[Appeared in the March 11 Wall Street Journal.]
It's time to give the National Education Association a little math lesson.
On releasing its recent annual report on teacher salaries, the NEA announced that public school teachers' salaries were "barely
keeping up with inflation." The average U.S. teacher salary for 1995-1996, according to the 2.2 million member teachers'
union, was $37,685, up 3 percent from 1994-95.
"The salary outlook for teachers is troubling," lamented NEA President Bob Chase in the press release accompanying the
report. "The nation needs 2 million new teachers over the next 10 years, and how are we going to attract qualified people to
the teaching profession without attractive salaries? Teaching is an emotionally, physically, and intellectually challenging career
that today garners too little respect and low pay relative to comparable professionals."
The NEA report contains a great many data to judge "pay relative to comparable professionals" -- per capita income,
population, class size, average per-pupil expenditures and so on. Curiously, however, the study omits one factor with an
extraordinary effect on annual salary comparisons: the number of workdays per year. Here's an experiment to underscore the
importance of the information the NEA report failed to include:
Let's say Ms. Smith, an average "comparable professional," makes $42,685 annually, or $5,000 more than the average public
school teacher. Even if she works for a generous company, her days off are unlikely to consist of more than 52 weekends,
three weeks of vacation and 11 holidays. Ms. Smith thus works 235 days per year; her pay totals $181.64 per workday. Ms.
Doe, our average public school teacher, works only 185 days per year for her $37,685. That comes to $203.70 per
workday. If Ms. Doe worked the same number of days as Ms. Smith, her annual salary would be $47,870 -- $5,185 more
than the "comparable professional."
The per-workday statistics in the nearby chart allow comparisons with workers in South Dakota, the state with the lowest
average teacher salary, and Connecticut, which has the highest average. They can also project teacher salaries over a
235-day work year: A South Dakota teacher would receive $33,467, while a Connecticut teacher would earn a whopping
$63,836. One other conclusion: The low pay that Mr. Chase decries is actually greater per day of work than that of most
U.S. workers.
To see how such data can be useful to policy-makers, consider the recent experience of the state of Hawaii: In February it
barely averted a teachers' strike in February by agreeing to a deal that would raise the average teacher's salary from $35,807
to $41,400 by next year -- a boost of 15.6 percent, based on NEA statistics. But state negotiators managed to get the Hawaii
State Teachers Association to agree to increase its members' workdays to 183 from 176. Per-workday salaries thus rose
from $203.44 to $226.23 -- an increase of 11.2 percent.
The NEA generally counters such calculations with a litany of tales about teachers being uncompensated for grading papers at
home, or for certain extracurricular activities. This argument fails for two reasons. First, most professional careers require
spending a great deal of uncompensated personal time on work. And second, most teachers' union contracts define the
maximum number of hours per week a teacher can be required to work, usually between 37 and 39 hours.
If NEA President Chase really wanted teachers to earn more money, he would give them one bit of advice: Go to work for
the NEA. The average NEA employee earned $68,346 in 1995. A full 126 of its 608 employees made more than $100,000
in cash compensation, led by Mr. Chase's predecessor, Keith Geiger, who took home $274,800 in 1995. That's the kind of
math the NEA understands.
Reprinted with permission.
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