Last month, Jack Jennings of the Center on Education Policy wrote an article refuting the contentious AEI paper claiming that public school teachers are overcompensated and under-achieving (see a summary of this study here). Jennings contrasts the methodology of the AEI study with a study from an impartial group, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a group composed of the world’s most advanced economies.
Jennings discuses OECD’s Building a High Quality Teaching Profession: Lessons from Around the World, which analyzed how high-performing countries have developed their effective educators. Among the other areas of analysis, the report included a discussion of teacher pay. The US ranked 22nd out of 27 countries in teacher pay, meaning American teachers are paid only 60% of what the average, college-educated American worker is paid in other sectors.
Another study that refutes the AEI paper was conducted by McKinsey & Co., a major market researching firm, which concluded that the US was not attracting higher-performing college graduates to the teaching profession because the pay is so low in comparison to other industries. To be competitive, teachers would have to be paid between $65,000 – $150,000 per year, far more than the current salaries.
“Money is never the reason why people enter teaching, but it is the reason why some people do not enter teaching, or leave after a few years,” Jennings concludes.
