How Does Teacher Pay Compare? Methodological Challenges and Answers

For decades, researchers have asked whether teacher compensation has kept pace with outside job opportunities, and whether compensation is sufficiently competitive to attract the quality of instructors desired. While the popular view is that teacher pay is relatively low and has not kept up with comparable professions over time, new claims suggest that teachers are actually well compensated when work hours, weeks of work, or benefits packages are taken into account.

How Does Teacher Pay Compare? reviews recent analyses of relative teacher compensation and provides a detailed analysis of trends in the relative weekly pay of elementary and secondary school teachers. It finds that teacher compensation lags that of workers with similar education and experience, as well as that of workers with comparable skill requirements, like accountants, reporters, registered nurses, computer programmers, clergy, personnel officers, and vocational counselors and inspectors. Incorporating benefits into the analysis does not alter the general picture of teachers having a substantial wage/pay disadvantage that eroded considerably over the last 10 years.

Sylvia A. Allegretto is an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. Her areas of research include unemployment, income inequality, and family budgets, and she is a co-author of The State of Working America 2004-05. She received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Sean P. Corcoran is an assistant professor of economics at California State University, Sacramento and a research associate of the Economic Policy Institute. His research interests include state and local public finance, the economics of education, and applied econometrics. His dissertation, on teacher quality and school finance, received the 2003 outstanding dissertation award from the American Education Finance Association and was recently featured in the "Economic Scene" column of The New York Times. Portions of this dissertation have been published in the American Economic Review and the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.

Lawrence Mishel joined the Economic Policy Institute in 1987 and has been its president since 2002. His areas of research include wage determination, industrial relations, productivity and competitiveness, income inequality, and growth. He is the director of EPI’s education research program, and has been a co-author of The State of Working America since the first version in 1988.