The Economic Policy Institute is one of the few D.C.-based think tanks that is not indebted to billionaires. It is decidedly liberal and supports workers, fairness, equity, and unions.
Its latest study, by Sylvia Allegretto and Lawrence Mishel, shows that teacher pay has fallen behind comparable workers.
Here is the summary:
What this report finds: The teacher pay penalty is bigger than ever. 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. This erosion of relative teacher wages has fallen more heavily on experienced teachers than on entry-level teachers. Importantly, collective bargaining can help to abate this teacher wage penalty. Some of the increase in the teacher wage penalty may be attributed to a trade-off between wages and benefits. Even so, teachers’ compensation (wages plus benefits) was 11.1 percent lower than that of comparable workers in 2015.
Why this matters: An effective teacher is the most important school-based determinant of education outcomes. It is therefore crucial that school districts recruit and retain high-quality teachers. This is particularly difficult at a time when the supply of teachers is constrained by high turnover rates, annual retirements of longtime teachers, and a decline in students opting for a teaching career—and when demand for teachers is rising due to rigorous national student performance standards and many locales’ mandates to shrink class sizes. In light of these challenges, providing adequate wages and benefits is a crucial tool for attracting and keeping the teachers America’s children need.
Reformers insist on merit pay, performance pay, differential pay, bonuses for test scores, and signing bonuses for high SAT scores posted years earlier. What they do not support is overall improvement in teachers’ salaries.
80% of the teaching force is female. Does sexism play a part?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Is anyone surprised? School districts will do anything they can to shed old/experienced teachers. They are hoping there will be enough sweet, young things who have a passion for teaching. Judging from the number of teachers leaving the profession, it won’t take long for them to become jaded. At least if they leave while they are young, they can pursue another career. What does a 60+ year old career teacher do? The bills don’t go away. Maybe that is why one district I know has been staffing their schools with subs. There are plenty of experienced teachers trying to make ends meet.
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I am not certain that the “comparable workers” research in this link sheds much light on the subject. The study actually shows a larger wage penalty in teaching for males than it does for females. Comparable seems to mean employed persons with a college degree in a professional occupation.
Beyond that, the comments on the last link are mostly vitriol and comparable to that spewed by Trump.
Do I think there is rampant sexism in teaching? Yes, but that is also deeply embedded in many of our institutions and institutional arrangements. Imagine that only men could be teachers and that only women could be members of Congress.
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I’m embarrassed to write that without a college degree, as an office worker, I earn $20,000 more than my child, who is a teacher. Wrap your heads around that. I was in the right place at the right time, and have 30 years experience performing my job, which has changed vastly in 30 years due to technology, and I’m on top of it.
I’m considered a good worker who has always received excellent reviews – however, the company that employs me has, in the past 20 years, reduced staff in my position from 120 to 37, much of that occurring within the last 5 years. I have been lucky to escape “reduction in staff” many times, but in the next couple of years, my turn will come. I will not volunteer myself to fall on the sword, and at 58 years old, I fear I’d be unemployable in this dying field, and be lucky to get a minimum wage job–and perhaps even then, they wouldn’t want me.
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Therlo
Your experience has been the sad truth of the American worker, wages, benefits and job security have fallen . Much of generational . Even among boomers it has been a matter of falling into a protected niche. “There but for fortune”
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it generational
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American workers today work under a Sword of Damocles. The computer profession was once well paying, but the myth of a “skills gap” resulted in a rush of H1b workers from overseas to replace Americans. All I hear is head-shaking, patronizing lectures from Democrats and Republicans alike that the loss of good jobs is some inevitable result of globalization. We’d better stop globalizing working Americans out of jobs or Trump is just the beginning of what could be a worse parade of demagogues until one actually wins. American workers turn towards Trump because they not only lost jobs, they lost dignity. You have college graduates and 30 year tech workers serving fries for minimum wage. Wake up, Democrats, or you will lose this thing.
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Vale Math
to your point today on Moyers
http://billmoyers.com/story/half-life-deindustrialization-donald-trump-just-symptom/
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Joel,
Elites do not get it. Establishment does not get it. Democrats do not get it. Republicans do not get it. Trump gets it. And that is dangerous.
People in former steel and coal towns are not stupid nor lazy as portrayed by Democratic elites or to be ridiculed by Republican blue bloods and industrialists. They are to be admired for building America with sweat and blood. And that’s not an overstatement knowing many steel and railroad workers in my family who worked in tough, dangerous jobs. As we turn America over to corporations and Wall Street, look for many more Trumps. People in the rust belt are very angry. And Hillary is tone deaf and unlikable. Democrats need to step up and support teachers and labor more, or they will lose this thing like they did in Ohio. And Ohio’s new normal is a few well-connected elites with every other citizen working at minimum wage.
