How about private schools? They can charge whatever they want.
I’m not surprised that the market for English teachers is different in those countries, just as I’d guess a French teacher is in higher demand here than in France or Quebec. How do the salaries compare in other English speaking countries?
Adjunct faculty in community colleges usually make about half to two-thirds of what their full time colleagues make for teaching the same classes, with the same degrees and experience or in some cases even more.
They generally receive no compensation for prep time, planning, grading, and other work outside the classroom hours; and sometimes no benefits programs or paid office hours unless such things are negotiated.
Many wind up as freeway flyers juggling multiple campuses and overloads to make ends meet. If they made better $–and if the colleges hired more people to work full time, they wouldn’t have to juggle so much.
I’m a teacher, and I don’t make squat. Like the adjunct faculty that vivalostwages mentions, I earn about one quarter of what a professor earns (per class).
Most of my colleagues earn 7k/year teaching; in order to make ends meet, I double up my sections, teaching two/semester (the average professor teaches three).
I am a dreaded TA. I do all the work of a professor - class planning, test writing and grading, composition grading, office hours, etc, for a fraction of the price. Of course, I don’t have the education (another 3 years before I get my doctorate) of a professor, or the experience, but the university still entrusts the education of my 48 students to me every semester.
kunilou, that’s just not a distinction.
Look; MY salary comes from a budget, too. My director has almost no input whatsoever into how much money she gets to hire and pay people. And the company can’t just arbitrarily increase revenue or else we’d just raise it to a quadrillion dollars a year. The vast, vast majority of all employees in all businesses have their salaries set in exactly the manner you describe. How are teachers any different?
Furthermore, what you’re saying is generally true of ALL government employees down to the last detail - and yet government employees are generally very well paid and enjoy outstanding benefits and a level of job security comparable to any private industry. (At least around here, job security for teachers, specifically, is virtually ironclad.) I search for jobs constantly - it’s just a wise thing to do - and government positions compete quite well with private almost all the way up the experience curve. (For that matter, with my experience and education, as a teacher I’d be coming out about the same - a little less pay, but better benefits and way more job security. I work for a decent company that pays well, too.)
Remember, we aren’t talking about people making minimum wage here. Teachers generally make good money and get great benefits. What you’re going to have to demonstrate to prove they’re underpaid is to establish somehow that their equilibrium compensation is actually MORE than it is now. Do you even know what their average salary IS?
I don’t understand, then, why they simply don’t fix the cost at minimum wage. Why pay an experienced teacher $40K and up if you could just pay them $25K?Look, in this case the taxpayer IS the customer. With or without children, education is a good purchased by the taxpayer. What teachers are paid is a reflection of the taxpayer’s utility curve, since the taxpayer could elect politicians who promise more education spending if they wanted to.
The general point you’re orbiting around - that school boards are all local monopsonies - is valid. But that doesn’t prove teachers are underpaid unless you can somehow demonstrate why they should make more. And what gives lie to that is that it still remains a truly amazing coincidence that in the case of PRIVATE schools, where salaries are more directly attached to customer preference, where the customers in fact are buying the good specifically because they want high quality education, teachers make the same, if not less. Why is that?
I think it is brutally obvious that the variation in teacher salaries is no greater than the variation in salaries in any other job. It is simply not the case that everyone in the same sort of job makes the same sort of money. The salary range for what I do ranges between $45K and $80K, and that’s just in the city I live in.
Your points about monopsony may have some validity to them. But it’s all theory. What is the evidence that teachers’ equilibrium salary is higher than what they’re being paid? There’s a lot of factors that could be driving them up or offsetting the effects of local monopsony; unionization, public pressure for education spending, legal issues, who knows what else.
RickJay, you have overlooked my point that in a classic market economy, salaries are determined by an interaction between employees (what they want to receive), employers (what they want to pay) and customers (how much revenue they generate to provide a budget). In short, the company’s revenues are based on what the market will bear, and the employees’ salaries are set accordingly.
In a public school system, the “company” can not raise prices without the approval of an outside group (taxpayer/voters who are not customers.) Therefore, the public schools are not able to charge what the market will bear, and therefore are arbitrarily limited in what they can pay their employees.
The existence of private schools where parents are willing to pay tuition many times what they pay in taxes for a public school proves my point, not refutes it.
