Jason Richwine writes: Do teachers earn less than the minimum wage?
When “teaching hours” are quantified, one may argue that teachers’ salaries are adequate for the hours they work. But I can attest that if anyone ever quantified the hours that I, and many of my colleagues, submit to create and maintain cutting-edge instruction, we would be making less than minimum wage and we’d be better off flipping burgers.
That quote comes from a teacher making the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour would need to work about 21 hours per day, 365 days a year, to reach the average annual teacher salary of $56,000.
But what’s bothersome isn’t the exaggeration. It’s this part: “…if anyone ever quantified the hours…” If? People have been quantifying teacher working hours for years. (See our working paper on the topic, and note the literature review in particular.) Instead of repeating the talking point that teachers work some extremely large but unknowable amount of time outside of the classroom, why not look into the research? We actually have data that measure teacher work time as
definitively as anyone could hope for, and the paper linked above has all of the details. (TL;DR: Teachers work about 41 hours per week during the school year.)
I’ve noticed a depressing pattern in Washington. Even as the literature advances, politicians and reporters still have the same old debates featuring the same old talking points. Sometime soon, there will be another person who says that teachers have it easy because the school day is less than eight hours. Then someone like Ms. Futterman will respond that teachers work a lot at home. And then the debate will stagnate, without anyone bothering to investigate whether those work hours at home could be quantified. Lather, rinse, repeat.
It’s true of so many issues. (Don’t get me started about a certain topic in psychology.) Each side has their talking points, and the reporters seem uninterested in moving beyond them. Another example is the Cato Institute’s new report on federal pay, which mentions that Feds make 78 percent more than private-sector workers before any adjustment for skill differences. Predictably, critics responded that the greater average education and experience of federal workers could explain the difference. And then… stalemate.
I’ve seen this movie before. Five years ago, the same events transpired, and no one in the media seemed interested in testing whether education and experience actually do account for the difference. Andrew Biggs and I decided to do that analysis, and it inspired several other reports that compare similarly-skilled workers in each sector, including one from the CBO and a summary of each report from the GAO. The new literature established that federal workers do receive, on average, greater compensation than their private-sector counterparts.