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The opposite is true in South Florida. Veteran teachers who were lucky enough to make it to the top of the salary scale are doing much better financially than new teachers. My former district has given one step in the last eight years and this was ultimately the reason I quit. Not only were they stealing from me upfront but they were also robbing me on the backend through my pension. When I quit I had thirteen years experience but I was only on step seven. Had I stayed, I would now have fifteen years experience and I would still be on step seven. I will note that the vets who are at the top of the scale are being harassed by my former District with all sorts of tactics in order to make them quit because they have been deemed too expensive. They even offered those vets buyout packages so they could replace one vet with two rooks making 40K. Look at this salary scale the Union is bragging about and tell me this isn’t the biggest piece of $hit you’ve ever laid eyes on and then consider the fact that South Florida is now one of the highest priced rental markets in the Country. http://btuonline.com/pdf/EP_Unofficial_SalarySchedule.pdf
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I posted this link the other day as well, in the discussion about teachers becoming more professional. The bottom line, you are not professionals because they don’t want to treat you as such, recognize you as such or pay you as such. Professionals achieve their status through individual action. Although we can argue that too is a myth as well, when large organizations like the ABA or AMA do so much to skew the market.
So if you are not professionals like so many other “White Collar” workers, than you are merely workers. As workers the best way to achieve what you need for yourselves and your students is collectively. However certainly not only on a narrow contractual basis that leaves others behind. Then at that point we can talk about being considered professionals.
So here is my problem. About a year ago there was a major Demonstration in Manhattan for the $15 dollar wage. The construction trades combined their forces with it .After a massive separate demonstration a few blocks away. Yes many left. Yes many of those workers who joined in were clueless as to why they were there, but they were there. There were many other unions participating in this demonstration in support of these powerless workers. They were from AFSME, to Unite, to the CUNY Adjunct Professors Association… There are 50,000 members of the UFT in NYC. They teach a population that is and will be subject to these poverty level wages. I did not see any at this 5PM demonstration.
So then ask yourselves why this EPI report is so dismal? You will sink or swim together, for the plutocracy or oligarchy if you prefer, know “that they could pay half the working class to kill the other half”. (Jay Gould)
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What happened to teachers’ labor unions in the United States that these wages should stagnate so much?
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They were specifically targeted, for their support of the Democrats in the past . As a general assault on anything Public. Then finally abandoned by neo-liberal Democrats/Republicrats . Diane will ban me from the site if I use the language I would like to about that group. Plus a whole lot more.
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This is very sad. It sounds like the union members will have to fight very hard . . . harder than before and will have to reinvent what has probably become their very very corrupt unions.
Unions in Europe are much stronger. There is such a wide difference.
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A long story, the short of it a law called Taft Hartley,the red scare and the cold war.
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The Reagan revolution.
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West Coast
Even Reagan would have lost the PATCO battle, had Taft Hartley not banned secondary boycotts. That was the most important weapon taken away from American labor. You can replace some workers not all workers.
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I know some people resent teachers being paid the same as employees that work 12 months out of the year that also have bachelors and masters degrees too. Everyone feels their job is important.
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Eileen,
You should know that teachers take home hours of work after the 3:30 bell and/or they stay late after school hours to prep their classrooms for the next day. They call parents after work and grade papers, create materials, plan lessons, and read up on research in professional journals, all during non-contractual hours. They work through lunch, and they come into work early before school starts. They volunteer to attend and run for free all sorts of family outreach events, such as the science fair and literacy night.
Teachers put in all sorts of non-contractual hours and they are now mandated to produce results on standardized tests (a very poor method to evaluate teachers) while working with populations that are very complex. These populations are increasingly ridden with poverty and a virtually incomplete development of values or knowledge of how to navigate the educational system. This does not vilify by any means the families and students, who are victims of a capitalist society in which, unlike Europe, wealth distribution is reprehensibly inequitable; but we at the same time should not think that teachers have it “easy” and are compensated appropriately for all their extra time, hardcore efforts, and competence.
There are no bonuses in most schools; merit pay is shown in study after study to not work, and teachers donate hundreds of dollars a year from their own pockets (very little of which is tax deductible) to make up for supplies and materials that are not included in what are mostly now dwindling school budgets, thanks to America’s reform policies and the demonization of taxing the wealthy. Teachers work in classrooms of 25 to 28 children, often with no teaching assistant due to trending budget cuts.
Add up all of those anvils on the teacher’s shoulders, and it make perfect sense for teachers to have the summer off.
And technically, teachers are paid for working 10 months out of the year, but their paychecks are spread out, most of the time at their option, over 12 months. Many teachers pick up summer work, such as teaching summer school or working in some other field that is seasonal.
Please don’t mischaracterize the pay practices of public schools with regard to their teachers during the summer.
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Having worked in non-union shops all my life, yet a strong supporter of organized labor, I can assure you non-union workplaces are far from a meritocracy.
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Vale Math
Having been a supervisor for thirty years I can assure you you are correct .
Norwegian Filmmaker
I suspect all of those things were factored into this EPI study they are usually “pretty pretty ” thorough to be prepared for the right wing critiques.
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