Teachers Unions – Part 8

Is teacher compensation that bad, all things considered?

Continuing this essay series on how teachers unions influence America’s public schools, this essay focuses on teacher pay, teacher work schedules, and teacher absences.

Teachers unions’ exclusive legal obligation is to push for higher salaries and benefits and easier working conditions for teachers.  So what is the status of teacher compensation today?

As Terry Moe writes in his book Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools:

[T]he claim that teachers are underpaid. Over the years, this notion has become woven into the warp and woof of modern American society, so much so that, in circles of reasonably well-educated people — including, in my experience, policymakers, journalists, business leaders, and most reformers – it is regarded as strange and some sort of heresy for anyone to argue the contrary. Of course teachers are underpaid! This is one of the taken for granteds of American public education: a “fact” that is widely bemoaned and regularly pointed to as evidence that the nation isn't doing enough to support and reward its teachers … [T]he question itself does not have an objective answer. Underpaid compared to what? What does underpaid even mean? I do think, however, that this is an issue that — precisely because so many people have prejudged it, and because it has long played a central role in the policymaking process — deserves to be separately examined so that it can be more clearly understood … In a fascinating recent survey, Howell and West explore how much the public knows on these counts and find that people vastly underestimate the true salary and spending levels in their own districts. More than 90 percent of Americans underestimate how much their own districts spend. With the average district in the U.S. spending more than $10,000 a year (in 2007) [My note: in my own city of Alexandria, Virginia, the annual spending in public schools per student is as follows: “the average per pupil cost [is] projected to increase by 3.6 percent to $21,474, for FY 2024 compared to the prior fiscal year. The FY 2024 Budget for General Education per pupil cost increases by 3.7 percent to $17,211, Special Education per pupil cost increase by 2.4 percent to $37,255, and EL cost per pupil increase by 3.7 percent to $21,508 compared to the prior fiscal year.”], “more than 40 percent of the sample claimed that annual spending was $1,000 per pupil or less.” This is an astounding misperception of how much money is being spent on the schools. A thousand dollars per pupil per year? No wonder they think more money needs to be spent. Their perceptions are more accurate for teacher salaries, but not by a lot. On average, they underestimate how much their local teachers are being paid by some 30 percent. Here too, it is little wonder they think teachers need to be paid more. Somehow, Americans have gotten the idea that districts are spending next to nothing and that teachers are being paid much less than they really are … In the end, salary alone is not what matters. What matters is the compensation package in its entirety … The unions typically pursue two key goals that are in tension with one another: they want more compensation for their members, but they also want the districts to hire more teachers. The latter is hugely to their advantage because it adds to their membership rolls, their finances, their legions of political activists, and their political power. And they have been very successful on this dimension — aided by the popularity of smaller class sizes. One of the most important historical trends in public education is that the number of teachers has risen relentlessly over the years relative to the number of students.

Incidentally, on the subject of smaller class sizes, as Michael Hartley writes in his book How Policies Make Interest Groups: Governments, Unions, and American Education:

[E]ven in debates over class size, the relationship between student and teacher interests will be contingent and mixed. Yes, research indicates that lower class sizes boost student learning, but this finding tends to apply narrowly to students in lower grades (K–3) and only when policymakers spend significant sums of money to substantially lower class sizes. In other words, if policymakers set out to establish class-size policies with only one objective in mind—doing what class-size research shows is best for kids—they would surgically steer education dollars into lowering class sizes in the early grades. Policymakers might even opt for larger class sizes for older students so that they could redirect these less efficient expenditures to some other needs. If teacher and student interests were perfectly congruent, teachers unions would adopt the very same position, lobbying for reduced class sizes only in cases where the research shows that it matters for students. Yet the historical record shows that this is not how unions have approached class-size debates. In California and Florida, for example, they advocated for across-the-board reductions that, in the end, cost both states millions of dollars without leading to significant student achievement gains.

