WHY DO CONSERVATIVES HATE THE CHILDREN?
A new study conducted by the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) finds that, contrary to popular belief, public-school teachers receive total compensation more than 50 percent greater than that of private sector employees – if you take into account benefits, job security, summer vacations and other factors.
“There’s a widespread belief among people — really across the political spectrum — from laymen, to politicians, to scholars, that existing teachers are underpaid in terms of their wages and benefits,” said Jason Richwine, Ph.D., senior policy analyst for empirical Studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation, and coauthor of the study.
“The reality is that it’s just not true,” Richwine said.
The study, “Assessing the Compensation of Public-School Teachers,” was unveiled Tuesday, in an event held at AEI, in Washington, D.C.
In 2010, an Associated Press-Stanford University poll found that 57 percent of people believe teachers are underpaid. The same poll found that only 7 percent believe teachers are overpaid.
“There’s no way to look at the data and conclude that they are underpaid,” Richwine said. “They are certainly paid more than they can get if they work in the private sector and certain policy implications flow directly from that.”
In fact, Richwine and co-author Andrew G. Biggs, a resident scholar at AEI, found that “public-school teachers receive compensation about 52 percent higher than their skills would otherwise garner in the private sector,” Richwine said.
While overall compensation between public-sector teachers and private-sector workers appears equal, the new study identifies flaws in statistical data when accounting for the benefits received by teachers.
By factoring in discrepancies in benefits in the private versus the public sector, as well as in education and skills of teachers and non-teachers, the study found the disparity is “equivalent to more than $120 billion overcharged to taxpayers each year.”
[…]
Speaking on the reasons behind the study, Richwine said the report takes aim at reform.
“We want to reform the way teachers are paid,” Richwine said. “We want to pay the good teachers a lot and the bad teachers not much, or move them out of the profession. We can’t really get pay reform of that kind without understanding the current situation.”
Currently, the evidence shows that teaching majors meet lower grading standards in university education departments than other fields, the authors said.
“Given the relative lack of rigor of education courses, many teachers have not faced as demanding a college curriculum as other graduates,” the report states.
The study cites several studies that validate this fact. In 1960, The Journal of Higher Education reported, “32 percent of students in education courses received ‘A’ grades, compared to just 16 percent in business courses.”
Wake Forest University economist Kevin Rask conducted a study in 2009 on education majors’ grades at a northeastern liberal arts college, and found that the major “awarded the highest grades.”
A more comprehensive study, recently conducted by University of California–San Diego economist Corey Koedel, looked at grade point averages (GPAs) and found “that education majors had substantially higher GPAs than students majoring in the hard sciences, social sciences, or the humanities.”
[…]
The study also finds that workers who switch from non-teaching to teaching jobs receive on average an increase of 8.8 percent in compensation. “Teachers who change to non-teaching jobs, on the other hand, see their wages decrease by 3.1 percent,” states the paper.
“In other words, the effect on wages of switching into or out of a teaching job is precisely the opposite of what one would expect if teachers were underpaid,” the study said.
Having a powerful union has its privileges.
The problem is, it’s the private sector who pays for all these benefits and perks — even while the educators it funds deliver an education to children that remains pedestrian in some areas and poor in others.
What chance does conservatism have in a nation where what you project about yourself or your pet ideology constitutes the only acceptable truth about either?
If I drive drunk I know I might crash into a grocery store or face a nasty legal consequence. But if we vote to install a cabal insulated from other laws of society and nature everything will work out just peachy?
In other words, good luck with that reality. It’s remarkable that you’ll need as much of it as you can possibly find.
Anyone who went to Catholic school can tell you that the teachers don’t make shit, but the schools are “soooo much better”*. Why is that?
*I don’t agree completely, BTW. Some are, some aren’t. I went to Catholic schools all the way through, my Algebra teacher, for example, was shit. My son’s algebra teacher is excellent. The Catholic school in my town is little more than a daycare with sports, but the type of parent who would spend the money to send their kid there is also the type of parent to make sure that the kid does well in school and on standardized tests. 99% of the local Catholic school kids go to college. 40% of the local hillbilly hell public school kids go off to college, but 90% of them complete their degree in five years. The Catholic school numbers are pretty close to reversed. In fact, the local community college campus is sometimes referred to as (Insert Name of local Catholic High School Here) University.
