Stupid Parasites are eating your children's brains

Jason Richwine and Andrew Biggs, researchers at the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, two leading conservative think tanks, argue in a new report that the country's 3.2 million teachers may be overpaid by over 50 percent or more, given their salary, benefits, job security, and intellectual ability.

This isn't the first study to take on the politically sizzling issue of how much we pay the molders of our nation's young. And shockingly, the results fall pretty cleanly along ideological lines.

According to Census data, Richwine and Biggs admit that teachers do look underpaid; they receive a 20 percent lower salary than private-sector workers with the same level of education, and have benefits approximately the same.

These numbers are flawed, however, according to Richwine and Biggs. They show that the typical worker who moves from the private sector into teaching receives a salary increase of 8.8 percent, and the typical teacher who enters the private sector receives a pay cut of 3.1 percent. If teachers were underpaid, they write, "this is the opposite of what one would expect."

They also admit, however, that given the small sample size of workers who switch between teaching and non-teaching, "these data should not be considered precise." It is also probable that a private sector worker who would receive a significant pay cut from becoming a teacher is less likely to fulfill that mid-career calling.

The report further claims that the truncated work year of the average teacher skews the numbers. Teachers receive their salary for an average of nine months of work, which means their average workweek salary is higher than that of private employees, whose salary is for a full-year of labor.

This argument rehashes a 2007 report by The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, another conservative think tank. That research looked at hourly wages. In weeks teachers worked, they labored apparently for 36.5 hours, and took home $34.06 for each of those hours, more than architects, psychologists, chemists, mechanical engineers, economists, and reporters. There's just one minor hole in this analysis: Teachers work 36.5 hours a week?

Teachers alleged higher salaries are cushioned by higher job security. The average unemployment rate for public school teachers between 2005 and 2010 was 2.1 percent, the report states, compared to an average of 3.8 percent for workers in similarly skilled occupations. That means less time, on average, job hunting without pay.

The level of education measure obscures some important facts, according to Richwine and Biggs. While a large proportion of teachers have bachelor's or master's degrees, over two thirds have their highest degree in education, which they claim is not a particularly rigorous path of study. You don't have to work as hard and it's easier to score an A in education, supposedly, than in the sciences, social sciences or humanities.

While teachers score above average on national intelligence tests, they allegedly fare worse than other college graduates. Richwine and Biggs therefore conclude that teachers are overpaid, given their average raw intelligence. They get more bucks per IQ point (with IQ determined by the perhaps dubious measure of standardized tests).
But this also suggests that the teaching profession fails to attract and retain the highest skilled college students. So examined through a reverse lens, this could be an argument for even higher salaries.

The report also argues that teachers' benefits are more generous than private employees'. On the surface, both teachers and private sector workers receive benefits at about 41 percent of their salaries.

Pensions, however, are financed differently in the public and private sector. The public sector, the researchers claim, invests in risky assets with an approximately 8 percent rate of return. If the investments fall in value, the "public employers -- meaning, ultimately, taxpayers -- must increase their contributions to the pension funds."

If teachers and private employees contribute the same percent of their salaries to their pension funds, teachers will receive retirement benefits 4.5 times higher, according the report, because teachers have a guaranteed higher rate of return.