Why Teachers are Overpaid and Overrated
Why Public School Teachers are Overpaid and Overrated
Note: I didn’t want to keep typing Public School Teachers, so when I refer to “teachers” I mean Public School Teachers.
Preface: I am biased because I always disliked school. I have never had a “favorite teacher”; however, that probably was my fault not the schools/teachers’. Secondly, I hope this does not come off as an attack on teachers as I think the vast majority are great people. In addition, I have egalitarian preferences and would prefer if in general white collar workers were paid less and blue collar workers were paid more.
This article was inspired when I was a student at J.P Stevens High School in NJ. We used to look at the salaries of the teachers that taught us as it was public information, and quite a few made over 100,000 dollars. I thought they were being paid too much.
Introduction:
In this essay, I will make two separate arguments. The first is that teachers are overpaid. This means for the level of human capital and skills teachers have, the majority of teachers are paid more than market rate. Oftentimes, arguments about “adequate pay” mutate into arguments about the moral worth of each job. For example, nurses should be paid more than professional athletes because they do important life saving work. I would argue the contrary because the skills of the professional athletes are much more rare than the skills of nurses.
My second argument is that the teachers are overrated by themselves and society. That is the value and the difficulty of work teachers do is thought to be greater than reality.
Part 1: Why teachers are overpaid
When evaluating the salary of teachers it is crucial to take into consideration the benefits they receive. I will list them here:
Work Less Days
Teachers work 180 days instead of the average of 260
Pensions
Teachers receive a pension that is evaluated at on average at $668,000.
Health Care
Teachers receive great Health care that typically covers the entire family.
Flexibility
Teachers can take many sick days and be late to work without much consequence.
Job Security/Tenure
After a fixed time on the job, teachers cannot be fired without egregious misaction.
Now evaluating the human capital of Teachers, I will use the proxy of SAT scores of teachers and the GRE scores of teachers. Of course, this is an inaccurate measure, but I think this is an okay approximation.
Looking at the charts above, education majors are at the bottom of GRE scores, and near the bottom among college graduates majoring in white collar jobs(Construction Trades is not white color). Therefore, I think it is safe to conclude that the human capital of the average public school teacher is below the average college graduate. It is important to note that the salary of teachers are not set by supply and demand, but rather union negotiating.
The median annual salary of teachers as of 2021 is $62,370. The median annual salary of a college graduate is $61,073.
However, public school teachers typically work around 180 days while regular workers work around 260 days. While taking into account the substantial amount of break time teachers have, their annual salary would be $90,090. Further taking into account the Pension, Health Care, Flexibility, and Job Security of teachers, I will very conservatively add another 5% bonus to the annual salary. This comes out to $93,208.5. This is considerably higher than the median salary of college graduate, although teachers have below average human capital.
Part 2: The illusion of Lower Pay
Oftentimes, you can see stories about Teachers living in poverty or not having enough to eat. As in all stories there is some truth to it. I will give some clarification of why this is the case.
Teachers have very low starting salaries especially for college graduates. This is because of the odd pay structure of Teachers, which is substantially different from almost all private sector jobs.
An important concept in labor economics is that the productivity of workers rapidly increases in the first two years, then plateaus. That is, in the first two years of working a job, a worker becomes much better at the job, then stops getting much better. This reality is reflected in the pay structure of jobs.
I will give some examples of some typical jobs of Cornell Graduates, which I am somewhat familiar with. Junior developers straight out of college make around 80k to 100k, then their pay nearly doubles after they become senior developers after two years of experience. Another example is consulting, straight out of college consultants typically make about 100,000 dollars. After two years of experience, consultants make 180,000. After the first two years, you typically need a promotion to a management position to make another substantial pay raise.
On the Contrary, Teachers make very incremental increases in their salaries each year as a result of teachers unions. Unions serve the older longstanding members at the expense of younger members. This rewards older teachers to the disadvantage of younger teachers. Making around 30,000 dollars with college debt can be tough. Further, the pay of teachers is backloaded because of pensions. . In addition, politicians promise teacher members pensions so they give teachers more pay without raising taxes, and instead kick payment to many decades later. In the private sector pensions and these kinds of pay structures are very rare.
Part 3: Overrated by themselves
At one point I was a lifeguard, where I just sat at the pool doing nothing. Occasionally, I would shout at a little kid for running too fast. I made minimum wage, which I think was a fair amount.
I think similarly the jobs of teachers are not that hard. Their task is to manage 25 kids at a time. It for sure is harder and requires more skill than me being a lifeguard, but in general it is not too hard. Of course, there are some very tough jobs in the inner city and tough neighborhoods, but in general most teaching jobs are in middle class neighborhoods, where the students are well behaved. Secondly, most teachers have about 45 minutes of release time per day to do grading, this comes out to 3.75 hours per week, which should be an adequate amount of time to do grading. In addition, once you have been teaching the same lessons, so many times it no longer becomes necessary to plan, and instead you can just rely on experience.
In my perception teachers think their job is more difficult than it really is. In the 2022 Gallup poll, Teachers were the most burn-out profession at 44%. I think there are many other jobs such as telemarketer, construction worker, or prison guard that would be tougher and more burnt out. Instead, there is a culture in teaching that likes to amplify the difficulty of their job.
Part 4: Overrated by society
First, I think education in general is overrated. I have written about this a bit in this blog post.
Second, I think that teachers just are not that important when it comes to academic achievement. Other things matter much more like the student’s family life, socioeconomic status, genetics, and composition of the student body. For example, private school teachers are paid substantially less than public school teachers; however, private school students still test better than public school teachers.
Conclusion: What would Adrian do?
I would fire all foreign language teachers and physical education teachers. Instead, the kids can have recess. Nobody learns foreign languages in high school anyways.
I would make all subjects optional except Math and English
I would make the starting salary of teachers 50,000. In the second year they would make 55,000. In the third year they would make 60,000. After that pay raises would be tied to inflation.
This would never happen because cutting public school salaries would be extremely unpopular, and the unions would never let this happen.
If you have any counter arguments, I would love to hear. Leave a comment or email me at ard238@cornell.edu.