Heritage-AEI: Overpaid! Teachers earn too much for their level of smarts.



The Study: The Heritage-AEI study seeks to correct what it sees as a major flaw in past assessments of teacher pay. Ordinarily, researchers like compare teacher salaries to what other similarly educated professionals make. Jason Richwine and Andrew Briggs think that's foolish. Years of research has shown that education degrees are among the least challenging, they write, and higher levels of education don't necessarily correlate to better teacher performance. It's more effective to compare teachers to other professionals who have the same objective cognitive abilities. In other words, break out the IQ tests.

The Conclusions: What they find isn't exactly complimentary. "Although teachers as a group score above the national average on intelligence tests, their scores fall below the average for other college graduates," the pair write. Teachers, they find, also score lower on their SAT and ACT. Finally, they break out data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to analyze the effects of both education and IQ. When education is taken into account, teachers salaries are more than 12% lower than their peers. But when measured based on cognitive skills, the salary gap evaporates. Once you factor in benefits such as retiree healthcare and pensions, total teacher compensation starts to eclipse what others in their cohort make. To top it all off, teachers tend to take a pay cut when they move to other professions.

The Big Criticisms: Richwine and Briggs paint with a broad brush, lumping teachers together from across geographic regions and subject area expertise. It may be that math and science teachers are underpaid while gym teachers are making a steal. But their study can't tell. The two researchers acknowledge that problem. Of course, there's also some controversy about whether "objective measures of cognitive ability" such as IQ and the SAT scores are really all that objective. But let's not get into the weeds.

Even if America's best and the brightest aren't becoming teachers, Richwine and Briggs' concede that there's a good argument for paying teachers more. As they note: "We have shown that existing teachers are paid above market rates, but recruiting highly effective teachers into the profession may require present levels of compensation or perhaps even higher levels." In the end, they just want to see pay-for-performance policies. That puts them on the same wavelength as, well, Michelle Rhee.

OECD: Underpaid! We pay teachers much less compared to other countries.



The Study: To wrap it up, let's add a little international perspective. This year, the OECD released a long report on ways to improve education worldwide. Part of it looked at teacher pay across different countries.

The Conclusions: Worldwide, teachers tend to make less than other college graduates. But even in that realm of diminished expectations, the U.S. still doesn't look so hot. According to the OECD's findings, we pay our teachers about 60% of what their educational peers earn. That's way less akin to developed countries like Germany and Australia, where pay is closer to 90%, and more in line with Italy, Poland, and Slovenia.

The Big Criticisms: Again, you can argue about whether college education is a good benchmark for measuring professional qualifications. But beyond that, the numbers just look a little funky. No matter what their methodology was, all of the U.S.-based studies on teacher pay I read found educators making more than 60% of what their peers earned. Teachers aren't swimming in cash. But they don't have it that bad.