young teachers have to hold down a second job. Many teachers work over the summer to support their families.
It’s not all peaches and cream, I can assure you.
Also consider this before you spout off your garbage, Gipper:
I have 260 students and I get paid about $48,000 a year. With that many students, I teach each student for about $184.00 a year, or $1.00 per school day, before taxes.
This is the problem. When a comment doesn’t agree with your thoughts it is “garbage”. Why can’t we have a civil debate with different points of view? My point is simple, millions of people work as hard or harder than you do in various professions for the same or less money and we don’t hear half the carping we do from teachers on this blog.
Remember this….teachers are graduated, not ordained.
It IS garbage, Gipper, when you post flagrant lies about teachers’ “vacation” pay that they do NOT get. That is as repellent as the current “reformer”/right-wing talking point teachers are “part-time” workers.
They are salaried, non-exempt workers, and their salaries are based strictly on their contracted hours. They work many hours off the clock.
The reason teacher pay is so crummy is because it is seen as traditional women’s work, and female-dominated occupations are ALWAYS poorly compensated in relation to similar male-dominated work. That’s because there is an assumption made that women are married and supported by men, the real breadwinners, and they don’t need the big salaries men take for granted, assuming men can get those jobs to begin with.
Few jobs are as difficult as teaching, Gipper, and few have the responsibility involved and make crap pay for the effort.
You think it’s easy? Go get the training to be one and shut up.
Gipper – yes we have not been ordained, but the general public seems to think we are all Mother Teresa. Just because we love the children doesn’t mean we’ve taken a vow of poverty. This is supposed to be a career, not a sacrifice.
And I don’t find it humorous that the workers at MacDonalds will be earning more than some teachers by collecting $15 an hour.
When I was a beginning teacher in NYS, I qualified for food stamps and free lunch. That’s pathetic.
Teachers receive NO paid vacation. They have annual salaries spread out over 12 months, usually. They don’t qualify for unemployment benefits when they are laid off over the summer as they are expected to return to work in the fall.
Try taking sick leave for any extended period for a school district. You may find yourself out of a career because school districts don’t follow FMLA.
Skip the training.
Join the best and the brightest at TFA.
Are you am Ivy League grad?
All the better!
And yet you recently praised the proposed NYC teachers contract. The one that delays retro payout until 2015 and spreads it out through 2020. The contract that has two years of no raises, and then raises of 1 and 2 percent. This scheme is nothing more than an I.O.U. for teachers. You can’t be for fair compensation and for this contract at the same time.
It would be better to look at total compensation than salary. Fr many folks increases compensation might increase due to higher health insurance costs even as wages decreased.
In comparing teacher salaries to other jobs you might also ask if some of the difference comes from teachers having due process rights. If teachers were at will employees they might well have to be paid more to take the job.
Protection from unfair dismissal ought to be the right of every worker, not just teachers.
That may be, but in comparing across jobs it would be best to note that some job categories are filled with at will employees and others are filled with employees that have due process rights. Unless you think those due process rights have no value, we would expect that those jobs without due process rights are paid more than those with due process rights, ceteris paribus.
You have that right as a private sector worker. It’s called the civil court system. You have to be in a protected class to be able to get an attorney and get a settlement or win a judgment, but you do have that right. Administrative or government law regulations apply only to public employees because of property rights to keep a job.
All public sector workers have, through administrative law, is the right to an administrative hearing, which most don’t take. It is just one more step in the dismissal process, and these workers usually don’t win there. However, if they avail to this, they still have the right to sue. If they take a severance package (called “settlements” in educrat jargon), they waive that right.
FLERP! we need you.
Yes, at-will employees have the right to file and lose a lawsuit for wrongful termination. It’s priced into the job market across all industries, and probably at a very low price. Susan’s correct about the bottom line on this stuff most of the time, even if she gets the rationales wrong.
“At will dismissal” is deeply regressive. Teaching Economist has tipped his hand and revealed the real goal of the so-called education “reformers” – which is a return to the slave labor conditions of the early industrial revolution — or the Mississippi Delta of 1910.
You mistake my pointing out how the world works for advocating for the world working that way.
