Are teachers in the U.S. underpaid? Depends who you ask
Teachers in the U.S. are underpaid significantly compared with their colleagues around the world, and the differences can be quite stark, according to a recently released report by The Brookings Institution.
The left-leaning think tank found that U.S. teachers would on average need double-digit percent raises to match the salaries of their counterparts in countries as diverse as Luxembourg, Slovenia and Denmark.
The perks that U.S. teachers do enjoy are insufficient to make up for the low salaries, according to the report's author, Dick Startz, a professor of economics at the University of California Santa Barbara.
"So while U.S. teachers work fewer days than other workers, that's also true in other countries, so the differences wash out," he writes in an email. "American teachers do get better benefits than many other workers (although the extent of this is exaggerated), so this would make some difference in the comparisons. But the salary differences are generally bigger than the benefits differences, so the basic point still holds."
Of course, money is not a motivating factor for some people who enter the teaching profession, but it can't be ignored, according to Startz.
"It does matter, though, and probably it matters a lot," he writes.
Andrew Biggs of the conservative American Enterprise Institute and other critics of the educational system reject the argument that teachers are underpaid, claiming that they are overpaid compared with workers in the private sector.
In an email, Biggs argued that Brookings' report examined U.S. teachers, many of whom are paid more for having a master's degree with their colleagues in other countries, who mostly have bachelor's degrees. Biggs, like other critics, considers master's degrees to be a useless tool for measuring teacher quality.
"Relative to private sector employees, public school teachers have a VERY (generous) benefits pay package, which includes long vacations, but more importantly a retirement package of pensions and retiree health benefits whose cash value is (I'm guessing here) 5-10 times higher than what a private sector employee can expect to receive," he writes.
According to the National Education Association (NEA), the largest teacher's union, the average starting salary for a teacher was $36,141 in 2012-2013, though it varies widely by states with extremes ranging from $20,274 in Montana to $48,389 in New York. That is well below the average starting salary for a college graduate which as of 2015 was $50,219, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers.
Overall, the NEA estimates the average salary at $57,420, which includes the higher pay experienced teachers earn. According to the union, 35 states saw real declines in teacher's pay over the past decade.
Many school districts, however, couldn't afford to pay their teachers more money even if they wanted to, given the chronic underfunding by states. Per-pupil spending dropped in 2013 for the third year in a row, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics. A separate report issued in January by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities found that 31 states were providing less funding per pupil in the 2014 school year than in the 2008 school year before the recession started. Fifteen states slashed funding by more than 10 percent.