What Should Teachers Be Paid?; US

March 8, 2011

By SHEILA GLASER

Jonathan Alcorn for The New York Times High school students attend class in Los Angeles, Calif.

What’s most surprising about the worldwide charts on teachers’ pay posted on Jonathan Cohn’s New Republic blog? (Via Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish.) It’s not that the United States fares poorly but that we do better than nanny states like Sweden and France (or Sweden and Norway, depending on whether you’re looking at teachers’ starting salaries or salaries after 15 years).
Instead of comparing American teachers’ salaries to the salaries of those in other professions in this country, McKinsey & Company compared what teachers in the United States earn to what teachers in other countries earn. But do these rankings of teacher pay by percentage of G.D.P. per capita give us a better picture of the value that particular nations place on teachers? Or just a differently skewed picture? The United States remains at the bottom in both charts, but Japan, for example, does much better in the second. And Turkey beats the Netherlands (and the United States) in both.
The New York Times