Feliz 2012!
Gregory Elacqua
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Higher Pay Than Private Sector
Andrew Biggs Jason Richwine
NYTimes
Andrew G. Biggs is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise
Institute, and Jason Richwine is a senior policy analyst at the Heritage
Foundation.
January 2, 2012
Our research has shown that public school teachers receive salaries
about on par with private sector workers who score the same on the SAT
and other standardized tests of cognitive skill. But fringe benefits —
in particular, generous vacation time, pensions and retiree health plans
— push total compensation for teachers roughly 50 percent above private
sector levels.
Of course, formal tests like the SAT do not capture all of the skills
needed to be an effective teacher, or a good worker. But if teachers are
being underpaid for their noncognitive skills, like communications or
organization abilities, we would expect that teachers who shifted to
private sector jobs would receive a significant raise. This does not
happen. The average teacher suffers a slight decrease in salary upon
leaving the profession, and likely a greater reduction in fringe
benefits. Simply put, the average teacher would not earn more in a
private sector job.
Public school teachers already are compensated above fair market rates.
To those who say schools need to pay more for recruiting purposes, we
say: The extra money is already there, but teacher quality has not risen
to match it. This implies a fundamental problem with how teachers are
hired. Past research indicates that even large across-the-board pay
increases would do little to improve teacher quality.
Rather than spending even more taxpayer money inefficiently,
policymakers should change how school funds are used. Merit pay to
reward the best teachers would be a good start. But merit pay must be
part of fundamental reforms to help schools hire, promote and fire
teachers according to the best interests of students. This kind of
arrangement is standard in the private sector, where continuous quality
improvement is both expected and delivered.
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There Are Simply Too Many Teachers
Lisa Snell
Lisa Snell is the director of education at the Reason Foundation.
January 2, 2012
It may be a stretch to argue that teachers are overpaid, but the recent
American Enterprise Institute report and other data from the National
Center for Education Statistics make it clear that the idea infamously
perpetuated this summer by Matt Damon at the Save Our Schools Rally that
teachers are underpaid is clearly incorrect. In fact, accounting for the
number of hours worked in a year, Bureau of Labor Statistics data
consistently show that on a per-hour basis, teacher income (not
including fringe benefits, which are typically far more robust than
those offered other workers) is extremely strong.
We are paying high-quality teachers too little, and we should be paying
the poor-performing teachers less — or not at all.
The real problem is quantity over quality. The N.C.E.S. reports that 3.6
million elementary and secondary school teachers were engaged in
classroom instruction in fall 2010, and that number has risen 8 percent
since 2000. In addition, the number of public school teachers has
increased by a larger percentage than the number of public school
students over the past 10 years. In the fall of 2010, there were a
projected 15.6 public school pupils per teacher, compared with 16.0
public school pupils per teacher 10 years earlier. Scarce education
dollars are stretched too thin. We are paying too many teachers and we
do not differentiate pay based on quality.
This is brought home by the controversial teacher value-added rankings
in Los Angeles, which highlighted the fact that teachers in the top 10
percent bring enormous gains to their students in terms of increasing
student achievement. These teachers are not recognized in any way by the
school district in terms of compensation or replication of best
practices. Schools and districts need to compensate and capitalize on
their most productive teachers. A good start would be the
recommendations in the National Education Association's recent report
"Transforming Teaching: Connecting Professional Responsibility with
Student Learning," which calls for differentiating teacher compensation
based on teacher effectiveness, the roles that teachers play, the
difficulty of teaching assignments, and the length of the school year or
school day.
The bottom line is that we are paying high-quality teachers too little,
and we should be paying the poor-performing teachers less — or not at all.
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Let’s Focus on Quality, Then Cost
C. Kent McGuire
C. Kent McGuire, the former dean of the Temple University College of
Education, is the president of the Southern Education Foundation.
Updated January 2, 2012, 6:43 PM
Teacher salaries and benefits make up nearly 80 percent of current
expenditures in the nation’s schools, so I can appreciate why the
question of whether teachers are over- or under-paid comes up. But this
would not be my first question, as I think the larger issue for this
country is what set of conditions gives rise to developing and
maintaining a high-quality teacher work force. My bet is that a
competitive salary is among the factors that count.
Now, to the extent we are not pleased with current knowledge and skill
levels, especially for those just entering the teacher labor market,
salaries may play an even greater role given how low starting salaries
are relative to average salaries in the work force today. It may take
the promise of higher salaries and greater lifetime earnings potential
to attract candidates with generally higher SAT and GRE scores who know
they can command higher beginning salaries if they pursue careers in
math, science, business and engineering, to name a few.
In the end, these are empirical questions that deserve greater
attention. Sophisticated treatment of these questions will need to
include factors beyond compensation. Scholars looking closely at who
enters, who stays and who leaves teaching underscore that factors like
the degree of support, the level of professional discretion and
autonomy, the quality of administration and other factors related to the
work matter as much as or more than salary and benefits. To the extent
the data reveal that some of the more skilled individuals are the ones
most likely to leave teaching, we need to be concerned more about the
culture of schools than compensation.
Staying with salaries for a minute, it turns out there are significant
limitations with our ability to make effective comparisons within the
education sector, much less between the public and private sectors. Most
national data sets on teacher compensation derive from occasional
surveys. Fortunately the National Center for Education Statistics has
been working on developing a longitudinal data set that makes reliable
state-by-state comparisons possible. This is enormously important given
the policy community’s expressed interest in attracting and retaining
high-quality teachers. These data might shed more light on a question
like "What role does salary play in quality?" The center's pilot effort,
however, reveals significant variation among states in the extent to
which the available data are of sufficient quality to guide policy
decisions. Among other things, the information on benefits is variable.
