A union-backed research group is blasting a recent study that claimed teachers are paid 52 percent more than fair market rates, saying the work “rests on a series of flawed and one-sided assumptions and sloppy statistical analysis.”
The Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute, both conservative think tanks, in November issued “Assessing the Compensation of Public School Teacher,” concluding that “public-school teacher salaries are comparable to those paid to similarly skilled private sector workers, but that more generous fringe benefits for public-school teachers, including greater job security, make total compensation 52 percent greater than fair market levels, equivalent to more than $120 billion overcharged to taxpayers each year.”
Andrew G. Biggs, AEI’s resident scholar, and Jason Richwine, a senior policy analyst in Heritage’s Center for Data Analysis, wrote that teacher compensation could be reduced “with only minor effects on recruitment and retention. Alternatively, teachers who are more effective at raising student achievement might be hired at comparable cost.”
Professor Jeffrey H. Keefe of Rutgers University’s School of Management and Labor Relations, determined the Heratige-AEI study relies on “an aggregation of spurious claims” to make its case.
The review was produced by the National Education Policy Center with funding from the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.
“Central to the original report’s argument is the claim that teachers are less intelligent than other workers of comparable education and experience,” Keefe wrote.
“The report bases this claim on the lower scores of teachers on the Armed Forces Qualifications Test. Yet the AFQT is simply not an intelligence test. Further, the authors claim that AFQT scores alone can be used to compare teacher and non-teacher populations. But that conclusion relies on a data sample that’s too small to provide any meaningful long-term analyses or conclusions.”
Keefe wrote that there are other “statistical missteps in the report,” including “erroneous calculations for benefits costs.”
The Great Lakes group notes that the wrote that the study will lead to “’headline-grabbing claims of dramatic overpayment of teachers’ that, in turn, will result in ill-informed and harmful policy decisions that further undercut support for public education.”
The Great Lakes group is funded by the National Education Association and the union branches in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin. Michigan Education Association Executive Director Lu Battaglieri serves as the Great Lakes Center’s chairman.
The project also was supported by the National Education Policy Center, which is backed by the Ford Foundation, the Great Lakes Center, and the National Education Association, according to the organization’s website.
via Review blasts teacher compensation study as ‘flawed’ and ‘sloppy’ | MLive.com.
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February 1, 2012 at 11:27 AM
Not certain whether this was done in this study, however anti-teacher researchers are famous for assuming that teachers only actually WORK when there are students in their classroom during formal school hours. Then, they calculate, based on the “teaching day” the teacher’s hourly wage, which they then proclaim to be well above the norm. Indeed, they may also factor in the decent benefits package.
Teaching, as most of know, involves much more than what takes place during actual school hours. For me to be prepared to teach students while they are in my room, I must prepare lessons, grade work, make phone calls, see students after school, attend meetings and classes (which I may also be required to pay for). The number of hours teachers actually WORK in a given week is variable, however many, many teachers WORK for more hours than are visible.
I work after school in my room, and I take work home almost daily. I work at my desk in the evening, or I am in my home office by 5:30 a.m. daily working on lessons, etc. I write IEPs, I stop by my classroom on weekends to work.
This is what professional people do. It is unethical to estimate a teacher’s hourly earnings based only upon teaching hours.
The countries where students earn the highest test scores recognize that teaching is an activity that incorporates much more than time in class with students. We should do so as well.