Another Attack on Teacher Pay

About a month ago, you may have heard of a new study claiming that public school teachers are compensated at a higher hourly rate than almost any comparable profession in the American economy. The report, How Much Are Public School Teachers Paid?, was released by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. Its authors, Jay Greene and Marcus Winters, maintain that they made "no judgments in this report about whether public school teachers are underpaid or overpaid," stating that their purpose was to "facilitate a fact-based approach to teacher pay, by shifting the focus of policy discussions to systematic data."

Thankfully, the report did not get much attention, although nearly 30 newspapers nationwide carried articles about the study or op-eds written by the report's authors. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be ready to respond the next time bogus research is used to smear the teaching profession. It is also important to understand what types of organizations promulgate this propaganda and what motivates them to do so.

On its Web site, the Manhattan Institute describes its mission as playing "a pivotal role in debates over public education policy, promoting alternative approaches like school choice, vouchers and charter schools." Clearly, this nonprofit organization has an anti-public education bias. But what about the authors of the report?

Greene is a Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow and endowed chair and head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. Winters is a Senior Research Associate at the Manhattan Institute and a Doctoral Academy Fellow at the University of Arkansas. Both men are unapologetic in their support for so-called education reforms that would undermine public schools.

Now to the research itself. Greene and Winters used data collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in its annual National Compensation Survey (NCS) and "compare the reported hourly income of public school teachers with that of workers in similar professions, as defined by the BLS."

That may sound like a good start, but the report completely ignores one very important factor — the work that teachers do outside of the school day.

Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute called the report "really ridiculous research," adding that its authors "willfully ignore" that a BLS statistician acknowledges that the use of these data for this purpose is inappropriate.

Mishel is one of the authors of the 2004 study How Does Teacher Pay Compare? The report includes a quotation from the BLS Chief of the Division of Compensation Data Estimation National Compensation Survey who identifies the "futility of comparing salary estimates for periods of less than a year between two occupations with very dissimilar work time requirements."

"The bottom line," Mishel concludes, "is that these NCS data . . . results in an apples to oranges comparison when it comes to occupations like teachers which are not year-round and don't conform to the regular office schedule."

He adds, "Manhattan reports weekly and hourly wages based on information which vastly understates the weekly hours of teachers and the weeks worked each year by teachers, thereby vastly overstating their hourly and weekly wages."

In other words, if you believe the National Compensation Survey Hourly wage data, then you believe that English professors ($43.50) make more than dentists ($33.34) or nuclear engineers ($36.16). So what do Greene and Winters say about this glaring omission in their data?

"Many teachers undoubtedly do devote long hours, for what may seem far too little pay, as they engage in the essential work of educating future generations. Yet the personal testimony of a number of teachers as to their poor compensation is no substitute for systematic data."

The truth is, looking only at hours that teachers are contractually required to be physically present in a school grossly underestimates the amount of time they spend doing their jobs. Ignoring that teachers are salaried professionals whose jobs do not begin and end when the school bell rings is no excuse for shoddy research used to misrepresent their well-deserved compensation.

-- Reprinted from the NJEA Review, New Jersey Education Association, March 2007

Related Content:

• "Jay Greene's Persistent Misuse of Data for Teacher Pay Comparisons," by Lawrence Mishel, president, Economic Policy Institute