As for the issue of private schools paying teachers less than public schools, here’s a cite
http://memphis.bizjournals.com/memphis/stories/2002/08/05/focus3.html
And here’s an even better one
That talk about the traditional trade-offs between teaching in public and private schools, and how the salary disparities are narrowing.
And yes, I do know what the average salary is. And here’s a link for that, too.
Whoa there cowboy. Let’s back up and see if we can agree on reality at a more basic level. I never said the actual salaries weren’t “market rate”. I said the market rate is lower than it would be because of prejudices about the value of services provided, almost exclusively, by women. This is commonly known as “wage discrimination.” It is the topic of dozens, if not hundreds, of laws on both the state and federal level. Do you acknowledge that wage discrimination exists and is a real problem?
Now, if we cleared that hurdle, then we can move on to see if wage discrimination is an issue for the professional class known as “teachers”. How are they paid when compared to similar positions which require the level of commitment and education this field does. I would refer you to the reasonably comprehensive Survey and Analysis of Teacher Salary Trends 2002. Specifically page 47 which shows a shortage of teachers for the years 1999, 2000, 2001, and 2002. Also pages 49-51 for salary rates for new teachers versus other professions requiring extensive education.
Beyond that we can start to look at the “why”, but we should get a firmer footing on the “what” before we go ahead. I am making two assertions. Firstly: Wage discrimination exists and salaries depressed by it should not be considered fair. Secondly: Salaries of teachers are consistently below other fields requiring similar working hours/conditions and specialized knowledge.
Let me know what you think of those two and we’ll see if we can go further with this.
Enjoy,
Steven
On a similar note as public school teachers, I feel child care workers are grossly underpaid. According to PA state regs., you need to have a certain ratio of degreed teachers in every center. The turnover for these people is unbelievable. Many only stay until they can get a public school position. The ones who stay are often times either incredibly dedicated and the second wage earner in the family, or too unqualified to get a public school position. It is dismaying to say the least.
I would like to shift gears for a moment and see what you think of this…
As a TV news producer, I felt underpaid. I was responsible for creating a newscast every day that tens of thousands of people would be watching and which would generate about ten thousand dollars in advertising revenue.
My take home pay per day was a little over one hundred dollars. I was making in the mid-30’s. Some producers made more, but not much over 50-60K…for bringing in that much in one week.
Any thoughts?
The entry level pay for teachers is frequently more than that of chemists and biologists, toss in all the extra days off, the bonuses they can get for coaching teams, etc., you really have to be in it for the love or the long haul to want to choose a commercial (egads, even worse government ) job over teaching. I’m thinking about teaching when I semi-retire in 20 or so years…
Of course, but the origin of wage discrminiation is men and women getting paid different wages for the same job. Male and female teachers are on the same pay scales in the same school districts.
You’re attempting to establish that teachers’ market value is driven down because the majority of teachers are women, as compared to… well, presumably as compared to what they’d make if teachers were mostly men. This is a more recent definition of pay inequity.
Now, if you’ll give me some time to go over your cite, I’ll respond to that. But I’m now addressing two questions, so you’ll forgive me if I go ahead and respond to others.
kunilou:
That is simply not true, kunilou. Teachers’ salaries are entirely up to their employers; I have never heard of a county or state holding a referendum on raising salaries for teachers - maybe they do this where you live but it’s sure not common. They have to budget accordingly or else they’ll go into debt, but how is that any different from a business? An ordinary business cannot simply jack up salaries with disregard to income. Either government, school board or private firm must budget salaries in accordance with expected future revenue. A government relying on taxation can adjust its revenue stream (and, like a business, can make mistakes that result in less revenue rather than more.)
No, it really doesn’t. If those teachers are paid market value why aren’t they making far more? The customer has direct input there, and yet your own cite indicates those teachers make less money!
Anywa, with respect to your links, I find it intersting to note that according to your first cite, Memphis area public schools are currently increasing salaries just to bring them in line with public school salaries, which incidentally begin at $34,700, which is a pretty good rate of pay for someone just out of school. (Jeez, that’s BAD??) If public school teachers were paid under market value my expectation would be that private school teachers would make more, not less or the same.
Interestingly, it appears rural Missouri pays much less than Memphis, TN. I would expect there’s a cost of living difference there.
