Teacher pay around the world: How we compare.

 It's like listening to a broken record: Teachers are overpaid, over-benefitted, vacation-heavy whiners who need to need to connect with the "real world."


Great rant but, when one takes the time to actually examine the inconvenient things known as "facts," the rant doesn't hold water.


Jack Jennings, president and CEO of the Center on Education Policy, has a column at Huffington Post that presents an interesting way to look at the issue of teacher pay around the world.


According to Jennings: "A few months ago, the widely respected Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development released Building a High Quality Teaching Profession: Lessons from Around the World, which analyzes how high-performing countries have created highly professional and effective teaching forces. Included in this report is a telling chart which shows that American teachers are paid less than teachers in many other countries."


"For each participating nation, OECD calculated the ratio of the average salaries of teachers with 15 years' experience to the average earnings of full-time workers with a college degree. The U.S. ranked 22nd out of 27 countries on this measure. In the U.S., teachers earned less than 60% of the average pay for full-time college-educated workers. In many other countries, teachers earn between 80% and 100% of the college-educated average."


The countries in which teachers earn 80% or more of the average pay for full-time college-educated workers include: Spain (125%), New Zealand (98%), Germany (98%), Australia (95%), Finland (95%), Sweden (95%), Belgium (90%), Scotland (90%), Denmark (85%), France (85%), England (80%), S. Korea (80%) and Netherlands (80%).


Keeping company with the USA in the 60-79% bracket are: Austria (78%), Greece (75%), Portugal (70%), Norway (70%),  Estonia (68%), Poland (65%), USA (60%).


Who do we beat? Italy (58%), Slovenia (55%), Hungary (50%), Iceland (50%) and the Czech Republic (50%).


That annoying know-it-all down the block might argue that teaching is only a part-time job. Teachers work from 7:30 until 3, have lots of vacations and the summer off. You and I know that's a load of bull, and remember, we have the hard numbers to prove it.


In a previous post, we quoted another OECD study: " American teachers are the most productive among major developed countries, according to Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development....Among 27 member nations tracked by the OECD, U.S. primary-school educators spent 1,097 hours a year teaching despite only spending 36 weeks a year in the classroom — among the lowest among the countries tracked. That was more than 100 hours more than New Zealand, in second place at 985 hours, despite students in that country going to school for 39 weeks. The OECD average is 786 hours."


The study (posted on the website of the Wall Street Journal) went on to say: "And that’s just the time teachers spend on instruction. Including hours teachers spend on work at home and outside the classroom, American primary-school educators spend 1,913 working in a year. According to data from the comparable year in a Labor Department survey, an average full-time employee works 1,932 hours a year spread out over 48 weeks (excluding two weeks vacation and federal holidays)." [Emphasis mine.]


So, in fact, teachers do work the equivalent of a "full-time" job, and the comparison with full-time pay in the OECD study is perfectly justified.


Jennings quotes Education Secretary Duncan in a speech to the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards on July 29: "Money is never the reason why people enter teaching, but it is the reason why some people do not enter teaching, or leave as they start to think about beginning a family or buying a home. Today, too often the heart-breaking reality is that a good teacher with a decade of classroom experience is hard-pressed to raise a family on a teacher's salary."

Jennings concludes: "It is difficult to advocate for higher salaries for teachers during these hard economic times, but we aren't going to make long term progress economically if we don't have a better educated citizenry. Business leaders have been saying this for years. Paying teachers higher wages and getting and retaining good teachers is integral to achieving that goal."