I'm getting tired of defending my salary- and the myth that my husband and I, as educators, are somehow so much better off than other middle class working Americans. We're not. And when I find myself once again debating this issue with family members who really have no idea exactly what we do as educators, and exactly how much time and energy we put into our careers, I will be directing them to this:
The Economic Policy Institute issue #298 published on March 30th:
THE TEACHING PENALTY
"Trends in weekly earnings show that public school teachers in 2010 earned about 12% less than comparable workers, a gap equivalent to that found in our 2004 study. The weekly earnings disadvantage for teachers relative to comparable workers grew by 10.5 percentage points between 1979 and 2010, with most of the erosion (8.2 percentage points) occurring between 1996 and 2001. This increase in wage disparity for teachers is particularly troublesome because the 1990s recovery was one of the few periods in recent decades of strong overall wage growth for workers."
And how do benefits fit in?
"We found that the average weekly pay of teachers in 2003 was nearly 14% below that of workers with similar education and work experience, a gap only minimally offset by the better nonwage benefits in teaching."
Conclusion?
"If the policy goal is to improve the quality of the entire teaching workforce, then raising the level of teacher compensation is critical to recruiting and retaining higher quality teachers. Policies that solely focus on changing the composition of current compensation (e.g., merit or pay-for-performance schemes) without actually increasing compensation levels are unlikely to be effective. Simply put, improving overall teacher quality requires correcting the teacher compensation disadvantage in the labor market."E1
No comments:
Post a Comment