Teachers Are Not Underpaid
Can we stop already with the canard that teachers are underpaid? It’s one of those “facts” that’s tossed around all the time and has completely ceased to be true. I’m willing to concede that once upon a time it probably was true. I don’t have the data at my fingertips, but based upon my recollections of my childhood (admittedly fuzzy and vague), it seems like it was true at the time. It’s not now, and that’s not fuzzy and vague. I’m going to let the numbers back me up.
Thanks to the US Census Bureau, we have quite a bit of information about individual and family incomes across the US. Wikipedia helpfully collected the relevant information for us in two helpful pages (Household Income and Personal Income) that are far easier to read than the actual Census Bureau reports, so we’ll start there. Also, I’ve grabbed the actual salary chart from Fulton County Schools in Georgia. Why Fulton County? I don’t live there, but I’ve spent enough time in Atlanta (which sprawls across four counties) to know that Fulton County is basically the poor and (dare I say it) minority part of the city. It seemed like a good representative of not necessarily the richest school district in the country. The actual teacher salary info will vary depending on your locale, but it should be public information. Track down the salary charts for your areas and play along at home. If I were feeling more industrious I’d track down actual median salary data for teachers, but this is good enough to illustrate the point.
Before we begin, I’ll go ahead and point out that the Census data is from 2009 (the latest year we have it for) and the teacher salary chart is from the 2010-2011 school year, so it’s not quite a perfect match. It’s close enough, however, for anything shy of an actual academic paper.
Data point number one: the median income of all individuals over the age of 25 for 2009 was $32,140. This seems like a fair starting point, since we’re not really interested in comparing teacher salaries with high school students who are working part time for spending money. It also cuts out the college age group. Much of this group is in college and not working, and those that aren’t in college at this age typically have crappy income. So we’ve already filtered out a lot of the lowest individual incomes, which has the effect of pushing the median way up.
Looking at the teacher salary chart, we see that starting pay fresh out of college with no experience is $39,132 a year. That’s right – a 22 year old college grad just entering the market in this field makes more money than 50% of his fellow American workers. Twenty percent more. Take a look at the other end of the chart and we see that a teacher with 26 years of experience (so someone in his or her late 40s, typically) is making $62,59 even without adding any additional schooling. You have to add up the percentages in the income distribution table to calculate it, but that puts that teacher at the eighty fifth percentile for income. In other words, that teacher makes more than 85% of his fellow American workers.
Let’s make another, more striking comparison. Looking at the household incomes numbers, we see that a fresh Master’s Degree graduate with no experience makes $43,44, which almost puts puts him on par with the national median household income of $44,389. Don’t want to bother getting a Master’s Degree? No problem, you can still reach that point by the time you’re 30 just by getting 8 years of experience. In other words, at each of these points our hypothetical teacher now earns more money all on his own than 50% of all American families, including those with 2 or more workers. If our Master’s Degree student continues working there for 26 years (again, that’s only until his mid 40s), his individual income will now exceed more than 80% (closer to 85%, but not quite) of all American households.
At what point along the scale, exactly, are our teachers underpaid? And if you still want to argue that they are, then tell me, exactly how much should they be paid? More than 90% of our fellow workers? 99%? Should each and every teacher be paid executive level salaries?
Teachers are paid just fine. Sure, they feel the pinch, just like the rest of us. And just like the rest of us, they want better pay whenever and wherever and however they can get it. Also, they’ve told each other for their entire working careers that they’re underpaid, so when they feel the middle class pinch, it just seems like it must be true that they’re underpaid.
On top of all that, 70% of the teachers I ever had in the public school system were completely worthless. Even a typical student would’ve been just as well off without them. Another 25% or so were almost worthless. Typical students might have been a bit better off with them than without, but gifted students would’ve been better off on their own again. Only about 5% of the teachers I ever had would I call actually worth my while. Our public schools are so bad that I’d sell body parts if I had to (literally) to keep my kids out of them. So again, how exactly are these people underpaid? We pay pretty decent salaries to a group of people who can’t be fired and who get an ass load of vacation time. Don’t start with me about the hours they put in after school; I’ll make a detailed rundown of the number of hours I’ve worked in the last two years and show exactly why I have NO sympathy whatsoever. It’s called a job. You get paid to do stuff that sucks. If it was fun, they wouldn’t have to pay you to do it.
Next time you hear a politician tell you that it’s necessary to raise your taxes to pay for the schools and our poor underpaid teachers, remember that it’s all bullshit. It’s just one more very powerful special interest group looking out for themselves.
A better method would be to compare teachers’ salaries with those earned by people with similar education and accreditation costs. Then you would need to adjust for hours worked, which makes for an even better comparison given that teachers get roughly two and a half moths of every year. Then, for funsies, see if you can compare the productivity of today’s teachers to the productivity of teachers from, say, fifty years ago. I would bet that you find most teacher’s are considerably more overpaid than you first thought.
By the way, both my parents are public school teachers, although they had the good sense to homeschool through my sophomore year of high school. My dad says that most of the teachers he works with are good people who do good jobs. Yes, there are some really incompetent teachers, but most of the problems stem from administration. The biggest problem with teacher pay is that it is based on seniority, not merit.
To me, the best way to overhaul the system would be to revert to a classical approach to education (which eliminates the need for virtually all classroom technology), switch to a merit-based pay system, give teachers more authority in the realm of classroom discipline, and cut administrative jobs in half. After that, you could return half the money saved to the taxpayers, and give the other half to teachers, in order to attract higher-quality labor. Really though, you can make the savings split anyway you want.
