Making Sense of the Whole "Are Teachers Overpaid?" Thing
by Frederick M. Hess • Nov 18, 2011 at 8:00 am
Cross-posted from Education Week
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ShareA couple weeks ago, Andrew Biggs, an AEI colleague, and Jason Richwine of the Heritage Foundation, authored a controversial study on teacher pay. They used federal wage, benefit, and job-security data, along with measures of cognitive ability, to argue that teachers are overpaid compared to what they'd earn in the private sector. The analysis generated heated reaction, including an unusual, personal attack by Secretary of Education Duncan. In the aftermath, given that I'm director of ed policy studies at AEI, there were a number of inquiries regarding my thoughts on this provocative analysis.
My take is threefold. (An earlier version of this originally appeared as an Ed Week commentary last week, but I thought it worth sharing a tweaked version here with RHSU readers.)
First, claims that teachers are, in Duncan's words, "desperately underpaid," are a familiar refrain. Yet, given that we've steadily boosted staffing and after-inflation spending in recent decades to little obvious effect, and that states and districts are wrestling with structural shortfalls, it's healthy to question such orthodoxies. Biggs and Richwine remind us that the costs of teacher benefits dramatically inflate the cost of compensation, even if the results aren't always obvious when scanning a paycheck. Recall, for example, that University of Arkansas
