I like the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., for many reasons. I like the research it produces. But I most admire the fact that it is not sustained by the usual billionaires. It follows the facts.
In a recent report, EPI found that teachers pay a wage penalty for choosing teaching as their profession. They are paid about 20% less than others with similar levels of education. This makes it hard to attract new teachers and hard to hold on to teachers. If billionaire-funded “reformers” had spent their time advocating for higher wages for teachers, instead of spinning their wheels about phony evaluations based on student test scores (which have failed everywhere to improve teacher quality) or on merit pay (which has consistently failed for at least a century), they might have actually helped improve the schools. Their bogus efforts have undermined teacher morale and actually reduced the supply of people entering what is one of our most important professions.
The report begins:
As we have shown in our more than a decade and a half of work on the topic, there has been a long-trending erosion of teacher wages and compensation relative to other college graduates.1 Simply put, teachers are paid less (in wages and compensation) than other college-educated workers with similar experience and other characteristics, and this financial penalty discourages college students from entering the teaching profession and makes it difficult for school districts to keep current teachers in the classroom.
This report was produced in collaboration with the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the University of California, Berkeley.
Teacher compensation is not just an issue of staffing: Effective teachers are the most important school-based determinant of student educational performance. To promote children’s success in school, schools must retain credentialed teachers and ensure that teaching remains an attractive career option for college-bound students. Our previous report (Allegretto and Mishel 2019) explains in more detail why providing teachers with a decent middle-class living commensurate with other professionals with similar education is not simply a matter of fairness but necessary to enhance student and economic performance.
We provide this update to our long-standing series on the teacher wage and compensation penalty as the U.S. continues to struggle with the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic consequences. While the data in this paper are through 2019 and thus predate the pandemic, our analysis may provide useful insights as schools struggle to reopen. As a country we have yet to make the necessary investments, and pass the needed policies and procedures (e.g., universal mask requirements and testing, tracing, and isolating protocols) that would allow us to achieve some semblance of normalcy. Teachers and other school staff will continue the business of educating students in these trying times. They and their unions will play a critical role in moving forward in an effective and safe environment.
Key findings
- The teacher wage penalty has grown substantially since the mid-1990s. The teacher wage penalty is how much less, in percentage terms, public school teachers are paid in weekly wages relative to other college-educated workers (after accounting for factors known to affect earnings such as education, experience, and state residence). The regression-adjusted teaching wage penaltywas 6.0% in 1996. In 2019, the penalty was 19.2%, reflecting a 2.8 percentage-point improvement compared with a penalty of 22.0% a year earlier.
- The teacher wage penalty declined in the wake of recent teacher strikes but only time and more data will reveal whether teachers’ actions led to a decline and a turning point. The lessening of the teaching penalty from 22.0% in 2018 to 19.2% in 2019 may reflect pay raises enacted in the wake of widespread strikes and other actions by teachers in 2018 and 2019, particularly in some of the states where teacher pay lagged the most. Unfortunately, the data we have to date are not sufficient to allow us to identify the geographic locus of the improvements in teacher wages and benefits and any association with the recent wave of teacher protests and strikes. Only time will tell if this single data point marks a turning point in teacher pay.
- The wage premium that women teachers experienced in the 1960s and 1970s has been replaced by a significant wage penalty. As noted in our previous research, women teachers enjoyed a 14.7% wage premium in 1960, meaning they were paid 14.7% more than comparably educated and experienced women in other occupations. In 2019, women teachers were earning 13.2% less in weekly wages than their nonteaching counterparts were—a 27.9 percentage-point swing over the last six decades.
- The wage penalty for men in teaching is much larger than it is for women in the profession, and it too has worsened considerably. The teacher wage penalty for men was 16.6% in 1979. In 2019, male teachers earned 30.2% less than similar male college graduates who chose a different profession. This explains, to a large degree, why only one in four teachers are men.
- While teacher wage penalties have worsened over time, some of the increase may be attributable to a tradeoff school districts make between pay and benefits. In other words, school districts may not be giving teachers raises but are instead offering stable or slightly better benefits, such that benefits make up a larger share of the overall compensation package for teachers than for other professionals. In 2019, nonwage benefits made up a greater share of total compensation for teachers (29.3%) than for other professionals (21.4%). In 2004, nonwage benefits share of compensation was 20.7% for teachers and 18.7% for other professionals.
- The benefits advantage of teachers has not been enough to offset the growing wage penalty. The teacher total compensation penalty was 10.2% in 2019 (composed of a 19.2% wage penalty offset by a 9.0% benefits advantage). The bottom line is that the teacher total compensation penalty grew by 7.5 percentage points from 1993 to 2019.