Do you think my actual argument is incorrect? That the difference between teacher salaries and other comparable salaries is in part explained by teachers have more job security than other compatible positions?
He’s a libertarian, and you can’t reason with these crackpots.
I don’t know why you think I am a libertarian. Im not.
TE, you’re NOT a libertarian by any means.
You’re a crackpot.
Robert,
Any thoughts about the arguments I have presented?
Looking at “total compensation” is a right-wing lie to further the claim teachers are “overpaid” for what “little” they do. You don’t eat on benefits. Of course, you are one of the resident trolls who has a vested interest in trashing public education for your nutball libertarian ideas.
You don’t have any rights as a teacher other than the “right’ to a rigged hearing. Few teachers opt for that but take severance packages that are common in private sector work.
Teachers will be NOT be paid more regardless of “due process rights” that are identical as other public employees because sexism is the reason the pay is crappy to begin with.
Sexism is probably involved with what are considered normal teachers salaries. Total compensation is important, however.
When employee benefit costs increase, these are costs that must be paid out of the same pot of money that salary comes from.
If teachers value due process rights they will be satisfied to be paid less than a similar job that does not have due process rights.
Are you kidding? I should take a lower salary for the right to a rigged hearing? In any case, I don’t think anyone ever said that teachers would be paid less in exchange for due process rights. Our guaranteed pensions/deferred compensation were supposed to make up for lower compensation. Of course, many of us are seeing how well that works. So switch to 401Ks and raise our salaries. Think that will happen?
Not that you should, it is that people do. In general people trade off lower salary for more security.
The more I hear about how K-12 tenure is nothing the right to a rigged hearing, the more I wonder why so many people seem to think eliminating tenure is such a big deal. Who cares, it’s nothing more than the right to a rigged hearing, right?
Click to access BriefingPaper299.pdf
“If teachers were at will employees they might well have to be paid more to take the job.”
That sounds to me, TE, like a conclusion from theory rather than an empirical observation and one based on a questionable free, rational actor model–the sort of observation that just screams “I’m not taking into account a lot of confounding or hidden variables.”
Theory and observation Robert.
Every job is a bundle of characteristics. One job might offer lower pay but greater benefits. Another might have less pleasant working conditions.
If you are faced with a choice of two jobs, one where there is a high probability that you will be unemployed next year and one where there is a low probability of being unemployed next year, why would you take the job that is likely to result in unemployment next year if both paid the same wage?
Steady work is does not have to pay as much as intermittent work to get folks to take the job.
I have no idea why this is upsetting people. I am making an emperical claim. True or false, my claim about reality has no impact on reality. People will do what they do, become teachers or not, quit teaching or not.
This is upsetting people because there is a concerted attack on due process for teachers occurring all across this country right now, and surely you know this. And these are theoretical arguments, not empirical ones, TE. In the real world, that one person brings many other decisions to taking a job, some of which are large enough factors to render completely moot whether this particular one is or is not being offered by a school system that has due process. Again, that sort of completely rational actor weighing all the factors model works on paper but often not in real life. In the real world, TE, if you happen to have a teaching certificate in elementary Reading, say, your options are fairly limited. And they are limited by matters of geography, often–people have to stay near the ailing mother or the boyfriend. And so that this job happens to offer no due process simply isn’t a determining factor, THOUGH IT IS A PAIN IN THE ARSE.
Robert,
If I were attacking due process rights in these posts I would understand why folks are upset. My posts, however, did not attack due process rights.
In the real world having steady work is one of the many factors that involve a decision to take a job or not. I work at well below market salary because I want to live in the same state as my family. If my university was required to pay me what they pay for a new tenure stream faculty member, they would not offer me the job. I trade off salary for locational preference. It seems to me the hight of arrogance to say that someone else should not be allowed to work for a salary that they find, all things considered, acceptable.
