A recent Manhattan Institute report authored by Jay Greene and Marcus Winters, How Much Are Public School Teachers Paid?, uses contrived calculations of hourly wage earnings to argue that American public school teachers are better paid than most white collar professionals. This report rehashes an almost identical argument from Greene’s Educational Myths, without adding any new data.
Larry Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute and Sean Corocran of New York University demolish the Manhattan Institute report here. Greene and Winter, it appears, are in the business of myth making, not demythologizing.
4 Comments:
1 paulrubin
· Mar 3, 2007 at 7:23 pm
It’s the same nonsense. It doesn’t take into account any time spent on teaching outside the regular school day. It doesn’t address the extra degrees + requirements. It doesn’t address the need to work for (in the case of NYC) some 22 years and get nearly 3 degrees to max out your salary. And on and on.
But in the end there’s really only one meaningful way to determine if teachers are paid enough or not. Examine the numbers and qualifications of those attempting to become teachers. If it’s easy to attract and retain quality personnel, then the salaries are probably either just right or high. If not, then the salaries are low. Case closed. Move on. Comparing the salaries of an architect to that of a doctor to a teacher and so on is silly. They’re different jobs with entirely different skill sets, etc.
2 curious3
· Mar 4, 2007 at 1:08 am
Hey Paul,
I think there are other things besides compensation that could attract or deter people from teaching in public schools. For example:
1. Some people might not want to work in a system in which compensation is only determined by seniority and the accumulation of degrees. They might want to be judged by their performance. (I agree with you that it is really unfortunate that you need to work 22 years and get nearly three degrees to max out your salary. This is truly an outdated approach to compensation. In what high-performance system does compensation work this way?)
2. Some people might not want to work in a system in which many of their co-workers are not doing a competent job.
3. Some people might want to work in a high-performance environment marked by accountability, experimentation, and a determined focus on achieving excellence.
Many private schools have uniformly excellent teachers and they pay them a lot less than NYC public schools pay. Clearly, financial compensation is only one piece of the puzzle.
3 Persam1197
· Mar 4, 2007 at 7:25 pm
Amen, Paul. I worked in the corporate world before teaching and was compensated for bringing work home. The idea of earning a decent salary after 22 years of service and multiple degrees was/is unheard of. Comparing teachers to other professions is ridiculous. I have former students who earn as much as I do after 15 years teaching. And some of them have not even earned a full bachelors! With the time for pay swap we’ve had in the previous contracts, we don’t even have the ability to work as many hours in our second jobs to simply pay the bills. Whatever gains we’ve made has been swallowed up by the cost of living increases that have risen at least one to two percentage points higher than the pay increases.
There’s something wrong with a system that loses half of its staff within five years.
4 paulrubin
· Mar 5, 2007 at 6:53 pm
It’s just so simplistic, anyone with half a brain should understand. The difficulties in attracting and retaining teachers and keeping veterans from retiring is simply a matter of inadequate salaries in combination with inadequate working conditions. Period. Use all the stats you want and it doesn’t change the truth.