In any case, as Moe writes:

The hitch, of course, is that teachers are the single greatest expense of the public school system, and the hiring of more teachers per student inevitably means that there is less money to go around for paying each teacher. Although the unions complain about low teacher pay, they have essentially made a rational trade-off: more teachers, less compensation per teacher. With a lower ratio of teachers to students, teachers could easily be paid considerably higher salaries. Michael Podgursky calculates that, if the staffing ratio had remained constant from 1980 to 2007, teacher compensation could have grown by 78 percent during this period, yielding a 2007 average salary of $78,574. But because the staffing ratio rose dramatically during those years and the money had to be spread among more teachers, the average salary actually grew by only 7 percent, to $ 52,578 … The real costs of public education, moreover, are actually much higher than those that get reported. According to an eye-opening, detailed investigation recently carried out by Adam Schaeffer, the total per-pupil costs — which include expenditures for capital (like buildings), transportation, debt service, and more — are actually 44 percent higher than the official spending numbers reported by major school districts. And Schaeffer's calculations don't even include the staggering costs of unfunded liabilities for teacher pensions and retiree health care benefits (to be discussed), which the districts (and states) should be paying but are not … Research shows that, even in the face of high staffing ratios and ever-present budget constraints, the unions seem to have been successful over the decades at raising teacher salaries. That is, teachers appear to make higher salaries in unionized as compared to nonunionized districts, all else equal. But the estimated impacts are not large, and thorny methodological issues make it difficult to even arrive at good estimates. The most sophisticated study thus far, by Caroline Hoxby, specifically addresses these confounding effects, and its estimate puts the impact of collective bargaining on teacher salaries at about 5 percent. Even though the unions have been the most powerful force in public education for some thirty years, then, they have not been able to win major salary gains for their members. With high staffing ratio s— which the unions want — the money just isn't there. But other trade-offs can help out considerably. With money tight, school board members are in the best position to make concessions on matters that don't cost them much extra money — or any extra money at all — and don't press up against their budget constraint. This simple axiom points immediately to two important conclusions about collective bargaining. The first is that school boards are much more inclined to accede to union demands on work rules than on pay and benefits, because most work rules can be adopted with little or no financial cost. Work rules —requiring seniority-based transfers, for example, or free periods for prep time — are valuable to teachers and represent a form of compensation over and above salary … [W]hen unions make trade-offs that allow districts to “pay” teachers in the form of work rules rather than salary, teachers are still being compensated. It just doesn't show up as salary. The second conclusion is that, when it comes to teacher pay and benefits, school board members have incentives to favor benefits over pay … The rationale is that teacher pay not only is a far bigger budget item than benefits, but also shows up in its entirety as a current expense in the schools' operating budget. Much of the true expense of teacher benefits, on the other hand, can be put off until the future—making them strategically attractive … As part of this emphasis on benefits, many school boards (and other governments) have agreed to generous health care benefits for retirees, sometimes including their spouses and children—a major union demand, because so many teachers (and other public employees) retire in their fifties, well before they are eligible for Medicare. As concessions go, this is an attractive one for school board members to make, as most of the costs will be paid in future years after school board members have moved on. Today's politicians get the advantages — happy unions, happy teachers, labor peace — and tomorrow's politicians are stuck with the bill. And the bill for retiree health care is enormous … I am not saying that teachers are rich. The thrust of my argument is simply this: teachers are much better compensated than people tend to think … [B]egin by recognizing what the [salary] number itself represents: teachers are paid this “annual” salary for working much less than a full year. Indeed, their work year averages just thirty-eight weeks — because, unlike almost all other professionals, teachers have their summers off. Many people go into teaching precisely because they want to have free time during the summer. They like it, they value it.

Moe then describes other factors that go into teacher compensation:

Moreover, it is well documented that, over the last few decades, the people going into teaching have increasingly been drawn from the lower strata of college graduates — as measured, for instance, by scores on the Scholastic Assessment Test — and thus, in terms of intelligence and academic achievement, they lag behind the people who go into many of these other fields (on average). Why should a teacher get paid the same as a computer programmer? There is little rationale for claiming that she should … Highly productive teachers should be better compensated than less productive teachers (many of whom should be dismissed). And overall spending on compensation needs to be assessed in terms of other ways the money could be spent (on buildings, computers, books, distance learning opportunities, and so on) and the relative contributions these options might make to productivity.