There is also the argument from academic freedom. I know a teacher who was recently teaching a play called “The Spirit of St. Louis,” which is about a boatload of Jewish refugees who tried to escape the Nazis just before the war but that was turned away by country after country, including the United States. That boat had to turn back, and almost all the folks aboard that boat ended up in death camps. Well, the students of this teacher had done set designs for a production of the play. One of the designs for one set contained a Nazi flag. A parent saw this design and called the principal, demanding that this teacher be fired. If the parent had been particularly powerful in the country or if the principal had had some sort of personal grudge against this teacher, then the teacher could have been fired over this incident, and due process would have protected her. Teachers see this kind of thing ALL THE TIME. Teachers deal with lots and lots of parents, and many of them are nuts at hot-headed, and they have to be careful. Teachers know this. We don’t want that care to cast a chill over their willingness to deal with controversial material in their classrooms.
That is a good justification for due process protections. My post had absolutely nothing to do with making any claim that due process protections were good or bad, so this post seems tangential to the discussion.
At any rate, this is all moot. Teachers have pretty much lost on this one. Teaching is rapidly becoming at will across the land. Administrators are being handed absolute power over their employees’ lives. If a principal wants to fire a teacher and replace that teacher with his mistress or his golfing buddy’s idiot son, that’s the way it is in many places now. There are many who will not be happy until those in power have absolute power to make whatever decisions they wish to make, on their own whim, over the lives of others. And you consider yourself, TE, to be arguing in favor of freedom?
Robert,
Again, my post made NO CLAIM THAT WE SHOULD OR SHOULD NOT HAVE DUE PROCESS RIGHTS.
Again, TE, I understood that.
I thought that I had clearly said that you were arguing an empirical hypothesis, not a normative one.
I did understand, TE, that you were making no claim that employees should not have due process rights, that that was not the claim that you had made. I thought that I had made it clear that I understood that and that I had then gone on to address the issue of due process rights.
To put it another way, it is upsetting to people because it is so devoid of humanity. With the current effort to digitize everything from student progress to grit and to tie that digital map to every educational management decision with little consideration of factors that do not have a digital surrogate(whether meaningful or not), TE dispassionate discussion of economic theory is bound to elicit outrage.
How did you go from my post that people will generally be willing to take lower compensation in exchange for higher job security to a digital map of every educational management system?
Ask Bob since I responded to him. If he understands what I said, perhaps he can explain it to you. If he can’t, then just ignore it. I either expressed myself poorly or your worldview won’t let you comprehend it. I often find myself skimming your posts, feel free to do the same to mine.
TE – there are just too many factors to make generalizations. On the face of it, one would choose a steady job, but in the current work environment, such a beast does not exist.
I worked for the Buffalo Public Schools for seven years and was a contract teacher (Buffalo’s version of tenure) when I was excessed the first time. My job was threatened on numerous other occasions, the last time (after sixteen years of service) I was number fifteen of the fifteen librarians left in service. Many of the laid off teachers in Western New York had worked for their district for ten or more years.
My daughter was a consultant at a local bank, a temporary job, but she thought long and hard before she took a permanent position there which paid less. She didn’t need the “attached” benefits because she was on her husband’s policy. She left that permanent job to take another temporary job at a higher pay which looked like it had potential, but after a year, the original job stole her back (with another boost on salary).
Now, even though these jobs were in business, they are not unique. It is presumed the current generation will have numerous jobs in various careers. Being a teacher in the same school for an entire career, even for my generation, is rare.
Actually we can make generalizations. Women get paid less then men for jobs that require the same qualifications as men. High school graduates get higher incomes than non graduates. College graduates get higher incomes than high school graduates (yes not true for Bill Gates and Michael Dell), Jobs that have a higher risk of injury will pay more than those that don’t. Insecure jobs have to pay more than secure ones to attract people to take the job.
TE – I agree with the first two statements, but could actually argue with the others. The addition of the word, most often, would make them more accurate.
How frustrating for you to try and make a simple point and have us argue all around your intention.
However, I still don’t agree with your original premise. It is true for you, and for many others, but the upcoming generation is working under a different mindset. They are more mobile and willing to take chances. It’s a new world and we are still living within the confines of the old. Job security is not their priority.
That said, my second daughter is working at one of the few hospitals that’s a part of the NYS retirement system. It’s probably the tenth job she has had in her career path. It’s also the first one she actually likes (at least at the moment). I am encouraging her to keep this one. Not just because it is in Buffalo, but because of the excellent pension it provides. She is staying put for now, but she also has her eyes on other career opportunities. I wouldn’t place bets on her following my advice.
