TEACHER PAY. For all the talk of the American Federation of Teachers' hammerlock over the education system, the teachers don't seem to be doing that well. The AFT just released their annual report tracking teacher compensation, and the numbers are...underwhelming. The average teacher's pay in 2005 was $47,602; the average starting salary was $31,753. Some riches. Salary growth, too, has been anemic. Between 1995 and 2005, real average pay rose for Americans by $4600, but teachers only saw an increase of $487. In fact, for every dollar increase in private sector pay, teachers got another 11 cents. In 2005, their wages didn't even keep up with inflation. The results are predictable. A new teacher with an average student loan burden will spend 9 percent of their income on debt repayment alone. In 15 of the 50 largest cities, a mid-career teacher can't even afford the median home. Who wants to sign up!? If teachers don't get paid much, if their salaries lag, both in absolute terms and in yearly growth, behind those of other professionals and private sector professions, they will leave the profession. These aren't individuals without other options. As Teacher Ken notes, this means we're "losing experienced teachers because they want to have families, to have decent lives, to have decent living accomodations and commutes that are not oppressive." The implications here don't need to be delicately teased out. If teaching is an economically unattractive job for college graduates, college graduates won't teach. If it's an economically unattractive job for particularly talented individuals, particularly talented individuals won't teach. If we want better teachers, we need to pay them more, and ensure their pay grows over time, and insist that the baseline salaries can attract the sorts of applicants we desire. If we want really good teachers to overcome the natural barriers to teaching in underserved, inconvenient, unsafe areas, we need to ensure we pay enough to overwhelm those obstacles. John Kerry, interestingly, had a very good plan focusing on precisely these issues, that also introduced merit pay and weakened tenure protections. For all the furious hatred of teacher's unions on the right, they're, at best, only half the problem. You can talk all you want about the need to fire bad teachers, but eventually, we also need to hire better ones. And that requires money.
--Ezra Klein
