Steinhardt Economist Sean Corcoran Contributes to Study of Teacher Pay Gap
By Timothy Farrell
At a time of national debate over ways to improve the performance of America’s schools, a new report reveals a trend that undermines the chances of reaching that goal: a large and growing pay penalty for those who choose to become public school teachers.
“The Teaching Penalty: Teacher Pay Losing Ground,” published by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), provides a detailed analysis of trends in teacher pay. In 1960, women teachers had an annual wage advantage of 14.7 percent compared to other similarly educated women. By 2000, the annual pay difference had become a 13.2 percent annual wage deficit.
The study’s authors are Sean P. Corcoran, assistant professor of education economics at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development; Sylvia A. Allegretto of the University of California, Berkeley; and Lawrence Mishel, president of the EPI, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, D.C.
The study compares teachers’ weekly pay to that of a core group of occupations with similar educational and skills requirements—accountants, reporters, registered nurses, computer programmers, clergy, and personnel officers. The teacher pay penalty translates to weekly earnings that are, on average, about $154 (14.3 percent) lower than those in the comparable occupations. The teacher pay penalty cuts across all 50 states, although its size varies. There is no state where teachers’ weekly wages are equal to or greater than those of similar occupations.
The study found that the penalty is severest among the most experienced teachers. For early-career teachers (age 25-34), today’s pay penalty is only slightly larger than in 1996 (a change of 0.5 percentage points). The brunt of the widening pay gap has fallen on senior teachers (45-54), whose pay deficit within their age group has grown by 18.0 percentage points among women, who comprise the vast majority of teachers, since 1996.
“Teachers are the single most important ingredient in educational success – and it’s important for schools to compete for and keep the best qualified teachers,” said Mishel.
The teacher pay disadvantage grew markedly during the latter half of the 1990s. While earnings of college graduates, on average, increased by 12.7 percent, teachers’ earnings did not grow at all.
The teacher pay gap is, to a great extent, a problem schools should have seen coming, as the study’s breakouts of trends by gender show. From 1996 to 2006, the pay gap for male and female teachers grew pretty much in tandem – from a 0.7 percent to a 10.5 percent deficit for women and from a 15.1 to 25.5 percent shortfall for male teachers.
“The teaching penalty among men has for a long time made it harder to attract men to the classroom, but as long as there was a more-or-less captive audience of highly qualified women teachers to fill the void, the problem could be ignored,” said Corcoran. “Now that women have better paying opportunities, schools are under the gun to make pay competitive if they want to attract and keep the best qualified teachers.”
Corcoran also notes that the new Equity Project (TEP) Charter School in New York City recently announced plans to pay its teachers a base salary of $125,000 a year. “This announcement may come as a surprise to charter supporters who believe that charter schools are capable of doing much more with less,” he said, “but the school’s founder, Zeke Vanderhoek, is making a strong statement about the need to increase teachers’ salaries to attract top talent.”