TE – it’s a different world.
I predict that if the current political environment against teachers continues, the school districts will have a difficult time finding teachers and will have to offer incentives, such as “signing bonuses” to attract personnel. They will need TFAs because Certified Teachers will be scarce. This is already a problem in some areas. And that job security you mentioned will be nonexistent (it already is in some places). Looking at the salaries in some states, I wonder how they staff their schools now. There must be a lot of Mother Teresa’s out there. God bless them (the government definitely takes them for granted).
Bob, this is a basic, uncontroversial statement of what should be true in any labor market, other things being equal. Yes, in the real world, other things are never equal. But if there are other factors that make this statement untrue, the natural question is what are those other factors, and how do they work to change the general rule?
So, according to that study I just posted, wages are lower in right-to-work states. Theoretically, raising the minimum wage should decrease the number of minimum-wage jobs. That seems obvious. But I’ve read a LOT of the literature on that subject, and it’s really inconclusive and seems to vary based on the industry and on a lot of confounding factors. I’ve seen quite a bit of conflicting research on such questions, and they all return us to the fact that economists often simply in order to establish general laws but that those simplifications often distort for people are not fully informed rational actors, and it is often impossible to conduct genuine tests of hypotheses because one cannot often identify the relevant variables or control for them.
Simplifications always distort. Let me quote from my favorite applied statisticians, Bill James:
The search for understanding, wherever it roams, is a search for better simplifications-simplifications which explain more and distort less. Even the understanding gained from experience is, of course, a simplification of experience into the generalizations which are distilled from many experiences.
The idea that people are willing to pay money in order to reduce risk of lower income is played out every day in insurance markets. The idea that people will trade off higher average earnings for higher minimum earnings is played out every day as well.
TE, when I was around nine or ten years old, I cut out an order form from an issue of The Sporting News, mailed it off with a check, and, a couple weeks later, received my copy of the Baseball Abstract. I probably spent more time with it than I’ve spent with any other book to date, with the possible exceptions of the subsequent Baseball Abstracts.
Bill is a great applied statistician. He once said that all he ever did is take what he learned in his economics classes and applied it to baseball.
Now, I am not someone who thinks that we should throw up our hands and stop doing economics because of these complexities, but I am someone who believes that we should be very, very cautious about making policy decisions based upon highly abstracted theoretical models when there is very good reason for being skeptical. I happen to think that people work very, very well in conditions of reasonable autonomy and security, and the life experience that has led me to that view raises, I think, an interesting challenge to “right-to-work” laws that bears investigating. Life is messy. This is not physics we’re talking about here. It’s economics.
Robert,
My post here involved no policy decisions. In economics we distinguish between normative and positive statements. Normative statements are about what should be, what the policy decision should be. Positive statements are about what is, the facts of the world. My statement that people will trade off job security for lower compensation is a positive statement, a statement about what people do.
I understood that, TE. And I argued that I have doubts about that actually being a trade-off that people make, that I think other factors probably make that one entirely moot.
TE, I suggest you learn how to speak in language that we all understand rather than economic jargon. I am not interested in a course in economic jargon; it takes enough energy to master “educationese” that would seem to be more useful on this blog. I suspect that you understand perfectly well what most of us say and choose to obfuscate the situation by injecting economic terminology.
What jargon did I use that I did not explain?
“…and they all return us to the fact that economists often simply in order to establish general laws but that those simplifications often distort for people are not fully informed rational actors,…”
Bob, can you clarify this statement? Did you mean that “economists often ‘simplify’ in order to establish general laws?” (I think auto-correct took over.)
To TE’s point, when I was a young man studying literature and linguistics, personal autonomy was very, very important to me (it still is), and so the fact that actual tenure was fairly common in those days was a factor in my weighting of possible career options. However, after teaching for a time, I decided to go into publishing instead because THE YEAR I LEFT TEACHING I TRIPLED MY SALARY.