And data irregularities abound around things like differences between
negotiated and actual compensation. All this is to say that deciding
whether teachers are over- or under-paid is not so straightforward.
I do know this. Our best school systems and indeed our most highly
recognized private schools acknowledge that salaries matter, together
with appropriate levels of leadership, professional autonomy and
support. These school systems generally pay attention to the overall
distribution of talent and are willing to pay some teachers for advanced
training and credentials, at least for some teachers. Perhaps more
important than a debate about absolute compensation levels is the need
to consider systemic reforms that permit greater differentiation in
staffing and compensation so that employers can adjust their staffing
tables to address specific knowledge and skill requirements. I’ll cede
the possibility that teachers enjoy a premium on benefits and job
security, but this might be short-lived. The need to strengthen the
overall quality of the work force, to include deploying talent
strategically, will be with us for some time to come.
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A Better Way to Slice the Data
Jeffrey Keefe
Jeffrey Keefe is an associate professor in the School of Management and
Labor Relations at Rutgers University.
January 2, 2012
The authors of "Assessing the Compensation of Public-School Teachers"
conclude that teachers receive total compensation 52 percent greater
than fair market levels, which translates into more than a $120 billion
overcharge to taxpayers each year. There are numerous and significant
problems with this study. I will examine one of them, wages.
The study begins by comparing teachers to other workers with similar
education, experience and weekly work hours, and using this model the
authors find that teachers are underpaid by about 19 percent. The study
then questions its initial finding by raising doubts about the rigor of
an undergraduate degree in education and the average cognitive ability
of teachers.
Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, the authors look at how
much teachers earn in comparison with how well they score on the Armed
Forces Qualifying Test, treating this as a measure of I.Q. In this
model, teachers’ salary penalty becomes statistically insignificant,
which would indicate that teachers are not underpaid. The study
incorrectly concludes that eliminating education as a control variable
and letting A.F.Q.T. alone account for skills provides the most accurate
wage estimates, and the "wage gap between teachers and non-teachers
disappears when both groups are matched on an objective measure of
cognitive ability rather than on years of education."
There are numerous statistical problems with this model, and the
conclusions drawn from it are erroneous. A cognitive ability model that
does not account for education level is meaningless, because individuals
are employed in jobs that depend on the skills acquired through
education. This is why education level, not cognitive ability, is used
to calculate human capital: it captures the level of investment in
workers’ skills.
While cognitive ability may be necessary to acquire an education, it
does not in any way indicate that an individual has made a personal
investment. There are people with high cognitive ability who have not
completed high school who are performing unskilled work, while there are
people of average cognitive ability who are performing highly skilled
jobs. Comparing teachers to people of the same A.F.Q.T. level who have
not invested in their education does not demonstrate whether there is or
is not a teacher wage penalty. In other words, cognitive ability may
enable educational investments; however, it is education that creates
the skills that facilitate professional performance. Consequently,
measured cognitive ability is correlated with wages but explains little
of the variance in wages across individuals and time. The only reliable
comparison in this report is its starting point: there is a 19 percent
wage penalty for teachers.
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Intelligence Is Not the Same as Value
David Z. Hambrick
David Z. Hambrick is an associate professor of psychology at Michigan
State University. His research concerns individual differences in
cognitive abilities and complex skills.
January 2, 2012
People who do well on a test of one mental ability — let’s say a test of
verbal ability — will tend to do well on tests of others — math ability,
spatial ability, and so on. This finding, which has been replicated
thousands of times, implies that there is a general factor of human
intelligence. Psychologists call this factor “g.” We still don’t know
what underlies g. Ian Deary, a researcher at the University of
Edinburgh, has argued that the speed of perceptual processes is one
piece of the puzzle, while Randall Engle, of the Georgia Institute of
Technology, has established that intelligence is strongly linked to
working memory capacity, which he thinks of as the ability to hold
information in the focus of attention. Others suggest that when we try
to boil down the human intellect to a single factor, we lose view of its
complexity.
Where I live, the average starting pay for a teacher is about $20 an
hour. A bartender can make double that. Which job is more important?
What we do know is that measures of general intelligence are practically
useful. Frank Schmidt, of the University of Iowa, and the late John
Hunter, of Michigan State University, documented that g is the single
best predictor of job performance across a wide range of occupations —
better than personality, interest, motivation and even job experience.
People who do well on tests of intelligence tend to make the best
mechanics, managers, clerks, salespeople, pilots, detectives and
scientists. They also tend to make the best teachers. It makes perfectly
good sense, as Andrew Biggs and Jason Richwine argue, to use
intelligence as a predictor of teacher performance. We should want smart
people to be our teachers.
But what, really, does this have to do with how much we should pay
teachers? As a society, we have decided that it’s fine to pay a heart
surgeon more than an electrician. We didn’t need to run a regression
analysis to decide this — it’s important to keep the lights on, but only
if there’s someone to keep them on for — and we don’t need to run a
regression analysis to decide that we don’t pay teachers enough. A
little arithmetic will do. In Michigan, where I live, the average
starting salary for a teacher is about $35,000 for nine months. That
works out to about $20 an hour. A bartender can make double that. Which
job do you think is more important?
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