Beyond that, teachers tend to enjoy more generous absence policies than others in the private sector.  As Moe explains:

Teacher absences have been studied by researchers, and here is what the evidence shows: On average, public school teachers are absent 5 to 6 percent of all school days; Teacher absence rates are nearly three times those of managerial and professional employees in the economy at-large; These absence rates are higher the more generous the leave provisions written into their contracts; Teachers are absent most often on Mondays and Fridays; Tenured teachers have a higher rate of absenteeism than junior teachers; Teacher absenteeism has a negative impact on student achievement.

In summary, as Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute writes:

Between 2012 and 2022, inflation-adjusted teacher pay fell by close to 4 percent even as real per pupil spending increased by 16 percent. In fact, falling pay and rising spending have been a pattern since the Clinton era. Why aren’t more dollars translating into more pay? Key culprits include the number of nonteaching staff, outsized benefits, and a truncated employee year. Between 2000 and 2019, U.S. student enrollment grew by 5 percent. In that time, the teaching force grew by 9 percent (from 2.94 to 3.2 million), the ranks of principals and assistant principals grew by 37 percent (from 142,000 to 194,000), and district administrative staff grew by 88 percent (from 97,000 to 182,000). This is a long-standing trend in American education. Between 1950 and 2009, while student enrollment doubled, the ranks of nonteaching staff grew sevenfold. As for benefits, Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab has estimated that just 66 percent of teacher compensation goes to wages; the remainder funds health-care and retirement plans. In the private sector, 71 percent of compensation goes to wages. Closing that gap would be enough to raise average teacher pay by about $5,000 a year. And then there’s the fact that teachers typically work a 190-day contract year, with 10 to 15 days of paid leave (yielding 175 to 180 workdays). That compares with a standard 52-week contract for other full-time professionals, which, minus federal holidays and paid leave, amounts to 230 to 235 workdays. It’s tough to argue that people who work ten fewer weeks per year than most full-time professionals should receive salaries on par with those of the latter group. (This is a big reason why teacher benefits are so costly: Schools pay full-year benefits for 190 workdays.) ... Trimming the nation’s nearly 400,000 district and school administrative staff by 20 percent over a five-year period (via attrition when possible) would return their numbers to where they stood during the Obama presidency. Administrative ranks would still have grown 25 percent since 2000, or about five times as fast as student enrollment.

Further, increasing the materialistic factors of salary and benefits risks luring to the teaching profession people whose primary motivation is something other than teaching students.  Professor Barry Scwartz has studied the topic of “practical wisdom,” and in his lecture series on Wisdom: How to Discover Your Path in Work and Life, he makes some interesting observations about how the particular motivations of people affect their performance in the job.  He starts by describing studies on students at the West Point military academy:

We studied about 12,000 West Point cadets and we had information that West Point collects about their reasons for coming to West Point … and what was the primary motivation for coming.  Some students came to West Point and said I want to go to West Point because it’s free college.  I want to go to West Point because I’m going to learn skills that will enable me to get a great job after I leave the army.  I want to go to West Point because I’ll make good connections with other people that will help me in my life later on.  And other people gave reasons for coming to West Point that had to do with [things like] I want to serve my country, I want to be part of a respected organization that’s larger than I am, I want to be loyal to the United States and do my part, I want to defend the homeland, those sorts of things that are more intrinsically connected to being a soldier.  And so we had all these eighteen year-olds who entered West Point for a wide variety of different reasons and the question we asked was “Does the reason people have for going to West Point affect (A) how successful they are at West Point; and (B) how likely they are to stay in the army after they’ve done their five years of military service? And what we found is that, if you go to West Point because it’s going to get you a good job, or you’re going to make connections, or you’re going to learn skills that will be very remunerative in later life, you are a worse student at West Point than if you went to West Point to serve your country … If you go to West Point for instrumental reasons, you are less likely to get recommended for early promotion than if you went to West Point because you wanted to serve your country.  In other words, the reasons people have as eighteen year-olds for entering West Point cast a shadow on what they’re like at West Point and after [when they’re 30-years old].  So reasons matter, and having good reasons for engaging in an activity, it turns out, makes you better at that activity than having less good reasons for engaging in the activity.  And what means good reasons and bad reasons?  Well, good reasons are reasons that are sort of intrinsically related to the activity: serving your country, leading others, defending the homeland, all of those are intrinsically connected to serving in the military.  Learning a skill — there are other places you could go to learn a skill; making connections — there are other places you could go to make connections; so those are not internally connected to going to West Point and serving in the army.  And external reasons are less effective motivators than internal reasons.

