The Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute have put out a report purporting to show that public school teachers are overpaid. It's 23 pages of elaborate statistical justification of right-wing beliefs, all built on a foundation of right-wing assumptions. The basic claims are that while teachers are underpaid relative to other people with similar levels of education, in fact they are overpaid because education programs are easier than other majors and also, teachers are stupid; that public school teachers earn more than private school teachers and this shows they earn more than the market should support; and that people who leave teaching earn less while people who enter teaching earn more, therefore teachers are overpaid.

Each of these claims deserves more extensive attention than I can give it, but let's take a look at a couple of points that jumped screaming off the page at me. We get a sense of where this is going when the report's authors acknowledge that comparing teachers to people with similar educations shows that teachers are underpaid, but argue that they need to look deeper because (PDF):

If we added an indicator for architects to the regression, for example, we would find that architects receive a wage premium over similarly skilled workers. Yet few people would immediately conclude that architects are “overpaid.”

Got that? Architects aren't overpaid because ... they're architects! Who could think such a thing? Not a bit of inherent class bias operating there. Teachers, though ...

The authors go on to base a big chunk of their analysis on "objective measures of cognitive ability" which they identify as "essentially" IQ tests. The first such objective essentially IQ test? The SAT. That would be the same SAT that year after year shows major racial and gender gaps in scores. So if that's an objective measure of cognitive ability, we have our official answer: Asians are the smartest, followed by whites, American Indians and Alaskan natives, Mexicans and Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and blacks. Men, of course, are smarter than women. And the smartest of all? That would be rich kids, of course.

It's by this shining measure that we're to conclude that teachers are just ... kind of dumb, y'all, and that's how we know they're overpaid.

That use of the SAT and similar alleged IQ tests is the first—and, presumably, they believe, the strongest—set of so-called evidence the report offers to prove its claims. Each of the other arguments involves at least a couple other jaw-dropping claims that could be made with a straight face only by the type of person who does believe that the SAT, race, gender, and class differentials and all, is an objective measure of cognitive ability. Yet they want us to believe it's teachers who are stupid.