Policy

Study Sez: Public School Teachers Aren't Underpaid

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Despite the prevailing belief that public school teachers are underpaid, people who go into teaching actually make more than they would in the private sector, according to a new study from Heritage's Jason Richwine and the American Enterprise Institute's Andrew Biggs.

Handy takeaway finding:

Workers who switch from non-teaching jobs to teaching jobs receive a wage  increase of roughly 9 percent. Teachers who change to non-teaching jobs, on the other hand, see their wages decrease by roughly 3 percent. This is the opposite of what one would expect if teachers were underpaid.

And that's just wages. When you include benefits, the gap is wider:

Public-school teacher salaries are comparable to those paid to similarly skilled private sector workers, but that more generous fringe benefits for public-school teachers, including greater job security, make total compensation 52 percent greater than fair market levels, equivalent to more than $120 billion overcharged to taxpayers each year. [Emphasis added]

Hey look, here's a blog post about one-time payments totaling about $120 billion in federal money going to subsidize teachers' pay and benefits!