A Teacher’s Worth

By Dave Winans

A new study reveals that teacher pay lags behind that of comparable occupations—even though professional skills and responsibilities are remarkably similar.

Illustration: Photodisc

Sixth-grade English teacher Jack Costello is a guy who lives and breathes his profession—to the point  where he’ll sneak into his Columbia County (New York) classroom during vacations to do grading, lesson planning, or online research. For Costello and other educators in the semi-rural town of Chatham, teaching is a rigorous “lifestyle” that demands 70-plus-hour workweeks, frequent community contact with parents and students, and lots of workplace responsibility, flexibility, and creativity.

Some Chatham teachers may suspect their complex skills would command a heftier wage in another profession, but Costello knows it for a fact. A decade ago, he was a senior public relations director for a large consumer products firm. “I was responsible for hiring, continual staff development, sales, and customer relations,” he says. “If I had stayed there, I would most likely be well into a six-digit salary.”

This school year, Costello, who holds two master’s degrees, makes $44,105. While this NEA local affiliate president is proud of his organization’s bargaining progress—it wrapped up a three-year contract last spring with annual raises of 5 percent—he knows his 130 members are still playing a grinding game of catch-up while confronting the cruel myth that public educators are glorified babysitters who work fewer hours than other professionals and get better compensation.

At bargaining, lobbying, or family barbecue time, NEA members such as Costello need solid data to dispel the myth and effectively wage this wage debate. Now, finally, that information is available.

Pay: A Teacher Quality Issue

This summer, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C., released a comprehensive teacher compensation study that found that between 1996 and 2003 inflation-adjusted weekly teacher wages rose just 0.8 percent—far less than the 11.8 percent growth of weekly wages of other college graduates.

Why should the public care? According to Lawrence Mishel, EPI president and a nationally recognized economist, this wage disparity “will make it harder over the long term to maintain and improve teacher quality.” Competition from better-paying professions for the best college graduates, he says, is simply too stiff. And as his report notes, public schools no longer can depend on the “captive” female labor pool it once enjoyed. 

EPI’s findings, based on several statistical analyses of wage data collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), challenge the argument advanced by some conservative economists that teachers are actually well compensated when work hours, weeks of work, or benefits are taken into account.

“All in all, teachers do have a higher ratio of benefits to wages than other workers,” Mishel concedes, “but because non-wage benefits—such as pensions, health care, and payroll taxes—only represent about 20 percent of total compensation, it doesn’t change the picture very much of teachers being disadvantaged in the labor market. Moreover, teacher benefits have not grown more than those of other professionals over the last 10 years.”

Citing BLS’s own National Compensation Survey (NCS), critics also claim that the average teacher makes more per hour than, say, a lawyer or computer programmer. But the EPI study finds that the NCS “greatly understates” average teacher hours worked per week and notes that the typical teacher “spends a good deal more time devoted to her teaching responsibilities” than that required by the collective bargaining agreement.

That’s hardly a surprise to Jack Costello, who doesn’t get home each day before 9 p.m. “I’d love to get even minimum wage for every one of the hours I work,” he chuckles. “I’d make a helluva lot more than I do now!”

“I’ll argue with a teacher who says he or she makes ‘good money,’” adds Costello, “I say, ‘Compared to what?’ Teachers often don’t know they could take the same skill set to private industry and double their income!”

Your skill is my skill?

So just how do you compare the work of teaching to other professions? One way is by using something called “occupational leveling, ” criteria the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses to assign point values to hundreds of different occupations found in workplaces. Among the job factors measured: the knowledge and level of supervision required for a given profession and its demands in terms of complexity, scope and effect of work, and face-to-face contacts with the public.

Using these criteria, EPI researchers identified 16 professional and managerial occupations they believe to be comparable to K–12 teaching—from accountant to personnel specialist—and then compared average pay for these professions with that of teachers. And they found a wage gap that has grown by a whopping 14.8 percent since 1993.

Again no big surprise to Costello. “I’m a big believer in the whole concept of ‘comparable worth,’ that people should be paid based on their value to an institution—and what position is more important to education and the economy than teaching?” he asks. You can almost hear the skill meter clicking as Costello describes the growing complexity of his profession.

 “I’m responsible for the emotional and physical well-being of students; I constantly face new requirements from politicians, from testing to data collection; and each day I determine how to modify a program to make it work for a child’s difficulties. Teaching isn’t routine anymore!”

Click and Find Out More

For more on the EPI study and the hot issue of educator pay, go to NEA Today Extra .

Truth in Numbers

Since 1993, weekly wages for all teachers have fallen behind comparably skilled workers by 11.5 percent and even more—13 percent—for female teachers. 

Teachers get less premium pay, less paid leave, and fewer wage bonuses than professionals with similar skills.

Though teachers receive somewhat better health and pension benefits than other professionals, these benefits are partly offset by lower employer payroll taxes because some teachers are not in the Social Security system. 

