MAKING MONEY MATTER: Financing America's Schools by National Research Council

Author:National Research Council
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Education : Policy, Reviews and Evaluations
Publisher: NATIONAL ACADEMY PRESS
Published: 1999-11-30T00:00:00+00:00

Teacher Salaries

Several arguments are frequently offered for raising teacher salaries, including the fair treatment of existing teachers, the need to keep teacher salaries in line with the salaries of other college graduates so as to attract qualified people into the teaching profession, and as a way to increase teacher quality. Of most interest to us here is the extent to which raising teacher salaries across the board is a good way to raise the quality of teachers.

Before we turn to that issue, however, we briefly look at the trends in teacher salaries relative to those in other occupations. Table 6-1, using data based on the decennial censuses of population for the period 1940–1990 (reported in Hanushek and Rivkin, 1996), shows percentages of male college graduates earning less than the average male teacher and similar percentages for women. The lower the percentage, the less attractive is teaching as a profession. The table shows a decline in the attractiveness of teaching as a profession for men from 1940 to 1970, with a partial turnaround since then. For women, the drop is more precipitous and has no recent turnaround. As of 1990, only 36.5 percent of college-educated men were in jobs that paid less than that of the average male teacher, and 45.3 percent of college-educated women were in jobs that paid less than that of the average female teacher.

A refinement of the analysis that isolates the patterns for 20- to 29-year-olds indicates that the relative position of teacher salaries for young female teachers (the women who have the most lucrative opportunities outside teaching) is approaching that for men. On the basis of that convergence, Hanushek and Rivkin (1996:29) conclude that schools will not be able to count on a continual supply of high-quality female teachers in the future and that the rising opportunity costs for women will put upward pressure on school budgets given that women made up 68 percent of all teachers in 1990. Overall, these trends based on average salaries suggest that teaching is becoming less financially attractive for college graduates compared with other occupations. While the average salaries mask what has been happening to the structure of salaries, a more detailed analysis of salary trends by teacher experience or education level is not likely to change this basic conclusion.

TABLE 6-1 Position of the Average Teacher in the Nonteacher Earning Distribution, 1940–1990

Year

Percentage of Male College Graduates Earning Less than the Average Male Teacher

Percentage of Female College Graduates Earning Less than the Average Female Teacher

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