American Federation of Teachers, October 2001
The American Federation of Teachers has been a busy place in recent weeks. On October 25, they released an in-house study of the salaries of urban teachers. There's some useful data here - including startling city-by-city differences - but the analysis is heavily spun to favor AFT policy positions. Three problems warrant mention: (1) Only cash salaries (based on posted salary schedules) are reported here; no account is taken of the value of the generous benefits packages that most public-school teachers enjoy, nor of various opportunities to supplement their incomes (either by doing extra work at school or by moonlighting and summer employment). (2) No attempt is made to "annualize" salaries, so we find the salaries of teachers who are attached to a typical 180-day work year compared with salaries in other fields where 240 workdays per year are commonly expected. Thus, for example, a statement meant to alarm readers - that new college graduates received average salary offers of almost $40,000 while the average "BA-minimum" salary for beginning public school teachers was $30,700 in large cities - when re-examined on an "annualized" basis, suggests that new teachers are paid at almost precisely the same rate as other recent college graduates. That's not to say they shouldn't be paid more, only that there's no great discrepancy here. (3) There's also a possible problem in what's otherwise a compelling point: the AFT analysts report that "net total spending growth" per pupil in public education over the past decade averaged 4.6 percent annually, while teacher salary growth averaged 3.2 percent per year. "Thus," concludes the AFT, "much of the increase in education funding during the 1990s went to something other than teacher salaries." Well, maybe. First, however, one would have to know how many more teachers were employed during this period. During a period of keen interest in class-size reduction, it's likely that public education put a lot of its additional dollars into hiring more teachers rather than into higher salaries for existing teachers. At the very least, that possibility must be ruled out before one can be alarmed by this discrepancy in the way the authors intend. You can see for yourself (PDF format) by surfing to www.aft.org/press/2001/102501.html.