I’m really gratified that the authors dismantled the “but we have College Degrees!” argument head-on. I may have said this before, but in my undergraduate years, the attrition rate in my department was over 60%. The attrition rate in the College of Education? Was negative. There were more seniors than juniors, and more juniors than sophomores. Didn’t take a genius to figure out that a Bachelor’s in Ed was in no way equivalent to a Bachelor’s in Finance or Chemistry or Engineering.
It’s always gotten on my nerves when these underachievers go puling on about their advanced degrees. The degrees are worthless, as are most other “professional credentials” dished out by the educrats to one another.
The Invisible Hand is not fooled.
And I’m not saying that I think public school teachers aren’t paid enough, I think most are. I think the problem with teaching as a career is that you end up a slave to the seniority system. The teachers who are young, excited and effective are usually the first to be gone in any kind of budget crunch, and the bitter and burnt out are rewarded with a pretty secure and well paying job.
Those young, cheap teachers end up in the private schools, or in Japan, grad school or in OWS, until they can get a better paying job or be sold as sex slaves to German tourists.
And I’m also not saying you need to have a college degree to be a sex slave in some German BDSM dungeon. It helps, sure, but you can learn a lot on line, and with good planning, dedication, and some luck in the interview, you could spend the next couple of years in nipple clamps and a leather diaper.
Of course, nowadays a lot of the really well run German BDSM dungeons are outsourcing to smaller operations in rural communities in the American South. It makes sense since both washed-out blondes and methamphetamine are available at quite a discount outside the major urban areas of the North East and Western Europe. So if location is important to you, or you’d like a clientele consisting primarily of failed presidential candidates, internet celebrities, World Bank officials and higher-ups in most of the more well-known non-governmental human rights organizations, consider an internship with any of the major hotel chains. It’ll definitely look good on your resume, and any verifiable sexual assault experience will give you a leg up on the competition when it comes to being drugged with rohypnol-laced Snapple and shoved in the back of a 2003 VW Golf.
I think you know a little bit too much on the topic, LMC. NTTAWWT.
Ace makes a good point:
emphases mine
Then there were those two crazy teachers who weren’t paid at all. And got killed for their trouble.
The way Ace has been going lately, I’m thinking a stopped clock analogy might be appropriate. Of course, that’s a biased opinion because I like Cain.
However, I agree with his argument on teachers. One does not need to be highly intelligent to teach in general, one only needs to be sufficiently intelligent to teach the subject at hand.
Also, the government distorts the market, and teacher’s pay is reflective of one of those distortions. I think in any job working for the government, one’s pay should always lag behind the equivalent private sector position by a certain percentage. I’m not sure of a good way to make that work, though.
I could write an engineering textbook even though I don’t know much about engineering.
I’d research it, compile the information, methodically explain the concepts, and then let real engineers fine-tune it.
I’d be relaying the information only, and having written the textbook, I might be able to converse intelligently with an engineer about his field, but I still shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near an engineering project. Ever.
It really is true about those who can and those who can’t. And those who can’t should be content with being able to relay the information to those who possibly can.
I know I am.
Here’s a dirty little secret.
Anybody can teach. Anybody.
Sure, there are tricks to doing more effective presentations to large groups or small groups. There are pedagogical methods that give you “more tools in the kit”, so if one method doesn’t reach a particular student well, you can try another approach. There are organizational methods to structuring lessons that make teacher assessment more general, and permit other teachers familiar with those methods to crib lesson plans.
But if you know something, you can teach it. Maybe not as well as somebody else, but you can teach it. Of course, we’re assuming the student’s inclination toward learning. Don’t matter if you’re puttin’ it down if they won’t pick it up.
Hell, centuries ago the literacy rates for Jewish communities in freakin’ Eastern Europe was well above the population norm. Without John Dewey, without State education, and without mandated public funding.
Full disclosure: I allowed my provisional State of Ohio teaching credentials to lapse, and I hold a B.S. in Mathematics Education.
I’m not sure of a good way to make that work, though.
Kill the public-sector unions. Make the gubmint jobs compete with the private sector.
Ace is sensible when the topic doesn’t involve a campaign he might be able to get a job with.
Oh, and guns. He’s proudly, militantly ignorant on the subject.
Private and public sector jobs are not always equivalent, so setting the salary could prove difficult in some circumstances. I don’t know. In the case of teachers, it wouldn’t be, but I was reaching for a general solution to the problem of government overpayment of its employees.