Professor Schwartz goes on to discuss the teaching profession specifically:

The appropriate goal of teaching -– the intrinsic goal of teaching -– is to awaken young minds, to stimulate young people to think, to build skills that will enable people to learn on their own, to get kids excited about the world –- that’s the internal set of goals of teaching.  But the thing about teaching, at least in the U.S. is the hours are pretty good -– there’s a whole summer vacation and long vacations during the year –- the work day, the school day, ends at 3:00, you can get tenure, which means that you can’t be fired, salaries and benefits are pretty decent, and so if you become a teacher because you like the salary and the benefits, and the shortish work day, and the job security, then you’re going to be a less good teacher than if you become a teacher because what you like is the opportunity to awaken young minds.

As Robert Pondiscio has testified in a statement titled “Higher Pay Won’t Solve Teachers’ Problems” (quoted in a previous essay containing more information on teacher pay):

When I reflect on my time in the classroom, I don’t think about my paycheck, the staffing, or the per‐pupil funding at my school, which seemed quite generous. Instead, I think about the impediments that stood—and still stand—in the way of teachers being successful … If our hope is that improving teacher pay will improve student outcomes, then we will likely be disappointed. Higher pay does not make a hard job easier to perform. It lifts no burden off a teacher’s shoulders, nor does it add hours to a teacher’s day.   I’d like to focus my testimony on a few of the factors that lead to teacher frustration and burnout that higher pay, however well‐intended, does not change. They include, but are not limited to, poor teacher preparation, deteriorating classroom conditions—specifically classroom disorder and disruption—shoddy curriculum, and increasingly the expectation that they will not just teach reading, math, or their subject areas effectively, but also play a quasi‐ therapeutic role in response to students’ behavioral and mental health needs. We are asking teachers to do too many things to do any of them well at any salary.   A recent Pew Research Center survey found that 84 percent of American teachers feel there is not enough time during their regular work hours to get all of their work done; two‐thirds (68 percent) feel their jobs are overwhelming … [Schools are not] failing because schools are underfunded. The U.S. spends 38 percent more per students than the average of OECD member countries, and student achievement has remained static despite four decades of increased education spending … Let’s start with teacher training. Nearly half of new teachers leave the classroom within five years. And no wonder … A New York City teacher described in his memoir how two years of graduate school and six months of student teaching left him unprepared for the realities of the classroom. “I had taken courses in lesson planning, evaluation, psychology, and research," he said. "Next to nothing was said about what a first-year teacher most needs to know: how to control a classroom.” He described his ed school experience as—quote—“a mix of folk wisdom, psycho-jargon, wishful thinking, and out-and-out [BS].” Why do good teachers leave the profession? Why do new teachers leave before they have time to reach classroom competence? It’s not primarily the pay. Student behavior is out of control. It creates classroom conditions that are intolerable, makes it impossible to succeed, and drives people out of the classroom. Don’t take my word for it: A 2022 poll from the National Education Association showed that almost half of all teachers report a desire or plan to quit because of school climate and safety. An EdWeek survey last year found that more than 70% of teachers report increases in disruptive behavior in the classroom since 2019. The same Pew study I mentioned earlier revealed that a shocking 40% of American teachers report having had students who were physically violent toward them. Cade Brumley, Louisiana’s State Superintendent of Education, said in a recent interview with the Independent Women’s Forum, "Students who are habitually ungovernable should be removed from teachers' classrooms ... so teachers can actually teach and students can actually learn." It was refreshing to hear a state superintendent say that out loud, and to recognize that disruptive student behavior is classroom cancer. But attitudes like Brumley’s are far too rare. Nearly every teacher has had the experience of asking for help with an unruly student and being asked what they did to trigger the disruption, or being told that students wouldn’t act out if their lessons were more engaging … One RAND study found that nearly every teacher in America—99 percent of elementary teachers, 96 percent of secondary school teachers—draws upon "materials [they] developed and/or selected [themselves]" in teaching English language arts. The numbers are virtually the same for math. Nearly half of teachers in the study reported spending more than four hours per week creating or searching for instructional materials. New teachers spend the most, and at the time they should be developing and mastering their craft … Time spent creating lessons from scratch or searching for materials on the Internet is time not spent analyzing student work, giving students feedback, building subject matter expertise, cultivating strong relationships with students and their parents—all of which are higher-yielding uses of teachers’ time and energy. Worse, studies have consistently demonstrated the teacher-created lessons tend to be below standard and lacking in rigor— another drag on student outcomes. One more example of the increasing demands placed on teachers is the rising emphasis on “social and emotional learning,” or SEL … SEL is an under-discussed change in the role of the teacher, from a pedagogue to something more closely resembling a therapist, social worker, or member of the clergy. The increased focus on SEL is a fundamental shift in teachers’ responsibilities, forcing them into roles that they may embrace reluctantly (or not at all) and are unqualified or unsuited to play, with potential negative consequences for students … No consistent or clear relationship has been found, for example, between teacher credentialing or certification exams and classroom effectiveness … Once again—and emphatically—none of this is to suggest we shouldn’t raise teacher pay. But there is no reason to expect that doing so will solve teacher shortages, or persuade good teachers to stay in the classroom. Again, don’t take my word for it. A 2023 RAND study concluded that “pay increases alone— without improvements in teachers’ working hours or conditions—are unlikely to induce large shifts in teachers’ well-being or intentions to leave.”

