| SEARCH OnWEAC |
|---|
Salary growth for teachers lags far behind the salary growth in similar professions, making it nearly impossible to attract and retain the highest quality educators, according to a new study.
The study – The Teaching Penalty: Teacher Pay Losing Ground – found that public school teachers are paid about 15% less a week than people in similar professions with similar educations, like accountants, registered nurses and computer programmers. In Wisconsin, where teacher salaries have fallen below the national average, the gap is even larger – 24%.
Even when health insurance and pensions are added in, nationwide, teachers still make 12% less.
Over the last decade, the teacher pay gap increased 10.8 percentage points – from a 4.3% shortfall for teachers in 1996 to 15.1% in 2006.
Particularly ominous for attempts to retain good teachers, the study notes, is the finding that the penalty is severest among the most experienced teachers. For early-career teachers (age 25-34), today’s pay penalty is only slightly larger than in 1996 (a change of 0.5 percentage points). The brunt of the widening pay gap has fallen on senior teachers (45-54), whose pay deficit within their age group has grown by 18 percentage points among women (who comprise the vast majority of teachers) since 1996.
“Teachers are the single most important ingredient in educational success – and it’s important for schools to compete for and keep the best qualified teachers,” said researcher Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute and director of EPI’s education research program. “But this widespread and systemic devaluing of teaching sabotages those efforts. If you deliberately set out to design a plan to drive away your most experienced teachers, this would be a good way to do it.”
Surprisingly, even during the period of solid economic growth, high employment and rising wages of the late 1990s, the teacher pay gap continued to grow. While earnings of college graduates increased by 12.7% during the boom of the 90s, teachers’ earnings didn’t grow at all.
Holding advanced degrees doesn’t help matters – in 2006, teachers with a bachelor’s degree earned 12.2% less than their peers in other occupations in 2006, while those with a masters degree earned 11.3% less.
Posted March 27, 2008