I have many concerns about the ending of due process for teachers, and again, these come from personal experience. I’ve had a lot of friends who were teachers, over the years, and I have spent many decades in and out of schools doing projects of one kind or another, and I have seen an awful lot of administrative pettiness, misfeasance, and malfeasance, and due process is a check on that. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
yes, LG, I meant simplify, not simply. I type too quickly and am often a victim of autocorrect or of miskeying.
And so, a couple hypotheses worthy of consideration that bear upon the matter of due process for teachers:
1. that elimination of due process does NOT tend to increase teacher wages because various confounding factors, such as job scarcity in a particular geographical region to which job candidates are tied, render moot the serious consideration by potential employees of due process as a major factor in choosing this career. I’m sure that if we sat and brainstormed this, we could come up with quite a list of such potentially confounding factors.
2. that good teachers often lose their jobs for inappropriate reasons in places where there is no due process as a check on administrative authority
Robert,
You need to asses the counterfactual, think about what would happen in two labor markets where everything other than job security were the same. We are trying to isolate the impact of one aspect of a job from everything else, and do not have the luxury of a controlled experiment in order to do the isolation.
The proper scientific spirit is skepticism about these theoretical claims. As Thomas Huxley said, “One must sit down before the facts like a little child.” I’m quoting that from memory, so the quotation is probably not verbatim.
And, because they distort, we should be careful about policy decision A based on them ESPECIALLY WHEN THERE ARE OTHER REASONS–sound ones–for making decision B instead.
You are a very bright fellow, TE. Why not put that fine mind of yours to the task of figuring out how academic freedom among K-12 teachers might be protected? That seems to me like a more interesting question.
“Teachers deal with lots and lots of parents, and many of them are nuts at hot-headed, and they have to be careful. Teachers know this. We don’t want that care to cast a chill over their willingness to deal with controversial material in their classrooms.”
Bob, it doesn’t have to even be universally controversial material. There are instances where anyone can find fault with anything. As a music teacher in charge of winter assemblies, I can attest to this. You cannot please everyone whether by inclusion, omission, or synthesis of ideas.
A strong administrator who has your back is rare, but I count myself lucky to have one. In the name of public sensitivity, I always inform him of the content of the materials I am introducing to the students. This way, he also defends that which he has approved. Keep your immediate supervisor in the loop and document EVERYTHING. You work as a team, not as two opposing forces. If you feel you have to go rogue, perhaps you are in the wrong school?
I ENTIRELY CONCUR with this advice, and that is one of the jobs of the teacher, to work WITH his or her administrators and parents and community. I was not talking, there, about the general picture. I was talking about the incidents that sometimes occur with particular individuals. We have millions of teachers and administrators in this country. Some will be bad apples. I have a friend whose married department chairperson came on to him sexually/romantically. That department chairperson spent the rest of the year angry and upset and worried that he was going to be outed by his subordinate. Things happen. Due process is important.
That difficulty in assessing the relevant counterfactuals is just the issue that I raised.
Yet it is required if we are to determine if job security plays a role in a person taking a job or does not play a role in a person taking a job.
I am shocked that this is at all controversial.
So, TE, the issue that you raise, that people have not distinguished, in their comments to you, between the empirical hypothesis that you have put forward and a normative one, is valid, certainly. However, as an economist, you study, among other things, what motivates people to make decisions, and it should be obvious enough to you that right now, in the United States, ALEC has drawn up model legislation that has been passed in state after state after state that ends due process for teachers, and many of the responders on this blog are teachers, and they are upset about this for reasons that are obvious enough. Much very real damage is being done by that legislation. That science teacher in LA whose kid made the device for lobbing an egg (a chestnut, that, like the battery made of lemons) would have lost his job if he had not been able to defend himself in a hearing. That could have had a devastating impact on him and on his family. These days, EVERY TEACHER APPLICATION asks, “have you ever been denied tenure, been fired from a teaching job, or had a license revoked?” And if you answer yes to any of those questions, you will not be considered. Losing that job means losing ANY POSSIBILITY OF TEACHING IN THE FUTURE. That’s an enormous price. In such a situation, having the opportunity to defend oneself in a hearing seems reasonable, rational, just.
Robert,
Again that is not what I was posting about.
