First Look: The Teaching Penalty, by the Economic Policy Institute

I like to read academic studies of teacher pay, because they’re totally non-controversial and everyone agrees with them. /sarcasm

The Teaching Penalty is a new book out from the Economic Policy Institute that looks at the most recent trends in teacher pay, and it’s not looking good for educators, especially in the last decade. From the report:

An analysis of trends in weekly earnings shows that public school teachers in 2006 earned 15% lower weekly earnings than comparable workers, a gap 1 percentage point larger than that reported for 2003 in our original study. The teacher disadvantage in weekly earnings relative to comparable workers grew by 13.4 percentage points between 1979 and 2006, with most of the erosion (9.0 percentage points) occurring in the last 10 years (between 1996 and 2006).

I’ll be giving it a full read-through to check the methodology, but if it stands up to scrutiny it’s a great report for teachers. The WEA thinks so, too, though the EFF disagrees.