When compared with workers in 16 professions requiring similar skills, teachers earned $116 less per week in 2002, a wage disadvantage of 12.2 percent. Because teachers worked more hours per week, the hourly wage disadvantage is even larger, 14.1 percent.

Comparing Apples, Oranges, Peaches, and Pears

What makes one profession more or less ‘skilled’ than another? The federal government has a measuring tool.

Ever wondered how the experts can rank your profession in comparison with others? Here’s a glimpse of the Occupational Leveling Criteria used by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in its National Compensation Survey. The BLS gathers a sample of occupations within each surveyed workplace and then tallies up these factors to compute a total skill score for any given profession:

Knowledge (up to 1,850 possible points) measures the nature and extent of information or facts that the employee must understand to do acceptable work—and the nature and extent of skills needed to apply this knowledge. To count, such knowledge must be “required and applied” on the job.

Supervision received (up to 650 points) covers the nature and extent of direct or indirect controls exercised by the employee’s supervisor, the employee’s responsibility, and review of completed work. Supervisory duties (0 points) describe the level of supervisory responsibility for a position.

Guidelines (650 points) cover the nature of job guidelines—anything from desk manuals to traditional practices—and the individual judgment needed to apply them.

Complexity (450 points) gauges the nature, number, variety, and intricacy of tasks, steps, process, or methods in work performed; the difficulty in identifying what needs to be done; and the difficulty and originality involved in performing the work.

Scope and effect (450 points) covers the relationship between the nature of the work—such as the purpose, breadth, or depth of the assignment—and the effect of work products or services within and outside the organization.

Personal contacts (110 points) include the employee’s face-to-face contacts and telephone/radio dialogue with people not in the supervisory chain. The purpose of these contacts (220 points) range from factual exchanges of information to situations involving significant or controversial issues and differing viewpoints, goals, or objectives.

Physical demands (50 points) cover the physical requirements and demands placed on the employee by the work assignment.

Work environment (50 points) considers the risks and discomforts in the employee’s physical surroundings or the nature of the work assignment and the safety regulations required.

Too Much To Ask?

Urban Educators Speak Out On Teacher Pay

“I want to teach—it’s about loving children and seeing something positive happen in their lives. But in urban districts we need to pay a good starting salary and benefits package or we won’t match private industry.”

—Kindergarten teacher Robin C. Holcombe

Passaic, New Jersey, is a high-cost place with a low-income population speaking 22 languages. Even though the Education Association of Passaic has bargained a $40,000 starting teacher salary—like 220 other NEA local affiliates in New Jersey—it’s still hard for this district to entice young people into the profession. When it comes to compensation, three Passaic NEA activists have lots to say—about recruitment, retention, and the rigors of teaching:

Steve Boudalis, science teacher, Passaic High School:  “I see the right qualities in some of our students for teaching, but when I speak to them about a career in education, they don’t want to consider a ‘low income’ after living in borderline poverty. It’s important to give quality students incentives to attract them into the profession—plus it’s expensive to live here. Many of our lower-paid people are forced to work second and third jobs, from construction sites to supermarkets.”

Donna Mickolajczyk, remedial reading specialist for seven Passaic schools: “The cost of living is high in this region and the work of Passaic educators becomes more involved all the time. I’m the Reading First coordinator for No Child Left Behind and I’m writing a $1.7 million grant—while being paid on the teacher salary guide.  And we’ve got teachers on ‘school leadership teams’ who make decisions that top-level people used to make—everything from computing costs in their buildings to examining test data to improve student achievement.”

Robin C. Holcombe, kindergarten teacher, William B. Cruise Memorial School #11: “A teacher is constantly working, thinking about things, coming up with ideas for lessons, and staying late to get it all done. My paperwork alone has doubled. I constantly deal with parents, and I must make decisions concerning student safety and health and recognize situations that need intervention—by a nurse, an administrator, or a counselor. Teaching is still about loving children, but in urban districts we need to pay a good starting salary and benefits package or we won’t match private industry.”

What Does a Teacher Do, Anyway?

The day-to-day skill requirements are significant, and wildly underestimated. Here’s what sixth-grade teacher Jack Costello says he must know and do to be the kind of educator the public demands. Sound familiar?

1. Be knowledgeable in every elementary content area.
2. Meet mandates set by politicians—including standardized testing, student data collection, and continual professional development requirements.
3. Adapt and modify educational programs daily based on individual student needs.
4. Assume daily responsibility for students’ emotional and physical well-being.
5. Help every child meet state and federal standards through remediation, intervention, and extra planning.
6. Maintain contact with students and their families outside the school day—while constantly remaining professional.
7. Assume responsibility for dozens of students at a time.
8. Work with little direct supervision.
9. Interpret school district policy and exercise timely independent judgment in a variety of situations.
10. Work outside the regularly scheduled day—during evenings, weekends, and school vacations.