Get Rich: Be a Teacher

Abstract

THE FACT is that are better paid than most other professionals. So wrote Jay Greene and Marcus Winters in a paper from the Manhattan Institute, titled How Much Are Public School Teachers Paid? Naturally, this paper received lots of attention from conservative think tanks and op-ed pages like the Wall Street Journal's. Greene and Winters attempt to give more credence to their contention by pointing out that, really, this is not our conclusion. just took it from the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics' National Compensation Survey (NCS). This particular NCS provides figures for 2005 in terms of hourly and weekly wages. Sure enough, clock in at $34.06 per hour, while economists garner $33.85, and architects earn a meager $30.22. Greene and Winters don't bother to calculate wages on an annual basis because, they say, the NCS provides only the hourly wage and length of work week. The main table in the text does not have annual wages, but supplemental tables do. The NCS for 2005 put the average teacher's work year at just over 1,400 hours, while the year for economists and architects exceeds 2,100 hours. An average of elementary and secondary teachers' annual salaries (they don't differ much) comes to $46,995. Economists earn $72,810, while architects take in $65,108. The figure for is close to the annual estimates made by the teacher unions, and, while it is not a starvation wage, neither is it a princely sum. It would certainly be hard, though, to argue from this figure that teachers are better paid than most other professionals. In addition, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has now rejected reporting some occupations' compensation in terms of hourly wages. Said one BLS official, We are actively studying which occupations and groups of occupations should not have earnings estimated and published by hour. Flight crews on airlines, outside sales representatives, operating personnel on over-the-road railroads are but a few of the occupations in addition to teachers. Greene and Winters glide by inconvenient facts. They write, Yet, although previous research has used BLS data to draw conclusions about the proper level of teacher pay, no one has organized and reproduced the data so that others can easily observe the information and form their own interpretations. So their task is merely to organize and reproduce the data and put it in an easy-to-read form? In fact, that previous research--How Does Teacher Pay Compare? from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI)--directly contradicts the conclusions Greene and Winters offer. In that EPI booklet, Sylvia Allegretto, Sean Corcoran, and Lawrence Mishel analyzed jobs in terms of skill criteria: knowledge needed, supervision received, guidelines applied, complexity, scope and effect, personal contacts, purpose of contacts, physical demands, work environment, and supervisory duties. When these researchers compared teachers' salaries to 16 other occupations that had similar total numbers on the criteria, trailed all but one, the clergy. They trailed architects by $275 a week. When I put the study on my blog site (www.huffingtonpost.com/gerald-bracey), I drew many comments, most of them opposing the Greene/Winters report and some rather witty. The most common topic in the responses concerned the hours that put in without pay. As one contributor put it, Yes, I got so rich as a teacher I am still driving a 20-year-old car with 500,000 miles on it. I quit to become a prison guard. Why? The hours are shorter, the pay is higher, and I never, ever take any work home. I observed in my blog that high salaries must be why so many recent college grads are lining up for classroom appointments and why half of them leave within five years--they just can't cope with the good life that teaching affords. Teacher Mobility and Attrition, a periodic survey from the National Center for Education Statistics, gives a more precise picture of how many leave the profession and why. …