It does seem to me that there is a general tension on this blog between 1) advocating for more government control over education and 2) advocating against what the government does when it asserts more control over education.
It may well be that state legislatures are making foolish decisions. Lord knows my state legislature makes foolish decisions all the time. The best way to address this is for citizens in the state to stop electing fools.
I agree, and I do understand that that was not what you were posting about. I’m just responding to your surprise at being attacked for the statements that you made. I think this entirely predictable in the current climate.
On another matter, I find it interesting that the current Ed Deforms are creating a lot of strange bedfellows. Organizations traditionally on the right–Brookings, Hoover, the Chamber, the Business Roundtable–are getting majorly behind centralization and regulation of curricula and pedagogy and assessment. Individuals on the left are arguing for more local control. Interesting times.
It does seem to me that there is a general tension on this blog between 1) advocating for more government control over education and 2) advocating against what the government does when it asserts more control over education.
I agree. And that tension is paralleled by a tension in the Ed Deform community between arguing for less government control over parents’ ability to choose the schools their kids go to and more government control over what is taught to whom, when, and how, and how that teaching is assessed. I have been clear about where I stand on this. I favor local autonomy within very broad guidelines requiring equitable access to free public schooling. I also favor relaxing guidelines on creation of alternatives to that schooling but NOT, I think, public funding of those alternatives. I have come to the latter view because I’ve seen far, far too much gift in the publicly funded charter sector. However, I continue to have an open mind about this because the bottom line for me is that kids differ and that schooling must meet them where they are and develop intrinsic motivation and unique potentials along very differing lines, for ours is a complex, diverse, pluralistic society that does not need for students to be identically milled. I am loathe to undermine a public school system that has been, historically, so enormously successful–a great means by which individual potential has been realized. On the other hand, there is a tendency withing public schooling systems toward centralization and regimentation that is, I believe, counterproductive.
LG’s point, here, about teachers and administrators working together rather than antagonistically cannot be emphasized enough. Principals are very, very exposed to the ire of particular parents or school board members with particular beefs. ANYTHING that happens in a school reflects on that principal, and principals CANNOT know everything, and so there is a great deal of insecurity built into the job. There’s a lot of churn of principals. I’ve seen a lot of them go down for terrible reasons. A principal’s voice mail is always filled with angry messages from parents. He or she has to be a capable diplomat. And teachers must understand this–that the pressures on them not to offend ANYONE are magnified exponentially for many administrators.
“think about what would happen in two labor markets where everything other than job security were the same. We are trying to isolate the impact of one aspect of a job from everything else, and do not have the luxury of a controlled experiment in order to do the isolation.”
That’s the very point that I thought I had made. The theoretical isolation of that one aspect often turns out to have no real-world relevance because of confounding factors. And that’s why we must be very careful not to make policy decisions based on such theoretical arguments alone. And one of the things we must do when we make those policy decisions is to consider possible confounding factors.
Consider, for example, the study that was done of the effect on number of jobs in the fast food industry in New Jersey of an increase, there, in the minimum wage. It turns out that the increase had no effect whatsoever on the number of jobs available. So, the empirical result runs counter to the theoretical prediction, and so there has to be something wrong with the theory IN THIS CASE. That presents a problem for further research.
The Card Krueger paper was very interesting.
This is the world that economists inhabit: a thousand different factors impacting every decision made by millions of different people.
Let me remind you of my post that started this all. I said
1) it would be better to look at compensation than salary
2) that salaries in occupations that have more job security are likely to be lower than salaries in occupations with less job security.
My second point IS your point, that jobs differ from each other in a myriad of ways, so that the simple comparison of teacher salaries to salaries of other occupations is not very informative unless you account for at least some of the ways that the jobs differ from each other.
That’s well said, TE.
TE, the hierarchy and salary structure at the college/university level is very different from that of the public school system.
And districts within the public school system vary. In Buffalo, our pay is much lower, but we have free health insurance (with a cosmetic rider). The only reason this structure still exists is because there has been no contract for over ten years. That is also why the salary listed as average for NYS (whose accuracy I question) is the highest salary in Buffalo. Of course, NYS has the Taylor Law (which will take a constitutional convention to remove) that both protects and penalizes teachers. FYI: If a teacher attends a paid inservice (after hours or on a Saturday), the salary is only a little more than that proposed $15 an hour minimum wage.
