Yesterday, I read a blog post from a friend about teacher vacancies in Washington D.C. The public school chancellor there recently made it a priority to cut out unqualified teachers. This initiative, however, has resulted in an increase in the number of teacher vacancies in D.C. public schools.
My first thought was that teachers, like everyone else, are responsive to the market. With better qualified teachers, there must also be better pay. Perhaps there just aren’t enough “qualified” candidates that are willing to work in urban areas of DC and take a teacher’s low salary (on average, less than $45,000 in the U.S.). So, it got me thinking… just how important is teacher pay? And what effect does it have on student achievement?
To take a stab at this question, I decided to look at differences in teacher pay between countries, using data from a 2008 report by the OECD (If you want to see the data below in Excel, email me for the consolidated reports from the OECD).
It’s often been reported that across the U.S., we spend the most money per student. From the OECD report, we see that this is true: the U.S. spends over $12K per student, versus $8K in other OECD countries.
However, higher per-student spending in the U.S. is not translating into higher teacher salaries. On an absolute scale, American teachers with 15 years experience make less money than similar teachers in 11 OECD countries, including the U.K., Germany, and Ireland. Not surprisingly, U.S. test scores are lower than 9 of the 11 countries where absolute teacher salaries are higher abroad than in the U.S. (with Luxembourg and Spain being the only exceptions).
What’s more interesting is that even after 15 years of experience, the average teacher in the U.S. is making less than the average GDP per capita — something that we only see in a handful of other countries (just 8 OECD countries have teachers making less than 100% of GDP per capita after 15 years, vs. 25 countries where veteran teachers are better compensated than the average worker).
Finally, not only are teachers in the U.S. poorly compensated relative to their international counterparts, but they also work the most. American teachers spend close to 1100 hours per year teaching, vs. ~800 hours for teachers in other OECD countries.
Of course, there are many reasons for our mediocre test scores in the U.S., and this analysis is incomplete given that we’re just looking at correlations through graphs. We also need to consider such drivers as cultural differences, student motivation, parent involvement, and the payoff of an additional year of schooling. But teacher pay is obviously a hot topic, and although we can’t determine causation through these charts, it would be interesting to see how U.S. test scores would fare if our teachers were paid comparably to educators in other countries.
Earlier this year, an article in the New York Times highlighted a NYC charter school opening in 2009 that plans to pay its teachers $125,000 a year. With this kind of salary, I’m guessing that teacher vacancies will not be an issue. It seems like the problem in D.C. may be reflective of an overall problem in the U.S. — where we just can’t pay teachers enough to teach. After all, if we’re not rewarding teachers financially, then the number of viable candidates goes down, quality suffers, the system fails, and kids bear the burden.