At this point, we’re all (me included) arguing in circles.
Kel Varnsen originally asked whether any group in the U.S. was truly underpaid or overpaid.
Several posters, including me, argue that teachers, as a group, are underpaid. The arguments:
Teaching is traditionally a female-dominated profession, and female-dominated professions are traditionally lower-paid than those dominated by men.
(My argument) That public education is artifically constrained from raising enough revenue to pay teachers what they are worth.
RickJay, forgive me for compressing your argument and possibly losing the critical points you’re trying to make, but it seems to me that you are arguing that teachers are paid what they are paid because the market has more or less consistently determined a pay scale. Therefore, they are neither underpaid nor overpaid.
And several, like silenus, jacksen9 and kidchameleon argue that, at least at the entry level, teachers are not underpaid.
This can go on for weeks unless we define “what is underpaid/opverpaid?” and who determines it.
At this point, the only styatistic not subject to interpretation is Mtgman’s cite that there has been a shortage of teachers since at least 1999. Until someone else comes along with a better definition of what we’re arguing about, I’m going to go with this…
If there is an industry-wide (as opposed to localized) shortage of qualified people to fill all the poistions, that job is underpaid. If there is a surplus of people to fill all the positions, that job is overpaid.
That definition won’t work in the field of entertainment, where consumers are willing to pay for a unique person (a movie starring Jim Carrey vs. Bill Paxton, for example, or Alex Rodriguez vs. Eric Chavez at third base) but it’s the best I can do right now.
Would anyone like to respond to EvilOne ?
I believe the current terminology(which aids in finding documentation from the Beauru of Labor Statistics and other sources) is “Wage Gap”. I did see a couple articles while Googling that suggested average starting pay for female teachers is lower than that of male teachers but couldn’t cite them because they’re in archives and only available for free from google’s cache. Plus they were opinion pieces and I prefer source data whenever possible.
In any event, I’m not trying to establish anything specific about teachers, just that there are more possibilities than you were originally allowing when you made the charge of contradiction against alison ashley. In economic theory whatever the market pays is, by definition, fair. Barring coercion to force people into certain jobs or to remain in certain jobs of course. I’m saying that is an overly simplistic model and other factors, such as ingrained prejudices which produce gender-based wage gaps, need to be accounted for. There is nothing contradictory in saying that a market-determined price may be lower than it would be if these prejudices were not present. The data clearly shows this prejudice is still present.
No problem, I found it very interesting reading.
Enjoy,
Steven
Don’t forget fat people of either gender.
I really don’t think it does. It only shows that women, as a group, make less than men. It says nothing about men making more money in the same fields.
Without solid evidence that prejudice has an effect on the wages for entire categories of jobs, we are left wondering whether women are paid less because they choose lower paying jobs, or whether those jobs are lower paid simply because employers know women choose them and employers hate women for some undefined reason. I think the former is much more likely.
From the page linked to in my previous post with the link called “Wage Gap”.
Enjoy,
Steven
Any employee that is paid free from outside intervention in the free market is paid exactly what the market will bear. Neither under nor over.
Only fields that are subject to outside forces, government coercion, barriers to competition, are either under or over paid. Public education in the U.S., being a virtual monopoly, would lead me to believe that the price paid for the good (education) is higher than the market price. It follows that as a whole, people in the public education field are overpaid.
Is that information corrected for age and experience? If you have 100 young women doctors and 100 older men doctors, you might get just these sorts of statistics without any gender bias. I was not able to tell for sure if the numbers used on the pages you linked to had been so corrected.
Monopolies, particularly public monopolies, can hold prices (and wages) down, as well as up. The market can rebel by creating shortages.
If, as a whole, people in the public education field are overpaid, why is there a shortage of qualified people willing to teach? Shouldn’t there be a surplus?
Or for that matter, education, or even number of hours worked per week. There is no indication that the data is normalized at all. It would seem to be a pretty worthless statistical analysis.
Here is a link with more statistic meat. It only goes to 1991, but it contains information about the differences in the number of hours worked (it should be noted that women are employed fewer hours in the week and fewer weeks in the year than their male counterparts.), the mean amount of experience (for all men, only 1.6 percent of all potential work-years were spent away from work while for women workers, 14.7 percent of all potential work-years were spent away from paid work.)