Dan D. Goldhaber, from Selected Papers in School Finance 2000-01, National Center for Education Statistics, August 2001
As part of the National Center for Education Statistics' Selected Papers in School Finance 2000-01 series, edited by William Fowler, Urban Institute economist Dan D. Goldhaber has written a very interesting essay examining teacher pay over time. Mostly what he demonstrates is how complicated this topic is, how difficult to select and apply the right "deflator" and to be certain what to compare teacher pay with. It's also daunting to decide which measure of teacher compensation to use. For example, does one look at beginning pay, average pay, top-of-the-scale pay? With or without benefits included? Done on an annual basis, a monthly basis, a weekly basis or an hourly basis? These are non-trivial analytic questions with major effects on the conclusions that one reaches. Also of concern is the extent to which teacher salary data, including that reported by government agencies, is in fact gathered by the teacher unions. Perhaps the most important policy implication of Goldhaber's analysis is the urgency of decoupling teacher pay from fixed salary schedules and instead varying it along several dimensions. On balance, he believes, school systems face three main options: (a) to radically increase teacher salaries across the board, at immense costs and by rates of increase that exceed anything in recent history; (b) to "differentiate salaries by teacher skills"; or (c) to " risk losing technical proficient individuals to other occupations." Present evidence indicates a de facto opting for the third of those possibilities. Goldhaber clearly doesn't think that's very wise. He doesn't think the first option is realistic. And he makes a pretty good case for the second one. To order the entire volume in which the Goldhaber paper appears (its number is NCES 2001378), write to U.S. Department of Education, ED Pubs, PO Box 1398, Jessup, MD 20794-1398 or phone 1-877-4ED-Pubs. To download a PDF version of the Goldhaber chapter, surf to http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2001/2001378_2.pdf.
