The ability to effectively educate the nation’s children hinges on the quality of our teachers. And in order to recruit and retain the number of quality teachers needed requires that they receive pay commensurate with that on offer in the growing number of other career opportunities available to them. Unfortunately, teachers’ pay increasingly lags significantly behind that found in comparable occupations or those requiring similar levels of education and experience.

The Teaching Penalty expands upon the research published in How Does Teacher Pay Compare? (2004) by providing new insights and updated data on the erosion of relative teacher pay, including new analysis that takes into account seniority levels for the first time (with data extending all they way back to 1960). Earnings gains that appeared to benefit all college-educated workers during the late 1990s actually bypassed teachers, leaving them making less and less by comparison. When all college grad’s inflation-adjusted wages began to stagnate in the 2000s, teachers seemed to be hit harder, widening the pay gap even more.

The Teaching Penalty takes the analysis one step further by showing that, contrary to the prevailing notion, the growing pay disadvantage for teachers is not offset even when benefits are taken into account.

Sylvia A. Allegretto is currently an economist at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California, Berkeley. She co-authored two editions of The State of Working America while working as an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. Her research interests include economic inequality, unemployment duration, family budgets, low-wage labor markets, the minimum wage, and the sub-minimum wage received by tipped workers.

Sean P. Corcoran is an assistant professor of educational economics at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University, and a research associate of the Economic Policy Institute. His research interests include state and local public finance, the economics of education, labor economics, and applied econometrics.

Lawrence Mishel is president of the Economic Policy Institute and director of it seducation research program. His areas of research include wage determination, industrial relations, productivity and competitiveness, income inequality, and growth. He has been a co-author of The State of Working America since 1988.

THE ECONOMIC POLICY INSTITUTE is a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank that seeks to broaden the public debate about stragegies to achieve a properous and fair economy. The Institute stresses real world analysis and a concern for the living standards of working people, and it makes its findings accessible to the general public, the media, and policy makers. EPI’s books, studies, and popular education materials address important economic issues, analyze pressing problems facing the U.S. economy, and propose new policies.

Economic Policy Institute books are available in bookstores and at www.epi.org

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You can download the entire publicatin in pdf format.

Sylvia A. Allegretto
Sean P. Corcoran
Lawrence Mishel
Copyright © 2008 Economic Policy Institute
ISBN: 1-932066-30-6

Table of Contents:
Introduction.............................................................................................1
Chapter 1 The Long View: Trends in Teacher Pay.........................................4
Chapter 2 Recent Trends in the Relative Earnings of Teachers.............9
Chapter 3 The Earnings of Teachers Relative to “Comparable” Occupations...... 27
Chapter 4 The Role of Differences in Non-Wage Benefits.............................. 31
Chapter 5 Misuse of the National Compensation Survey, Revisited............... 39
Conclusion and Policy Implications........................................................... 43
Appendix A.................................................................................................... 45
Appendix B................................................................................................ 56
Endnotes .............................................................................................. 63
References .................................................................................................. 69
About the authors ........................................................................................ 73
About EPI..................................................................................................... 75

Introduction:

Teacher quality is the most important input schools contribute to the academic success of their students (Hanushek and Rivkin 2006; Rice 2003). Yet for many school officials, recruiting and retaining talented and effective classroom teachers remains an uphill battle. For decades now, a small and declining fraction of the most cognitively skilled graduates choose to become teachers (Corcoran, Evans, and Schwab 2004), while rigorous national standards and school-based accountability for student performance have pushed the demand for talented teachers to an all-time high.

Recent efforts to recruit and retain highly skilled teachers have reenergized the debate over teacher compensation. Many continue to ask whether teacher salaries are sufficient to attract the best graduates into teaching (Stronge, Gareis, and Little 2006; Moulthrop, Calegari, and Eggers 2005), while others minimize the importance of base pay and question whether the current structure of teacher compensation is optimal for attracting talent into the profession (Solmon and Podgursky 2000; Hoxby and Leigh 2004; Leigh and Mead 2005). Whatever the case, it is clear that sound evidence on the comparability of teacher pay remains critical to our understanding of the link between compensation and teacher quality and those policies that will ensure a cadre of teachers capable of helping students to meet increasingly higher achievement standards. ...

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