“A better method would be to compare teachers’ salaries with those earned by people with similar education and accreditation costs.”
I actually meant to do that but forgot during the actual writing of the post. The data are in the Census reports. I should’ve been more clear in my writing, too. I’m not necessarily arguing that teachers are OVERpaid, although I’m sympathetic to that argument. My point is just that they’re definitely not UNDERpaid, and comparing them against similar educational backgrounds still validates that. I’ll do an update or another post later tonight.
Most of them, with the exception of the really good ones, are overpaid. From my experience in high school, it seems that 20% are really good at what they do and really dedicated to teaching; 35% are good people who treat teaching like a job, and they do a credible job; the rest are simply incompetent.
By the way, Ann Coulter does a decent job of addressing the shorter work year in relation to actually salary in one of her books. “Godless,” I think.
Teachers think they are underpaid because they compare themselves to other credentialed professionals – doctors, lawyers, accountants, investment bankers – rather than to mere plebs. It’s irrelevant that they average above median income for fewer hours worked; their desired status entitles them to six-figure incomes like their supposed peers, despite easier training programs, much lighter workloads, and generally lower intelligence levels.
And actually, Fulton County schools are in the close-in suburbs north and south outside the Atlanta city limits. Similar, but possibly lower paid (if less dysfunctional) than the city school system.
The thing is, even if you compare based upon education levels they still compare fairly well. Median income with a bachelors degree is $50,944, as we see from the personal income charts. From the salary chart, a teacher with only a bachelors degree will hit that range in about 11-13 years of experience, which would put them in their early 30s – a very fair point in life to be hitting the median income. Those with graduate degrees take a bit longer to catch up, especially the PhDs, but most teachers who get their PhDs go on to be administrators, which are on an entirely different pay scale.
I’m a former teacher myself, now working in education as an entrepreneur.
Teachers underpaid — hahaha, next joke please. Even with the extra time that I spent coaching after school, my work week barely come close to forty hours; I *never* had to do any grading at home, because I actually used my free periods efficiently.
And, I worked nightlife jobs in the summer.
The only teachers I’ve heard complaining about being “underpaid” are exactly the ones who just don’t know how to do grading and planning efficiently AND are too lazy to work during the summer.
Look at pay per hour actually worked. My wife is at school for about 12 hours per day and does grading and planning for a couple of hours every evening and about 8 hours each weekend. That’s about 78 hours per week. I am not exaggerating.
She is underpaid.
Or, if you prefer, keep up this foolish argument, pay teachers less, and let’s just keep under-teaching our fat little video-gamed McChildren so that they will be prepared to lead us into the second half of this century as a new colony of China.
Hell, we should let all the teachers go and give your snot-nosed offspring a remote control, a super-sized co-cola and a sack of twinkies and let the television raise them.
Moron.
I can put together a long list of people who work as many or near as many hours for a whole lot less pay.
Also, when you balance out the hours worked during the school year with the sheer amount of holiday and vacation time that teachers get, the hourly argument doesn’t come out anywhere near as well as your example makes it.
I don’t believe you that she works 12 hours a day … ex. 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.? … every weekday without any break. Not for a second.
Do you have children? Do you drive on roads paved by other peoples children? Eat at restaurants where other people’s children work? Do you realize that tomorrows presidents, industry leaders, etc, are in school today, being taught by these overpaid teachers?
What happens when we cut their pay even more? Well, let me teach you, for free. My wife will leave. She’s the one teacher in the school who is raising kids test scores above the national average, even though she has the most diverse classroom. But the teacher in the next classroom who spends most of her day showing the kids movies while she plays on facebook will stay, she is afraid that she might actually have to work somewhere else. America is losing because we undervalue education as a culture and you are reinforcing this value.
Ah – just figured it out. You must be a dumb-fuck alabama republican. Still no excuse.
If your wife is the only teacher actually raising test scores above the national average then why do you think that other teachers are underpaid?
In that you speak out of significant ignorance, I don’t know where to start.
1. North Fulton County is one of the most elite areas of the US. Homes in the area often start in the $450,000 category (do the math on a starting teaching position or even those with experience). Of all the areas of the country to pick – you sure started at the wrong place. There is no way for teachers in that county to own homes within the very education region in which they are located.
2. The hourly category you speak of does not entail the grading that occurs after hours, the after hours expectations from both the administrations and parents for chaperoning, club sponsorship, tutoring, current web/video curriculum requirements as well as undisciplined students who may carry weapons into schools (economic diversity does not change this as a possibility).
3. Teacher bashing has become quite societally avant garde in so many circles that it’s sickening to listen to whiners. I came across this site because my idiot fool daughter who is a national merit scholar has chosen teaching as a profession so she can affect change. She’s a finalist for a Fulton County position and I was finding starting salaries. As we drove through the $600,000 + homes surrounding the school and I compared my initial starting salary to where she is going to land – on the one hand I applaud her noble aspirations and on the other hand I’m sickened by her long term earning prospects.
4. And I may agree that whoever taught you statistics was an underperforming teacher and you a student who learned to make up research on the spot. This argument is a cherry pick of low lying fruit because every bubba in rural areas sees these numbers and thinks, “Wow – they do earn a lot” when the reality is – in an urban area such as Atlanta, the salary is at best, adequate.
I doubt very seriously that my son’s first grade teacher spent ANY time outside of class grading papers. I would be very interested in study showing hourly wage for teachers that included benefits.
I work in Mississippi. Teachers here have an excellent benefits package. The retirement package far exceeds anything that private industry offers.