News Briefs
Pay gap widens between public school teachers, other professionals; bonus schemes won't narrow gap, report says
Mar 13, 2008 12:22 PM
You didn’t go into teaching for the money, but you didn’t agree to be financially pummeled, either. Yet that’s what a new report on school salaries found: a growing pay gap nationwide for those who choose to become public school teachers, in contrast to the salaries of other similarly educated and credentialed professionals.
The report, “The Teaching Penalty: Teacher Pay Losing Ground,” by the Washington, D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute, found that over the last decade, the teacher pay gap worsened from a nationwide 4.3 percent shortfall for teachers in 1996 to 15.1 percent in 2006. And while the size of what the authors call a “pay penalty” varies state by state — exceeding 25 percent between teachers and non-teaching professionals in 15 states, including Texas and Virginia — there is no state that pays teachers’ weekly wages equal to or greater than those in similar credentialed occupations. The differential is less than 10 percent just in Montana, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wyoming. In effect, the earnings gains that appeared to benefit all college-educated and other workers during the late 1990s appear to have bypassed teachers.
The brunt of the widening pay gap even falls on those senior teachers age 45-54 — precisely the experienced teachers school systems say they want to retain — whose pay deficit within their age group has grown by 18 percentage points among women (who constitute the vast majority of teachers) since 1996.
“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,” Lawrence Mishel, president of the Institute and a co-author of the report, said.
Even earning an advanced degree won’t narrow the gap. Researchers found bachelor’s degree-holders earned 12.2 percent less than their peers in other occupations in 2006. The gap between teachers and non-teachers with a master’s degree was almost as large, 11.3 percent.
The report also makes short work of the argument that teachers’ seemingly weaker pay scales are buttressed by more generous health insurance and pensions. It found that taking total compensation into account would have narrowed the pay gap by just 3 percentage points in 2006 (from 15 percent to 12 percent), and would not have altered the general trend.
The authors conclude that efforts to improve recruitment and retention can’t succeed without remedying the teacher pay disadvantage.
Nor will merit-pay schemes or one-time bonuses to a small minority of teachers work, either. They are destined to fail because they don’t address the issue of a competitive base salary for all teachers. The authors conclude that merit pay “would continue to leave the pay of the most effective teachers below that of their comparables in the labor market and could hardly be expected to change retention and recruitment dynamics for the ‘best’ teachers, let alone the typical teacher.” The only thing that will work, the report says, is instituting a competitive base salary for all teachers.
As Antonio Cortese, AFT executive vice president, said, the EPI analysis proves that “salary growth for teachers must be on a par with the salary growth in other professions. Unless they are part of a comprehensive plan to develop and support high-quality teaching, merit-pay plans will produce the same dismal results that they have in the past.”
For more information on the report, which is available in hard copy but is not presently on line, go to www.epi.org.