- The teacher wage penalty exceeds 20% in 21 states and in the District of Columbia. Teacher weekly wage penalties for each state, computed using pooled 2014–2019 data, range from 2.0% in Wyoming to 32.7% in Virginia. In 21 states and the District of Columbia teachers are paid less than 80 cents on the dollar earned by similar college-educated workers.
Their bogus efforts have undermined teacher morale and actually reduced the supply of people entering what is one of our most important professions”
Mission Accomplished!
Mission Accomplished!
Send in computers
Teachers are vanquished
Bots are our suitors
Contracts were written
For soft-ware and hard-
Teachers were bitten
By Gates and his guard
Teachers are underpaid and undervalued for many reasons, and I know the vast majority of teachers spend more time working in a year than their counterparts in other industries…including the summer. Thas said, is it fair to acknowledge that a teacher is contracted to work about 20% less than their counterparts or is that taken into account within the study? My guess is that would be the first counter-argument to this study.
Teachers DO NOT get paid for being off in the summer…if that is the 20% you are talking about. Many teachers (thru their union contracts) have extra money taken out of their pay during the school year so that they get a “paycheck” in the summer. I’ve NEVER known a teacher who walks into school with students in the morning and leaves with students at the end of the day. I have NEVER known a teacher who doesn’t grade work/papers at home in the evening or during the weekend. Teachers are overworked, underpaid and disrespected.
And and FYI……I’m NOT a teacher and I know this.
a key point which the larger society cannot grasp: teachers who opt for the 12 month paycheck model are paid for the months they are in the classroom, but this pay is spread out over the full year. SO just imagine if work done by teachers over the summer was then paid as OVERTIME.
ciedie aech: I taught summer school ONE summer and was so exhaustedly by the time school started that I never did it again.
Good afternoon Diane and everyone,
Teachers can elect to take 21 or 26 paychecks. If you go for the 26 checks, the school is holding money you would have received all year and giving it to you in a lump sum at the end so you have money over the summer. It’s like a little savings account. It’s NOT pay for sipping pina coladas on a beach somewhere in July and August. I can’t even begin to tell you how much of my OWN money I’ve spent over 30 years of teaching so that students would have materials. I wish I had kept track of that but it’s easily into the thousands and thousands of dollars. When I lost my job in 2012 because my district abolished French, I was making a good salary. I took a year off and became a massage therapist. I went back to teaching. I’m making $20,000 LESS now than I made then. When I was rehired, the district only gave me credit for time I had in the teacher’s retirement system. This is what people don’t understand. There’s no monetary reward for experience or years teaching. Pay for a Master’s Degree is minimal. I have almost a PhD in my field. Teachers usually wind up staying at the same district for years because they know that after a certain period of time it will be extremely hard to move to a district and make more money. I always laugh when people say schools are a business. Really? Friends of mine who work in business get huge bonuses and other perks. Let’s face it. We’ve all had rotten teachers. I had an art teacher in middle school who screamed in my face in front of the whole class and sent me crying to the bathroom one day. I had an English teacher who gave me Fs on spelling tests for spelling every word correctly except that she didn’t like my neat Catholic school penmanship. My M didn’t connect with my A. I think a lot of people just take out their hatred and frustration on teachers and heaven forbid someone should be getting something for “free” or having an easier time than another person.
JK, what did you say? Teachers work 20% less.
My head just exploded with profanity. I worked for thirty years as a public school teacher and my workweeks often ran 60 to 100 hours once all the hours I worked were added together.
I taught 25 hours a week. That doesn’t sound like much does, it?
But I made phone calls to parents after schools, attended after-school meetings, sometimes had duty on the weekend at a sporting event, took work home and often stopped correcting papers or planning lessons after my family was in bed and my vision was blurring.
Most days, I arrived at school a few minutes after the gates were unlocked at 6:00 AM so I’d have time to get ready to teach when my first class started at 8:00 or 9:00 AM.
When I was the journalism teacher and advisor for the high school newspaper, around 11 P.M. the custodian would knock on my classroom door to remind me and my journalism students that we had to go because the alarms were being turned on.
Before I went to college in the GI Bill and earned my teaching credential, I served in the U.S. Marines and fought in Vietnam. That was easier than being a public school teacher in this country where teachers are often treated like TRASH!
Do not ever say again that teachers work 20% less than the average Joe or Jane. I worked in the private sector for 15 years before becoming a teacher and those jobs ate up fewer hours and were easier on stress levels.
