Study Sez: Public School Teachers Aren't Underpaid

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!