Total Pageviews

Search This Blog

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Right think tanks believe teachers are overpaid

By Ben Smith

It is an oft-repeated principle both of teachers unions and of their enemies in the “education reform” movement, not to mention of Education Secretary Arne Duncan, that teachers are underpaid. To the unions, this means more straightforwardly improving pay scales; to reformers, it means using higher salaries to recruit a new cadre of better-educated, more highly-motivated professionals to the vocation.

But this has also been a key point of friction between the reformers, for whom cost is no object and who have poured billions in public and private money into school systems like New York City’s; and the conservatives, whose assault on the unions is more closely linked to a broader suspicion of government action and government spending.

And the two core Washington conservative think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation, are putting down a marker on the topic with a study today making the case that teachers are “overpaid.”

They offer three main piece of evidence:

• The wage gap between teachers and non-teachers disappears when both groups are matched on an objective measure of cognitive ability rather than on years of education.

• Public-school teachers earn higher wages than private-school teachers, even when the comparison is limited to secular schools with standard curriculums.

• Workers who switch from non-teaching jobs to teaching jobs receive a wage increase of roughly 9 percent. Teachers who change to non-teaching jobs, on the other hand, see their wages decrease by roughly 3 percent. This is the opposite of what one would expect if teachers were underpaid.

These, combined with “generous fringe benefits,” the write, eviscerate the case for raising teacher salaries.

This will no doubt rile unions, who point out what a hard and important job teaching is; and reformers, who want to attract better teachers with higher, merit-based salaries. But they’re also a mark of the ambition of the conservative education project, which includes saving money.

http://foremostdigitalmedia.com/RobOutLoud/?p=2953

No comments:

Post a Comment