A 2024 RAND study showed that the top source of job-related stress for teachers was “managing student behavior,” which teachers ranked as more stressful than their salary.  Third was “Administrative work outside of teaching (e.g., paperwork …)”.  Ranked relatively low as a source of stress was “Preparing students for state standardized tests.”  The researchers reported that “Managing student behavior was ranked as a top source of stress by the most teachers in both 2023 and 2024.”

As Robert Pondiscio further reports:

Cade Brumley, Louisiana’s State Superintendent of Education, … said in a recent interview with the Independent Women’s Forum, “Students who are habitually ungovernable should be removed from teachers’ classrooms so teachers can actually teach and students can actually learn.” … Last month, he and the state’s Department of Education issued a series of common-sense recommendations titled, simply and winningly, “Let Teachers Teach.” The report … deserves to be studied closely in every state and school district if we’re serious about improving teacher job satisfaction and effectiveness and raising student achievement … Running just three brisk pages, it features eighteen bullet points aimed at fixing professional development, changing approaches to student behavior and discipline, improving curriculum and instruction, and taking non-academic responsibilities off teachers’ plates. This includes abolishing antiquated lesson planning requirements, limiting cellphone use in schools, and either paying teachers for non-academic work or putting an end to it altogether. “Teachers are asked to be mental health professionals, social workers, and nurses on top of their instructional duties,” Brumley told me this week. “It’s too much. It’s not fair to teachers or the students.” … Five of the report’s eighteen recommendations concern student behavior and discipline, including decoupling student behavior from school accountability systems. Currently, suspension rates can negatively impact a school’s performance metrics, discouraging administrators from removing disruptive students from the classroom. “Teachers are telling me they have habitually disruptive students, and some administrators are leaving these students to disrupt classroom,” said Brumley. That feedback was critical to recent passage of a state law to expel such students from the classroom after three suspensions. “Not expelled to go home,” Brumley explains, “But expelled to alternative sites where they can get the support that they need—academically, behaviorally, socially, mentally—to eventually return to the general school setting and function among their peers.” … If there was any doubt about how well the report’s recommendations would play with front-line educators, it was erased when Brumley presented them to 7,000 teachers at the state’s annual teacher summit in New Orleans a few weeks ago. “After sharing the first recommendation, I struggled getting to the next recommendation due to teacher applause,” he said. It took several minutes to get through the list. Brumley is vowing to continue to press the teachers’ recommendations. “I am over disruptions in the classroom preventing teachers from teaching and children from learning. I’m over excessive bureaucracies, trainings, and paperwork on our teachers. I’m over the art of teaching being taken away from our high-quality, professional educators,” he told me. “It’s time to take back this profession, allowing teachers to be successful, while keeping an eye on the purpose—stronger academic outcomes for students.”

In the next essay in this series, we’ll explore the benefits of unfunded but guaranteed liabilities (in the form of pensions) public school teachers enjoy as part of their union-negotiated benefits packages.