Nitpicking Hess and West: The Hourly Pay Issue
(A continuing look at the recent A Better Bargain: Overhauling Teacher Collective Bargaining for the 21st Century report from the American Enterprise Institute.)
The report makes heavy use of sidebars—there are 9 of them in 49 pages—and the one on page 23 is provocatively titled, “Are Teachers Underpaid?” I really feel that Hess and West got too cute for their own good in this section, and the point that they’re trying to make gets lost because of the disingenuous games they play with the numbers. From the report:
Almost everyone “knows,” in the words of Washington Post national columnist Richard Cohen, “Teachers make lousy money.” In fact, the claim that teachers are underpaid is debatable. The average teacher salary in 2004 was $46,400, compared to the average full-time worker salary of $43,690.
The argument has never been that teachers are underpaid compared to the average worker—the argument is that teachers are underpaid compared to the average worker with a college degree, an important distinction. Happily Hess and West provide the ammunition to shoot down their argument in the very report that they cite in this section. According to the Survey and Analysis of Teacher Trends Report 2004 from the American Federation of Teachers, "the average job offer made to college graduates who were not education majors was $40,472, or $8,768 more than the beginning teacher salary." This is where my "too cute for their own good" criticism comes into play: full-time workers includes the guy who manages the Pizza Hut and many factory workers. Is that really who the authors want to use as their comparison point?
They also got off-track when they started talking about beginning teacher salaries:
While a starting salary for a teacher with a B.A. in 2005 of $42,000 in Los Angeles or $44,500 in Newark, New Jersey, may seem shockingly low to the typical New York Times reader, it's actually higher that what many Ivy League graduates earn when starting in the policy world, advertising, or similar non-technical jobs. For instance, those 2004 graduates of journalism and mass-communication programs who landed jobs earned a median salary of $27,800 if they had a B.A. and $33,000 if they had an M.A.
Notice again how they shifted from the micro to the macro, looking at beginning teacher salaries of 2 different school districts and comparing them to the national average of the professions he chose. According to the AFT report referenced earlier the average beginning teacher salary in 2004 was $31,705 dollars, ahead of the B.A. figure but behind the M.A. This is also more than $10,000 less than the starting teacher salaries that they used to make their point.
Next up, the hourly argument:
While pay comparisons are inevitably subject to wrangling among economists, one recent analysis of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ National Compensation Survey found that teachers earn “more per hour than architects, civil engineers, mechanical engineers, statisticians, biological and life scientists, atmospheric and space scientists, registered nurses, physical therapists, university-level foreign language teachers, [and] librarians.” In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in 2004, the average pay per hour for all full-time workers in the “professional specialty and technical” category was $29.77, while public secondary school teachers earned $32.52 and elementary teachers $32.53—or about 10 percent more than the typical professional.
To counter this argument I give you an excerpt from “Redesigning Teacher Salary Structures: A Handbook for State and Local Policy Makers” by Allan Odden and Marc Wallace. Dr. Odden is one of the nations leading experts on differential pay for teachers, and the report I’m quoting was prepared as part of the Washington Learns initiative that is looking at teacher compensation here in Washington State. From the report:
Should teacher salaries be “adjusted” because of their “shorter” work day and year? A final issue in making salary comparisons is whether teacher salaries should be “adjusted” to account for the fact that the typical teacher works only 9 or 10 months of the year, or even just 5-6 hours a day. … But as Allegretto et al. (2004) learned from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, such an adjustment is not warranted because it is difficult to determine how many hours or even weeks that teachers work. Teachers prepare lessons and correct papers outside of the regular school day and often engage in training or curriculum development over the summer months. In comparing salaries among professions, the BLS makes no adjustments when “work” hours are difficult to determine, such as the number of hours airplane pilots work, or college professors work, and suggest that salary comparisons for such jobs, including teachers, be made on an annual salary basis. We agree with that position.
There’s a bit of humor (irony?) in the fact that nearly every district here in Washington computer the hourly salary of their employees; for my district, it’s (base salary) / 182 / 6.5. This is how the per diem rate is computed, and any district that uses per diem or TRI hours to pay for extra responsibilities—I get paid per diem for running the before school intervention program, for example, or for summer school.
