Are all those high paid teachers ripping off the public?

From Florida Today, by Matt Reed

You can imagine what Brevard County teachers think of their pay this week as their classes endure high-stakes FCAT testing and they face a fifth year with no raise.

But if you’re one of those who thinks local teachers should suck it up and achieve more with less, you’ll love the latest think-tank research behind the next wave of Republican reforms.

Consider the November report on teacher compensation by the conservative Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute. The new conservative reasoning includes a logic trap that no educator can defeat. It goes:

Public-school teachers receive salaries 19.3 percent lower than private-sector workers who have the same types of college degrees, Heritage says.

Thus, the “marketplace” has assigned a lower value to education degrees than to business or engineering degrees, it says.

Furthermore, master’s degrees in education do not correlate strongly to higher test scores, Heritage says.

Therefore, teachers are overpaid for skills of less value to the marketplace than the skills of private-sector workers.

Ipso facto: Teachers are gouging American taxpayers and must be stopped.

Compensation calculation
“We conclude that public-school teacher salaries are comparable to those paid to similarly skilled private- sector workers, but that more generous fringe benefits for public-school teachers, including greater job security, make total compensation 52 percent greater than fair market levels, equivalent to more than $120 billion overcharged to taxpayers each year.”

The total-compensation argument appears nowadays in most think-tank reports by groups opposed to higher teacher pay.

Heritage tallies U.S. school districts’ average cost per teacher of “paid leave” (including summers off), pension benefits, health insurance, Social Security taxes, Medicare and workers’ compensation. It divides that cost by the hours teachers are contracted to work on campus. The product is hourly “compensation” that looks pretty good.

The Heritage report notes briefly on page 12 that — when compared to those for private-sector employees in companies with 100 or more workers — “teacher benefits appear comparable.” To clarify, page 20 includes a list of 18 “occupations comparable to teaching,” including accountants, insurance underwriters, registered nurses, news editors, museum curators and computer programmers.

But remember: Teachers are overcompensated compared to them because the market assigns a lower monetary value to their qualifications.

Inconvenient data
If you dislike whining teachers, you can take comfort that such think tanks already have the ear of your governor, Cabinet, Legislature and Congress. Mind you, other data contradict some of their handy research. Try to ignore these findings:

U.S. educators work 1,097 hours teaching in the classroom, the most of any industrialized nation measured by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In second-place New Zealand, teachers lead their classes for 985 hours.

American teachers work 1,913 hours a year, just shy of the U.S. average of 1,932 per year, The Wall Street Journal reported.

U.S. teachers are slightly more likely to work at home than private-sector workers, the U.S. Labor Department found. They aren’t paid to work weekends but are as likely to do so as private-sector employees — including those scheduled to work Saturdays and Sundays, it says.

Lower IQs?
But this is where the Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute research explores new depths to torpedo teachers.

Their report states:

Public-school teachers should not get raises because they are less intelligent than private-sector employees.

“Although the College Board is reluctant to say exactly what the SAT measures, it is essentially an IQ test,” says the report by Washington researchers Jason Richwine, Ph.D., and Andrew G. Biggs, Ph.D. “In 2010, the College Board asked students taking the SAT about their intended college major. Students who indicated that education was their intended major earned a combined math and verbal score of 967 … below the average of 1,017.”

It adds: “Even active teachers exhibit low cognitive ability compared to other college graduates.”

So if you want Space Coast teachers to do more with less, here’s what you need to say to sound smart.

Second-grade teachers in Cocoa are overpaid compared to insurance underwriters on Merritt Island because the “market” already pays teachers 19.3 percent less.

History teachers in Cocoa Beach work nearly the same hours per year as computer programmers in Titusville, but not if your calculation assumes three months of “paid leave,” as Heritage does.

And, of course, salaries for chemistry and English teachers in Palm Bay are gouging taxpayers because — according to top American think tanks — they’re much dumber than accountants or nurses in Melbourne.

http://www.floridatoday.com/article/20120424/COLUMNISTS0207/304240003/Matt-Reed-Dumb-overpaid-teachers-gouging-taxpayers-?nclick_check=1