This is me copying and pasting, practically word for word. Stats look solid, but thought I would share just to drum up discussion...
While teachers are often honorable people whom we don't seek to demean, statistics show they're paid quite adequately relative to comparable professionals, once accounting for time-worked, education level, and benefits.
Per the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median annual wages (as of 2016) were as follows:
• $55,490 = Kindergarten & Elementary School Teachers [a]
• $56,720 = Middle School Teachers
• $58,030 = High School Teachers [c]
That averages to an annual salary of $56,747. For context, in May 2016, the median annual wage for ALL workers was only $37,040. [c]
While that's already 53% higher, its not really a fair representation, since we also need to look at time-worked, educational requirements, and benefits.
Per a BLS study titled "Teachers' Work Patterns," full time teachers worked 24 fewer minutes per weekday and 42 fewer minutes per Saturday than other full-time professionals. On Sundays, teachers and other professionals worked, on average, about the same amount of time. [d] Note that in this study, “other professionals” refers to health care professionals, business and financial operations professionals, architects and engineers, community and social services professionals, managers, and others. [d] (Essentially, professions which have similarly difficult educational requirements.) Therefore, this estimate suggests teachers are working 2.5 hours LESS in any given work-week than comparable professionals.
If concerned we may be inadvertently under-representing hours worked by teachers, we can address that via the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, where teachers self-report. In other words, they tell us what they believe they're doing, and we simply take that at face value. Thus, it's far less possible for us to accidentally underrepresent their hours worked. Per the CPS, "Teachers themselves report a mean work week of 43.7 hours, versus 44.8 hours for non-teachers with a college degree." [e] THIS estimate would put them at roughly 1 hour of work LESS than comparable workers.
Looking at full time teachers, the BLS also broke it down by age group:
• Teachers aged 20-29: 37 hours per week [f]
• Teachers aged 30-39: 36 hours per week [f]
• Teachers aged 40-49: 40 hours per week [f]
• Teachers aged 50-59: 42 hours per week [f]
Taken together, just for a rough estimate, these average out to about 38.75 hours.
Thus, in reviewing all of the above estimates, we can safely approximate that - when not presently on vacation - teachers work roughly 1 - 2.5 FEWER hours a week than comparable workers.
Now what about the number of weeks worked in a year? Many people will anecdotally claim that teachers only work 9 months out of the year, and the BBC even reports that teachers have 13 weeks off, but districts in the U.S. differ. Per the BLS, "Many work the traditional 10-month school year and have a 2-month break during the summer. They also have a short midwinter break." [g] That would equals a minimum of nine weeks off a year, leaving a maximum of 43 work weeks to divide their annual salaries into. THIS seems to be the most "conservative" estimate regarding vacation weeks, so to give teachers the benefit of the doubt, we'll use this one in our estimates. Using the average annual salary we stated above of $56,747, that would be about $1319.70 earned in a work-week. If we then take the highest estimate of hours worked, self reported by teachers to be 43.7 hours a week, that would come out to an hourly wage of $30.20 before benefits. Using the lower end of the spectrum (38.75 hours, which we explained above), their hourly wage would instead be $34.06. Therefore, we can safely approximate that teachers are paid an average rate of $30.20 - $34.06 per hour, which most people wouldn't consider a "bad" wage. (Especially compared to the median wage for ALL workers, divided by 52 weeks and a 40 hour workweek, which comes to $17.98 per hour.)
The next thing to consider are job-related benefits. Once accounting for lavish benefits, some researchers conclude that public teachers are arguably OVERPAID. (And at the very least adequately paid) [h] They argue that generous benefits for public-school teachers often go unrecognized, allowing public perception to discount the true nature of their compensation. For instance:
• Pension programs for public-school teachers are significantly more generous than the typical private-sector retirement plan, but this generosity is hidden by public-sector accounting practices that allow lower employer contributions than a private-sector plan promising the same retirement benefits. [h]
• Most teachers accrue generous retiree health benefits as they work, but retiree health care is excluded from Bureau of Labor Statistics benefits data and thus frequently overlooked. While rarely offered in the private sector, retiree health coverage for teachers is worth roughly an additional 10 percent of wages. [h]
• Job security for teachers is considerably greater than in comparable professions, worth about an extra 1 percent of wages. [h] Per research from Fordham Institute, it's nearly impossible to fire teachers. "Across the country, most districts and states continue to confer lifetime tenure on teachers, weak teachers still take years to dismiss if they achieve tenured status, and any attempt to dismiss an ineffective veteran teacher remains vulnerable to costly challenges at every stage in the process - from evaluation, to remediation, to the dismissal decision, and beyond." This job-security is a perk largely unique to educators, and the benefit of it should therefore be considered within any debate regarding compensation.
Lastly, 2008 Data from the Digest of Education Statistics show that base salaries for Elementary and Secondary PUBLIC School Teachers are 36.91% higher than Elementary and Secondary PRIVATE School Teachers. [j] This is because public teachers’ unions provide an unnatural advantage via political lobbying and campaign fundraising, influencing the very people they later bargain with during compensation negotiations. This is a power no private unions possess, since political elections don't determine who heads privately run schools. These perverse incentives arguably allow public teachers' unions to negotiate above-market wages, and thus largely explain the discrepancy between public and private teachers. It also strongly undermines the contention that public teachers are supposedly "underpaid" when their private counterparts - who are subjected to market pressures - earn far less.
CONCLUSION:
Given that K-12 teachers earn approximately $58,000 a year while working fewer than 10 months, with an approximate wage of $30.20 - $34.06 per hour before benefits, given that they appear to work slightly fewer hours a week than comparable professions, given that public teachers (in particular) earn far better benefits than the average citizen, and given that public teachers earn more than their private counterparts, it's highly misleading to claim that teachers in the U.S. are "underpaid."
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NOTE: WAC is already aware that teachers work before students arrive and after students leave. We're already aware that they work outside the classroom and often times work at home. All of this is accounted for, especially in the data set where teachers self-reported the amount of hours they worked each week. Our review did NOT omit this information.