Next time: bargaining isn't fair, because unions have more resources.
The report makes heavy use of sidebars—there are 9 of them in 49 pages—and the one on page 23 is provocatively titled, “Are Teachers Underpaid?” I really feel that Hess and West got too cute for their own good in this section, and the point that they’re trying to make gets lost because of the disingenuous games they play with the numbers. From the report:
Almost everyone “knows,” in the words of Washington Post national columnist Richard Cohen, “Teachers make lousy money.” In fact, the claim that teachers are underpaid is debatable. The average teacher salary in 2004 was $46,400, compared to the average full-time worker salary of $43,690.
The argument has never been that teachers are underpaid compared to the average worker—the argument is that teachers are underpaid compared to the average worker with a college degree, an important distinction. Happily Hess and West provide the ammunition to shoot down their argument in the very report that they cite in this section. According to the Survey and Analysis of Teacher Trends Report 2004 from the American Federation of Teachers, "the average job offer made to college graduates who were not education majors was $40,472, or $8,768 more than the beginning teacher salary." This is where my "too cute for their own good" criticism comes into play: full-time workers includes the guy who manages the Pizza Hut and many factory workers. Is that really who the authors want to use as their comparison point?
They also got off-track when they started talking about beginning teacher salaries:
While a starting salary for a teacher with a B.A. in 2005 of $42,000 in Los Angeles or $44,500 in Newark, New Jersey, may seem shockingly low to the typical New York Times reader, it's actually higher that what many Ivy League graduates earn when starting in the policy world, advertising, or similar non-technical jobs. For instance, those 2004 graduates of journalism and mass-communication programs who landed jobs earned a median salary of $27,800 if they had a B.A. and $33,000 if they had an M.A.
Notice again how they shifted from the micro to the macro, looking at beginning teacher salaries of 2 different school districts and comparing them to the national average of the professions he chose. According to the AFT report referenced earlier the average beginning teacher salary in 2004 was $31,705 dollars, ahead of the B.A. figure but behind the M.A. This is also more than $10,000 less than the starting teacher salaries that they used to make their point.
Next up, the hourly argument:
While pay comparisons are inevitably subject to wrangling among economists, one recent analysis of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ National Compensation Survey found that teachers earn “more per hour than architects, civil engineers, mechanical engineers, statisticians, biological and life scientists, atmospheric and space scientists, registered nurses, physical therapists, university-level foreign language teachers, [and] librarians.” In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in 2004, the average pay per hour for all full-time workers in the “professional specialty and technical” category was $29.77, while public secondary school teachers earned $32.52 and elementary teachers $32.53—or about 10 percent more than the typical professional.
To counter this argument I give you an excerpt from “Redesigning Teacher Salary Structures: A Handbook for State and Local Policy Makers” by Allan Odden and Marc Wallace. Dr. Odden is one of the nations leading experts on differential pay for teachers, and the report I’m quoting was prepared as part of the Washington Learns initiative that is looking at teacher compensation here in Washington State. From the report:
Should teacher salaries be “adjusted” because of their “shorter” work day and year? A final issue in making salary comparisons is whether teacher salaries should be “adjusted” to account for the fact that the typical teacher works only 9 or 10 months of the year, or even just 5-6 hours a day. … But as Allegretto et al. (2004) learned from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, such an adjustment is not warranted because it is difficult to determine how many hours or even weeks that teachers work. Teachers prepare lessons and correct papers outside of the regular school day and often engage in training or curriculum development over the summer months. In comparing salaries among professions, the BLS makes no adjustments when “work” hours are difficult to determine, such as the number of hours airplane pilots work, or college professors work, and suggest that salary comparisons for such jobs, including teachers, be made on an annual salary basis. We agree with that position.
There’s a bit of humor (irony?) in the fact that nearly every district here in Washington computer the hourly salary of their employees; for my district, it’s (base salary) / 182 / 6.5. This is how the per diem rate is computed, and any district that uses per diem or TRI hours to pay for extra responsibilities—I get paid per diem for running the before school intervention program, for example, or for summer school.
Next time: bargaining isn't fair, because unions have more resources.
posted by Ryan at 10:00 AM
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