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Government School Teachers Are Overpaid

Homeschool...homeschool...homeschool...
by Brad Edmonds

Government school teachers attacked me by email in recent weeks, over an article I wrote in June, 2001.

Among their complaints were that they make less money than people with equivalent "credentials" in the business sector. I put the term "credentials" in quotes because my writers laid claim to Master's degrees in education. Master's degrees in education are garbage, worth far less than the paper they're printed on. My point here is that government teachers are overpaid; I'm going to get to that point by discussing college education programs for a moment.

It is probably the case that every college education program in the US is crap. I say "probably" because I have not investigated every one of them. The education department at my alma mater has this to say about itself:
            "The University of Alabama's College demonstrate reflective practice and ethical decision making through respecting              diversity, honoring difference, and promoting social justice."
It gets worse:
            "The College of Education is committed to preparing individuals to promote social justice, to be change agents, and to             recognize individual and institutionalized racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism .. It includes educating individuals to             break silences about these issues, propose solutions, provide leadership, and develop anti-racist, anti-homophobic,             anti-sexist community and alliances."

In other words, the College of Education knows what the correct attitude towards each divisive social issue is, and it intends for you to have that correct attitude and for you to make sure all your students and fellow teachers have the same correct attitude. As many commentators have pointed out, "diversity" means only such things as skin color and sexual orientation; diversity of ideas is explicitly disallowed.

Just to dissect some more of that nonsense: "Sexism" is a code word for the sin of recognizing that men and women have different strengths and weaknesses. Nobody anywhere in the US is allowed by law to make any decision about another person taking their sex into account without government permission to do so. Legally and practically, there is no sexism to root out of our culture. Those of us who recognize the differences between men and women, and behave in accordance with them in our daily lives, are idiotic that we fail to recognize that there are some very feminine men and masculine women here and there. But it won't be until women start producing sperm and preferring workplace competition to nurturing and cooperating; and men start producing and gestating eggs and valuing diaper changing over getting promotions or bagging deer, that I'll adjust my attitudes to match those of Alabama's College of Education. I could go on - for example, there's an entire library's worth of economics and history texts
proving that the market, unfettered by forcible government, provides far better "social justice" than any government imposition ever devised - but that's another article.

Thomas Sowell has done most of the research on education students and professors for me, and I take his word for it that they are at the bottom of the academic barrel. I do have my own experience to draw on, however: extensive personal experience with an education guru http://www.lewrockwell.com/edmonds/edmonds45.html ; three years of college teaching experience, where
education majors made up the dumbest of my students; experience as a student with fellow students who were education majors, always the dumbest among us; and I looked at the back cover of an enrollment booklet for the GRE in 1996 to see where the majors ranked. Education majors did better than art majors; worse than everybody else.

Now, back to salaries: The government http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos069.htm#earnings tells us that median annual earnings for K-12 teachers in general - government and private - ranged from $37,600 to $42,000 in 2000. That's above the median earnings
range for the general population. The government noted that "Private school teachers generally earn less than public school teachers." (Actually, they earn much more; they're just paid less.) One website http://www.publicpurpose.com/pp-edpp.htm claims government school teachers in fact are paid 60-87% more than private school teachers, which seems consistent with what I learned about it in 1995, when I taught as a substitute in government and private schools in Tuscaloosa. While government school
teachers are paid more, private school students outperform government students on standardized tests. Government schools generally spend about double what private schools spend per student per year while getting these inferior results. This is all
well-known.

The reply I always get from government teachers and their apologists in the media is that government schools have to accept all students, including those with developmental and emotional problems. But it is also reported that Catholic schools are notoriously
willing to take anybody - especially those with problems. How about money-grubbing nontraditional private schools, such as Sylvan Learning Centers? From the Sylvan website: "Sylvan guarantees that your child will improve at least one full grade-level equivalent in reading skills or basic math skills after 36 hours of instruction, or we'll provide 12 additional hours at no further cost to you." So Sylvan guarantees they can do in 36 hours what the public school system doesn't guarantee it can do in 180 hours (assuming one hour on a topic each school day). There are restrictions on that guarantee not specified on the website, so I called Sylvan. The restrictions are NOT on the kind of kid you bring in, but on the subject matter - Sylvan's guarantee is restricted to reading and math (for which standardized tests are wellestablished). So they'll take anybody, just likeCatholic schools and government schools.

Government schools don't take all the worst students; they're just the only schools that use problem students as a blanket excuse for the schools' poor performance. Private and Catholic schools love problem kids because of the schools' pride in their history of
helping them.

Sylvan also told me the fee would generally run around $1500 per subject per 36 hours, which means per grade level. That's $40 an hour, which seems like a lot. But let's look at the numbers: Government school spending http://www.lewrockwell.com/edmonds/edmonds116.html ranges from around $4300 per student per year to almost $11,000, varying by state, though there's nocorrelation between spending and test scores. Let'sguesstimate that the typical government tally ismidway between the extremes, say $7500. Divide that by $1500, and you get five subjects, same as the government schools try to cover each year. Thus, Sylvan charges just about what the government schools cost taxpayers (though Sylvan doesn't charge you for your neighbor's kid to attend). At the same time, Sylvan guarantees results, offering an additional $480 worth of instruction if they fail. They can't afford to offer that unless they routinely succeed in the first 36 hours.

Pretend you take your kid out of government schools and drop them off at Sylvan every day. For five subjects, 36 hours per subject, give the student a grueling five-hour day and a five-day week. The student would achieve an entire grade level in less
than two months. Give the kid a week off, then send him back. These results become less likely as time goes on and the child and the coursework advance, but with four months off for the summer, at this rate your student would complete grades 1-12 in three years. Again, this is unlikely with a six-year-old, but might actually be achievable for a 10-year-old. Same price as the government schools, with a fourfold improvement in efficiency.

Based on census information, government schoolteachers are paid more than the average among us (though they generally work far fewer hours, usually none at all during summer months; and they have tenure, which nobody outside education has). Compared to their market competition, which charges the same price, they reach ¼ the efficiency. Compared to traditional private schools, government schools are twice as expensive but - this is a rough guess - reach 60% of private schools' efficiency. The people who teach in government schools come from the dumbest flock on campus. Their unions and administrators resist any measures put forward to subject them to real competition. If we were to create an average teacher from the DNA of all government schoolteachers, and get average government-teacher performance out of him, he'd be fired from any job he attempted in the private sector.

Considering their competition's performance and costs, government teachers are vastly overpaid - by the above
numbers, they're overpaid by a factor of about 4. Indeed, considering government school performance strictly within itself - without regard to the competition - that government schoolteachers are paid at all means they're overpaid.

December 6, 2003
Brad Edmonds writes from Alabama.

Copyright © 2003 LewRockwell.com

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