I am making a general point about labor markets, not about public employees.
TE, and as the bad old days of education would indicate, they would likely never have a pension or raise after hire, they would be let go before they could attain any of those things. The real fight here is that people of your mind love the churn. Schools are social institutions that need stability to function well. Why shouldn’t everyone have the right to earn a living? Companies would make nothing without workers. Why shouldn’t the workers share in the prosperity? I think everyone should have the security of knowing they will have a job as long as they do their job. No one should be in constant fear of losing their means of securing their basic needs. I guess in some sectors we haven’t advanced from the stone age in our thinking.
Old teacher,
First, see my comment above.
When you say everyone should have a job, do you mean that everyone should be able to keep the job they have until they decide to retire or do you mean that everyone should have the possibility of having some job until they choose to retire? I think the latter is feasible, while the former would introduce such rigidity into the economy as to make it unworkable.
I support a living wage so that regardless of your job, there is the assurance that you can pay for the essentials of life, shelter, food, medical care. A guaranteed pension after a given number of years working is also something I would favor. Some might call this socialism. Unfettered capitalism, even Adam Smith warned of this, seems to be the rage today, and it is non serving us well.
Fat finger syndrome, unfettered capitalism is not serving us well today.
I am still unclear about your original point. Would you require an institution to employ and individual until the individual chooses to retire or is it enough that there is some job available to every individual, not necessarily with the same institution?
What would you do with the people that institutions do not choose to employ at the living wage?
I would stand with Theodore Roosevelt, “No business which depends for its existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.” Yes T.E. I would make it the law of the land. As long as the person is capable of working they should be allowed to continue, providing they are doing the work. I could accept the notion of moving to different jobs. I do not accept the notion of business just firing people as a cost saving measure. Our social structure has allowed them to prosper, so in a sense, they did not succeed alone despite what the libertarians believe. They should help maintain a decent and fit society.
How would you have businesses save on costs? One advantage of business having to make a profit is that it helps prevent us from destroying value. What would you have a business do that uses $100,000 of resources to create goods or services that society values at $80,000? Should any such business be required to close completely rather than find a way to use fewer resources?
Your arguments would justify slavery. The worker is worthy of his hire.
Business saves on costs, especially big business. Look at the tax loopholes and the offshore taxhavens and de-regulation in the invesmtment community. Look at tax saving incentives for businesses and look at their participation in ALEC. Look at how Tyson Foods rigs the market for the price of chicken, or are you unaware?
Grow up, TE.
The more you write, the stupider you sound.
That was almost some thoughts about the argument i presented. Good job.
I should add that government distortions do screw things up, but it is not really an argument to put the government in charge of more things, is it?
What business does that? It seems I am consistently paying more for things than they are worth, you know, my house, my car, etc. Are you saying that business makes bad decisions? I know where you are trying to lead, but I am not going there. I do not believe in subsidizing their profits through tax incentives, or low wage allowances. If you can not afford to be in business, don’t be in business. Don’t ask us to sanction slave like wages, tax breaks that allow the use of our streets, our fire and police services, and not demand the payment of taxes by large businesses to help pay for these things, Also, major corporations use our services to subsidize their low wages. Enough already. Maybe business could make less profit if they have more costs. I know, how dare I suggest such a thing.
Why do you pay more for a good than it is valued to you?
I agree that businesses that make economic losses should close. Economists generally look to entry into a market to reduce profits to normal (for economists this means zero) economic profits.
What happens to the employees of the business that has closed?
Education is not a business, but an investment made by society. TE, you are full of the most egregious bull.
You might ask Lloyd if his daughter’s education at Stanford is being paid for by society.
I am not sure what your objection to not destroying value might be. A decade or so ago there was some concern that the myriad subsidies around the production of ethanol resulted in ethanol producers using more than a gallon of gasoline to make a gallon of ethanol. Surely you can see the folly of that.
TE is an unfortunate idiot, and he should form his own blog so that all of 12 people worldwide would read his posts.
