Human Services News

From Economic Policy Institute:

At a time of national debate over ways to improve the performance of America's schools, a new report reveals a trend that undermines chances of reaching that goal: a large and growing pay penalty for those who choose to become public school teachers.

Over the last decade, the teacher pay gap increased 10.8 percentage points---from a 4.3 percent shortfall for teachers in 1996 to 15.1 percent in 2006.

The Teaching Penalty: Teacher Pay Losing Ground, published today by the Economic Policy Institute, provides a detailed analysis of trends in teacher pay.

The study, by Sylvia Allegretto, Sean Corcoran, and Lawrence Mishel (see bios below), also compares teachers' weekly pay to that of a core group of occupations with similar educational and skills requirements: accountants, reporters, registered nurses, computer programmers, clergy, and personnel officers.

The teacher pay penalty translates to weekly earnings that are, on average, about $154, or 14.3%, lower than those of people in the comparable occupations.

(Because teachers' annual work schedule is so different from that of other professional occupations, the report compares wages earned for a week of work as a more appropriate comparison.)

There is no state where teachers' weekly wages are equal to or greater than those of similar occupations.

In addition to breaking out data by gender, seniority, and education, the authors examined and compared their results, which are based on decennial Census data, to results from other researchers.

Sean P. Corcoran is an assistant professor of education economics at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University.

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