I was an Executive VP for Development at a major publishing house. That job, which paid exponentially more, was far, far, far less exhausting than was teaching, and I put in far, far, far fewer hours. Those who talk about teachers having these short work days and tons of holidays have no notion, not a eunuch’s shadow of a clue, what they are talking about. When I was teaching, I never had any free time. It was like owning a dairy farm. If I was awake, I was working. That just about sums it up.
” not a eunuch’s shadow of a clue,…”
Don’t think I’ve heard that one before. Enlighten me, please. 🙂
I just sent this to my financial advisor who believes Illinois cannot continue to pay teachers’ retirement pensions AND to my state Senator [“blockhead”] Niemeyer [R-IN] and Representative Chyung [D-IN].
Chyung is up for re-election this year. He wants more money for public schools. Hal Slager who is running against Chyung believes giving money to charters, vouchers and virtual schools is just fine.
Thank you, Carol. Illinois has been trying to diminish our pension benefits for years despite the fact that we receive no social security or severely reduced SS if we worked another private sector job. They even reduce survivor benefits. They point to administrators, in particular superintendents, who frequently get bonus salary increases in their last eligible years to boost their pensions. There have been other shenanigans also not available to the ordinary teacher. Plus, your pension depends on whether you worked in a well resourced district or not that could afford attractive wages.
The so-called “benefit advantage” of teachers is no longer true in many red states. Some states have capped the amount of benefit at a low dollar amount. I know that for teachers where I live have their health care coverage capped at $2,000 dollars, and the district no longer cover family plans. I do not know how widespread this practice is.
No SSI for this Ca teacher of twenty-four years even though I paid years into the system before I ever entered a classroom in CA. Do not become a public school teacher as a second career in several states as you will lose the Social Security benefits for which you paid all those taxes.
Yup.
Within this is also the teachers who choose to teach in a particular district. Teachers who choose to teach in certain districts are choosing fewer local benefits often valued at as much as $i0,000 per year. Due to local funding of education, these differences generally mean poorer districts often become training grounds for their wealthier neighbors.
Roy Turrentine: A few years back, when I was doing hospice work, I met an art teacher whose relative was in hospice. He told me that he hadn’t had a pay raise in 8 years. He works in a poverty level district.
Indiana expects local taxes to help pay for education. What happens when poor people don’t have money to pay taxes…schools suffer greatly. It’s a rotten system.
I just read a post from an American teacher now working in Denmark. She said schools are funded by municipal taxes and equally distributed among all the schools. It avoids the rich school, poor school dynamic we have here.
I understand teachers don’t get paid during the summer, and I understand teachers are underpaid. That said, I’m asking a simple question. They are contracted to teach/work typically about 188 days. I’m asking if the study compared annual wages or daily wages. If the study compared annual wages, I would expect the counter-argument to be that a standard teacher contract is ~15-20% fewer days than that of those they are comparing them to. So in my community, teachers make ~$45 – $80K for a 188-day contract. That’s $239 to $425 per day. To compare that to a standard 222-day contract the salary range would be $53-$94k.
JK, I have posted before that I worked out the number of hours I worked in my last teaching job. It came out to more than a 365 day year. So much for a 180+ day contract.
Teachers also bring work home with them for which they receive zero compensation. Teachers sometimes serve on committees after hours for which they receive zero compensation. I attended monthly parent meetings monthly on my own time for which I received zero compensation. These meetings were optional, but as professional, I attended them. Teachers are often very giving of their time and commitment to their students and are willing to work beyond regular school hours..
No good deed goes unpunished.
A lot of my college friends were engineers and I worked for years as an engineer as well and the vast majority of the engineers I knew worked 9 to 5 Monday thru Friday , rarely on weekends and never (ever) brought work home with them.
And they had starting salaries that were higher than most teachers who have been teaching 20 years.
One friend of mine worked for a defense contractor and spent about six months one year literally twiddling his thumbs waiting for a security clearance.
I have seen both sides and have little patience for the sort of bullshit arguments JK is raising.
That might be the argument someone tries to make,but it’s not a valid one.
Even if it were true that teachers work 20% less time than someone who works all year (which, based on my experience working first as a teacher and then as an engineer is most certainly NOT true), unless teachers manage to land a job every summer that pays at least as well as their teaching job, they end up making less per week than if they worked teaching for the whole year.
Unfortunately, many of the jobs teachers are essentially forced to settle for during the summer simply don’t pay very well. I know that because when I was teaching, pretty much all I could get a job doing summers was painting houses, or doing temp carpentry or landscaping work, which actually paid less than the teaching (which itself did not pay that much).
