Reference - “Study: Teachers Make Too Much
Money” from Education Week.
In the article Francesca Duffy reports on a
Washington meeting this week where Biggs and Richwine (researchers at the
American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation ) reported on their
findings that on average teachers make 52% more than workers with equivalent
skills make in the private sector considering pay, benefits and job security. They totally demolished Arne Duncan,
Education Secretary’s assertion that teachers are “desperately underpaid.” I am really surprised that the researchers
made it out of town without suffering harm.
The researchers reckon that the overpayment
nationwide amounts to $120 Billion a year.
This puts it in the same ballpark as the savings the “super committee”
is tasked to find in the federal spending over ten years. Yes, it is hard to take away something that
people are used to getting but in this case it is both unfair and
unaffordable. This is why a focus of the
discussion was to promote the idea that states facing budget shortfalls should
consider teacher compensation as a viable area for spending cuts.
While this could be a fruitful area and could start
addressing the unfairness to society of the current situation, we know from the
states (Wisconsin et al) where even small changes in what teachers pay for
healthcare or retirement plan contributions are attempted that it will require
a lot guts on the part of state lawmakers with majority public support to make
it happen.
Richwine
contended that the standard regression method, which compares teachers to
workers with equivalent education and finds that teachers are underpaid, is
flawed because it doesn't consider "unobservable ability." People
going into teaching have lower SAT and GRE scores than people who pursue other
fields, he said. Thus, in the case of teachers, "years of education could
be an overestimate of cognitive skills." In addition, the education major
itself is not as rigorous as other fields of study. Thus, this adds to the recognition of education
outsiders over decades that an education degree is of extremely low value
compared to other degree paths. It is
essentially a “seat time” certificate. For
decades those who fail in other college majors switch to education and become “A”
students easily and those who can’t get admitted to more rigorous studies start
out in education from day one.
This
doesn’t mean that all educators are uneducated but the majority certainly
are. They set the tone for the whole
endeavor making any improvement virtually impossible as has been proven over
decades. An example of critiques of the
education schools and their graduates is Gary Lyons article in Texas Magazine,
Sept. 1979. Lyons
reported that half of the teacher applicants to the Houston Independent School
District scored lower in math and a third of them lower in English than the
average high school junior and he blamed the state’s sixty-three accredited
teacher-training institutions for turning out “teachers who cannot read as well
as the average sixteen-year old, write notes free of barbarisms to parents, or
handle arithmetic well enough to keep track of the field-trip money.” He accused the teacher colleges of coddling
ignorance and, “backed by hometown legislators,” of turning out “hordes of
certified ignoramuses whose incompetence in turn becomes evidence that the
teacher colleges and the educators need yet more money and more power.”
Arthur Levine, then president of Columbia Teachers
College (when he wrote his reports) in his three part critique of education
schools starting with Educating School Leaders in 2005 reinforced Lyons’
criticisms of 26 years earlier. He
pointed out the low SAT and GRE scores but also that administrators as a group
had lower SAT and GRE scores than the teachers they were “leading.” He also bemoaned the lack of rigor as being
related to universities, even those with good reputations, using education
schools as a low quality diploma mill with lowering standards and admission
requirements to support the levels of income needed to fund more important career
majors at the universities.
Back to the new research: They found that when teachers and other
workers are compared by cognitive ability, Richwine added, "the wage
penalty has essentially disappeared."
Also, their research showed that when teachers left teaching to take
private sector jobs their pay declined by 3%.
Of course, the party line of the teachers unions is that teachers are
constantly tempted by higher pay in the private sector, which is perhaps true
for some teachers but not for the average teacher.
It
should be no surprise that the biggest component of the overpaid reality lies
with the extremely generous benefits that teachers receive which are not
available in the private sector. Fully
funded retirement plans with defined benefit amounts unattainable without
taxpayer subsidies because the market return assumptions are unrealistic are
typically fully funded by the public.
Also, healthcare costs are extremely low and the retirement healthcare
benefits are also very expensive to the public but virtually free for the
teachers.
I
believe that this “free ride” on the taxpayer’s dime is unsustainable and
unproductive. It contributes to a view
of things within education circles that is totally unrealistic. It results in false sense of entitlement
related to believing the conventional wisdoms of educators. That is, “we are doing a great job and are
working incredibly hard.” Norman
Augustine in his “Is America Falling Off the Flat Earth?” points out that if
American educators adopted a goal to be “average” in the global education
panacea they would need to improve a lot.
The reality is that our education system is performing abysmally and the
amount we spend on it is not helping at all.
The payback on investment is atrocious.
Worse though is that millions of kids are given “amputated” futures year
after year because educators live in a dream world with no sense of reality or
responsibility while their enablers the education schools and too many
politicians find benefit in continuing the scam.
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