Robert,
Alas, back to calling names. What problems do you have with my argument?
Robert, for better or for worse, TE represents the opinion of the majority of the population. There isn’t a lot of support for teachers, most feel we are over paid and under worked.
Our only chance to make headway is that the CCSS has made some parents, especially suburban parents in affluent districts, very angry. They know that something is not right and they are not blaming the teachers.
Educating everyone else, even with Diane on our side, is going to be an uphill battle.
So, hone your skills on TE. He is a worthy adversary. If you can convince him, you might have a chance of swaying the rest of our opponents.
Ellen,
I have certainly said nothing here that is not supportive of teachers. I have made an empirical claim that everyone prefers steady work to intermittent work, so that those offering steady work can pay less on a ore unit basis (hour or year) and still get folks to take the job.
Actually they would not. Freedom of choice is essential for this to work, and slavery is the antithises of freedom of choice.
Yes, they are free to get a job at Walmart.
Or with a hundred other employers even in my small town.
Sorry. The NYS average salary is deceiving. In the Buffalo Public Schools $75,000 is the top salary after thirty years of service with thirty extra hours of course study above a Master’s degree. Not many ever make that much. I was one of the top paid teachers, but I never reached the top salary.
Some Administrators, however, made over $100,000.
I would think 75k in Buffalo goes a lot further than 100k in NYC.
The map of average salaries should be paired with average length of service data. Also wondering if this map used base salaries? Would prefer to the map have starting and max base salaries and number of years to max.
NY salary data is skewed for two reasons. NYC teachers (1/3 of workforce) reach max salary after only 8 years of service. Long Island/Westchester teacher salaries are off the charts high in some of the most affluent school districts in the country. Upstate teachers typically don’t reach max salaries until they have worked for 24 years or longer.
They further want to walmartize teachers’ salaries until they are perhaps called greeters instead of teachers, at $8.75 hourly, part time, without benefits. Walmart can train them for 5 weeks at walmart, Kopp can join them, and the joint venture will be called walmart for america.
Does Walmart hire old people?
Parents and taxpayers value K-12 teaching. They don’t want to sacrifice full-time professionals because they understand that it means children will receive lesser quality instruction. Further, they don’t want to short-change children so that hedge fund owners and convicted criminals can enrich themselves.
On the other hand, universities decided their mission could be filled with a faculty of 25% full-time professionals, except in sports and administration, where apparently, full-time, well-paid employees are essential. Teaching Economist’s colleagues, 75% of them, earn $12,000-$15,000 for two semesters of work, with no benefits. Can te make the case that he is worth the differential he receives?
What differential do I receive?
Adjunct? Defending the servitude system?
I am not a tenure stream faculty member, so I wonder what differential you are talking about.
As a general rule teacher salaries correlate to the affluence of the district. We get paid relative to the value that parents/taxpayers view the value of education.
Do the affluent place a higher value on education than the non-affluent?
The affluent have time to think about it.
The affluent have the money to do more than think about it.
High local property taxes used to support education can also result in a more affluent school district. The relatively poor may we’ll be reluctant to move into a high tax jurisdiction. Zoning laws about lot size, multifamily units, and the number of unrelated people living in a house can also serve to keep the relatively poor out of the district.
“may well be reluctant to move”
They want to eat, instead?
Allocating scarce resources among competing priorities, like living in a McMansion, is a bear, when you don’t know where your next meal is coming from.
Exactly correct. There are many ways a community can prevent low income households into the school district. That contributes to the very SES segregation in residences.
Affluent district generally have more resources to pay higher salaries. Whether they value education more is somewhat debatable. On one level they may but by the same token there are people in poorer districts that value it just a much but just can’t pay for it.
I find that $49,000 figure for AZ a complete fallacy. Jan Brewer slashed education funding for six years, and in my district we haven’t had a pay raise or moved any steps in eight years. The link is to the Tucson Unified School District salary schedule (p. 59). A teacher will hit $49,000 after 31 years. TUSD is the second largest district in AZ. There is no way that is the average salary in AZ.
Click to access 13-14Consensus.pdf
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Time to turn this thing around!
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