Are Teachers Overpaid?

RETORT TO OTBL



"Jay P. Greene and Marcus A. Winters have an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal suggesting that teachers aren't really underpaid at all. "Public school teachers earned $34.06 per hour in 2005, 36% more than the hourly wage of the average white-collar worker and 11% more than the average professional specialty or technical worker," they write. So should teachers stop their whining? Are we all misguided in our beliefs that teachers are underpaid for the critical work that they do? I don't think so. (In addition to being the ball-and-chain of one of the regular Plank denizens, I'm an education policy and research consultant, and I also teach a remedial reading class at a charter school.)

There are three big problems with their op-ed. The first is their assumptions. They assume that teachers work a 35-hour work week. Yes, that may be the number of hours they spend in the classroom, but as any teacher knows, preparation, grading, and maintaining relationships with parents are extremely time consuming activities. Greene and Winters discount this additional work, arguing that in other careers, people take home work as well. But its not fair to compare teachers' planning and preparation to "take-home work" in other careers, since these additional activities are an integral and necessary part of teaching. Especially in the elementary grades, teachers have very little planning time built into their days and planning is an essential part of teaching. Unless we want unprepared teachers who get up and wing it every day, planning time needs to be considered an essential part of a teacher's duties.

In an ideal world, teachers would have about half of their time for planning and preparation. In reality, the National Education Association has conducted research on teacher working conditions and found that teachers spend an average of 50 hours per week on all teaching duties. When that assumption is figured into the calculation, teachers' hourly wage drops to an average of $24. ....


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Third, Greene and Winters insist that teacher pay doesn't matter because urban areas with the highest teacher pay have the most abysmal outcomes. This is a ridiculous argument. As decades of research has shown, a whole host of demographic and socioeconomic factors affect student achievement, particularly in high-poverty urban districts. If we wanted a true test of the effects of teachers' salaries on the quality of teaching in urban districts, we'd have to randomly assign teachers with higher salaries to socio-economically similar districts and see if the higher paid teachers have a greater impact on student achievement."

"Finally, saying that teachers earn "enough" misses the point. Enough for what? Everybody agrees that we don't have enough high-quality teachers, particularly in high-poverty districts. Of course it's not all about money--working conditions and the professionalization and respect afforded the profession matter a great deal. On the other hand, if we paid teachers $150,000 per year, they'd probably be willing to endure the poor working conditions. Conservatives like to think the market works for everything else except teachers' salaries. I say we conduct an experiment and see how it works--let's double teachers' salaries in a random sample of districts and see if we don't get top quality teachers."

























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