In addition to the sorts of things I mentioned, many teachers teach summer school classes or coach youth sports teams, which normally don’t pay even as well per week as salaried teaching jobs.
So the idea that ” they work 20% less so should get paid 20% less” is really just a stupid argument that some lame brained economists (forgive the redundancy) might like to make..
The problem with all of these lame brained arguments is that the people making them make the most simplistic of assumptions that have nothing at all to do with the reality.
It’s just stupid.
Thank you again. Saved for sharing. It simply makes no sense whatsoever to try to improve teacher quality by using invalid test score ratings to fire teachers. That’s just plain dumb stacked ranking that nearly destroyed Microsoft when Steve Ballmer tried it. Treating your employees like dogs fighting over scraps does not inspire productivity. Compensation and good working conditions (small class size, etc.) work much better. It’s common sense, and there is research to prove it.
Teachers are underpaid but these others who are necessary for schools are in even worse situations.
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Janitors, Bus Drivers On Returning To Schools: Damned If They Do, Damned If They Don’t
10/15/2020 06:50 pm ET
Cafeteria workers and other school support staff are afraid of getting coronavirus as more students return — but many are even more afraid of losing their jobs.
States and school districts have had a piecemeal response to the pandemic, with some deciding to return fully in person, others continuing classes virtually and still others doing a combination of both. Many schools, including in New York, Florida and Texas, have opened up only to have to shut again as virus cases have cropped up among students and staff.
The drivers who bring kids to school, the cafeteria workers who feed them and the janitors who clean up after them are all considered essential workers — and they can’t do their jobs from home. They’re also disproportionately Black and brown.
With more than 7.9 million confirmed coronavirus cases in the U.S. and over 217,000 dead so far, those getting sick and dying have been disproportionately Black and brown. And the number of new daily cases has increased nearly 50% in the last month alone — precisely the period during which schools shifted to in-person learning.
Yet for many school support staff, scarier even than the chance of getting the virus is the thought of losing their jobs…
Article: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/school-janitors-bus-drivers-cafeteria-workers-coronavirus_n_5f88b4e9c5b6f53fff09b9ac?ncid=engmodushpmg00000006
I recently became a widow in California and because I was a teacher I will not get even half of my husband’s social security. This occurs in 9 states. Some teachers are very surprised to learn this upon a spouse’s death so have to make financial adjustments. California Retired Teachers (CalRTA) exists to fight what the state calls “double dipping.”
I knew you couldn’t get Social Security as a teacher in California, but I did not know you couldn’t get your spouse’s Social Security because you were a teacher. That is a blood boiling outrage! It cannot be allowed to stand. Cannot. Too much. Too much.
Same is true in Illinois. Can’t figure out how it is double dipping to get spousal benefit, nor does it make sense to reduce SS benefits that were earned for private sector work at a separate job. so a teacher working a second job pays SS but will not get the full benefit. In Illinois they take 2/3.
speduktr: When I was married, my husband did extra work to get higher Social Security payments. [He is also a teacher.]
We were married over 10 years so I was supposed to get half of what he was getting from Social Security.
Because he was a teacher who received an Illinois pension, his Social Security was cut. I didn’t receive anything from him.
The system stinks.
My SS is around $89 a month because I worked overseas for so many years and didn’t pay into the system. I receive one big bill every year to get Medicare + money is taken out of my monthly pension.
Stinks, doesn’t it.
The AFT or NEA should sue. The denial of spousal benefits is manifestly unfair.
This has been true for a long, long time. I started my teaching career back in the 1980’s. When I left three years later for a job in publishing, I immediately increased my pay by 283.33 percent, and publishing is not particularly well paid except at the highest levels. I loved teaching, but I couldn’t afford to raise a family on what I was being paid as a teacher, even with my coaching stipends.
When I returned to teaching at the end of my career, I took an 83.26 percent DECREASE in salary from my previous job in publishing.
On Oct. 7, the Chicago Teachers Union House of Delegates overwhelmingly voted to endorse Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris for President and Vice President of the United States. Together, they will try and repair the four years of damage we have suffered under the Trump administration.
speduktr, Yup, I was denied spousal widow benefits because I went back to teaching at age 40+ for the next twenty-four years…after twenty-seven years of marriage during which he paid S.S. for himself AND me. Reagan pushed through the windfall profits tax and certain states’ teachers were included. From then on, new teachers did not pay that tax; however, it cheated all of us who paid previously for years and qualified from earlier, non-teaching work or status. More people should be aware of this. Grrr…
Also, many of our spouses were/are veterans and even may have been getting Social Security disability payments. It’s important to write to your senators and congress people to change this.