Teacher Pay Continues to
Decline
A new
Study by the Economic Policy Institute
finds that compared with workers in
occupations that have similar education
and skill requirements, public school
teachers face a large and growing pay
gap.
Over
the last decade, the teacher pay gap
increased 10.8 percentage
points-from a 4.3 percent shortfall
for teachers in 1996 to 15.1 percent
in 2006.
The study, The Teaching
Penalty: Teacher Pay Losing Ground
provides a detailed analysis of trends
in teacher pay. In 1960 women teachers
had an annual wage advantage, of 14.7
percent compared to other similarly
educated women. This annual pay
difference was reversed to a 13.2
percent annual wage deficit by
2000.
The authors, Sylvia Allegretto, Sean
Corcoran, and Lawrence Mishel also
compared teachers' weekly pay to that of
a core group of occupations with similar
educational and skills requirements:
accountants, reporters, registered
nurses, computer programmers, clergy,
and personnel officers.
The teacher pay penalty translates to
weekly earnings that are, on average,
about $154, or 14.3%, lower than those
of people in the comparable occupations.
Particularly ominous for attempts to
retain good teachers is the
study's 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 18.0 percentage points among women
(who comprise the vast majority of
teachers) since 1996.
The teacher pay disadvantage grew
markedly during the latter half of the
1990s. While earnings of college
graduates, on average, increased by 12.7
percent, teachers' earnings did not grow
at all.
Some critics, while acknowledging the
existence of the pay gap, argue that
this gap isn't so much of a problem
since teachers' lower pay is outweighed
by more generous health insurance and
pensions. The authors examined that
claim and found that taking total
compensation into account would have
narrowed the pay gap by just three
percentage points in 2006 (from 15
percent to 12 percent), and would not
have altered the general trend.
The teacher pay gap is, to a great
extent, a problem schools should have
seen coming, as the study's breakouts of
trends by gender show. From 1996 to
2006, the pay gap for male and female
teachers grew pretty much in tandem -
from a 0.7 percent to a 10.5 percent
deficit for women and from a 15.1 to
25.5 percent shortfall for male
teachers.
Even earning an advanced degree yields
only a small improvement in the gap.
Among those with a bachelor's degree
only, teachers earned approximately 12.2
percent less than their peers in other
occupations in 2006, while the gap
between teachers and non-teachers with a
master's degree was almost as large,
11.3 percent.
The study offers the most thorough
examination to date of the trend in
relative teacher pay. In addition to
breaking out data by gender, seniority,
and education, the authors examined and
compared their results, which are based
on decennial Census data, to results
from other researchers. They found broad
consensus on the fact of a teacher pay
disadvantage that has grown over time.
The only exceptions, they report, are
the work of two researchers who based
their findings on certain Bureau of
Labor Statistics' data, which the BLS
itself advises on its own web site is
not appropriate to this task.
