teacher pay studies

Two more researchers weigh in on the subject of teacher pay.

source:
Is there a qualified teacher shortage?
by Michael Podgursky
















source:
Wage Distortion
(pdf file: full text)
Wage Distortion
(abridge; not pdf)
by Caroline Hoxby



Hoxby's and Leigh's argument:

The factors contributing to the reduced likelihood that women of high aptitude will enter the teaching profession appear to come from both within and outside the teaching profession. We focus on two that can be expected to be of critical significance.

First, within the teaching profession, the pay scale of public school teachers has become increasingly compressed since the 1960s. The salary distribution has narrowed so that those with the highest aptitude earn no more than those with the lowest. This may have pushed able women out of the field of education.

Second, outside of teaching, college-educated women have achieved greater parity in their pay vis-à-vis male workers, luring more able women to alternative professions. High-aptitude women may have pulled away from education in order to take special advantage of the new opportunities.

While there could be other explanations outside our investigation, conventional wisdom has long pointed to new opportunities for college-educated women as the primary explanation for the change in teacher quality that many have sensed. We were inclined to accept the conventional wisdom when we began this project, but, after systematically comparing the relative importance of the two factors, we found, surprisingly enough, that pay compression within the teaching profession, induced by the introduction of collective bargaining, has had by far the greater effect.

On further reflection, we were not quite so surprised by the results. For one thing, the overall timing of the decline in teacher quality corresponds to the rise of collective bargaining within education. Teacher unions won collective bargaining rights in key cities and states during the 1960s. Over the next 20 years, collective bargaining spread from state to state across the country.

As a result of union action, the average salary for teachers increased modestly. But as the average was edging upward, the range of the scale narrowed sharply, so much so that able young women were bound to take notice. Moreover, collectively bargained contracts placed a premium on characteristics such as seniority and credentials rather than performance, further depressing the opportunities for the high-aptitude teacher.

[snip]

Although compression of pay within teaching and improved parity with pay for women in other occupations occurred simultaneously over the past 40 years, we were able to distinguish their independent effects, because the timing of their impact varied considerably from one state to the next. For example, parity of pay for women improved sooner in some states than in others. Since we had data, by state, on the earnings of men and women who graduated from college in the same year, we could estimate the independent impact of pay parity separately for each state by calculating the ratio of female-to-male earnings of nonteachers who graduated from similar colleges at the same time.

[snip]

Unionization and the introduction of collective bargaining can be expected to increase average pay for all teachers but reduce the difference between average pay and the pay received by those with both high and low aptitudes, thereby discouraging entry into teaching by women with higher aptitude while attracting those with lower aptitudes.

[snip]

The economic news for educators as a whole was fairly good over the approximately 40 years of the study. Our data indicate that, nationwide, the real (inflation-adjusted) earnings of the average new female teacher rose by 8 percent between 1963 and 2000. But this change was not evenly distributed across aptitude groups. The earnings of teachers in the lowest aptitude group (those from the bottom-tier colleges) rose dramatically relative to the average, so that teachers who in 1963 earned 73 percent of the average salary for teachers could expect to earn exactly the average by 2000. Meanwhile, the ratio of the earnings of teachers in the highest-aptitude group (from the highly selective colleges) to earnings of average teachers fell dramatically. In states where they began with an earnings ratio of 157 percent, they ended with a ratio of 98 percent. By 2000, most states had earnings ratios near 100 percent for all aptitude groups, indicating that graduates of the most highly selective colleges earned no more as teachers than did graduates from bottom-tier schools!

[snip]

While parity of pay for men and women and the base pay for males in other occupations changed similarly for all women regardless of aptitude, the change in union-induced compression of the pay spread for teachers was especially large.

As a result teaching became much more attractive to those with lower aptitudes—and much less attractive to the most talented. Pay compression increased the share of the lowest-aptitude female college graduates who became teachers by about 9 percentage points. Meanwhile, the share of the highest-aptitude graduates who became teachers shifted downward by about 12 percentage points.


Conclusion

We find that pay compression explains about 80 percent of the decline of teachers from highly selective colleges and about 25 percent of the increase in the share of teachers from the least selective colleges. Meanwhile, changes in pay parity in nonteaching occupations explains only 9 percent of the decline in the share of teachers coming from highly selective colleges—and only 6 percent of the increase in teachers from the bottom tier of colleges. The sheer increase in the proportion of all college graduates coming from these bottom-tier colleges accounts for much of the remaining increment in the percentage of low-aptitude teachers.

These results are striking: union-driven pay compression alone accounts for more than three-quarters of the decline in teacher quality. The finding is best understood by recognizing that pay parity increased only moderately and at a similar rate for college-educated women of all abilities....

Put another way, we cannot expect high-performing college graduates to continue to enter teaching if that is the one profession in which pay is decoupled from performance. Indeed, other professions have been raising the reward for performance over the past few decades. We suspect that this trend exacerbated the degree to which pay compression pushed high-aptitude people out of teaching. A push from one direction has more effect on someone who is being simultaneously pulled from the other direction.

Christian Science Monitor's take on the Hoxby - Leigh paper: How do the new teachers measure up? by Teresa Mendez:

"These teachers were never a big share, but they were a non-negligible share," says Caroline Hoxby, a professor of economics at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., whose research focuses on the economics of education. "People say they were important leaders. They weren't in every classroom but they were mentors."

CSM's graphic, drawn from Hoxby's & Leigh's data:





The Hoxby-Leigh article, which I read a year ago, was a revelation.

Like everyone else, I had assumed that greater opportunities for women in other realms made teaching a less attractive occupation across the board.

It hadn't occurred to me that a factor like wage compression, while making teaching less attractive to some women, would make the field more attractive to others.



-- CatherineJohnson - 20 Jul 2006

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How good is the "quality of college/university" as a proxy for "aptitude of teacher"? It seems to Without some evidence (that does not seem to be provided here, though perhaps it was in the original article), I would be hesitant to assume that the relationship is that clean/obvious.

-- MattGoff - 22 Jul 2006

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As I recall, but I could be off, there was a difference in quality of teacher correlated with at least one of these measures....

not sure, though

ok, now I"m remembering something

I'm fairly certain that a teacher's language skills (and scores) are correlated to her effectiveness as a teacher

That would mean that high SATs and elite college - because elite colleges admit students with high verbal SATs - should correlate to teacher effectiveness.

-- CatherineJohnson - 24 Jul 2006

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This is all talking from memory, so I could be wrong.

-- CatherineJohnson - 24 Jul 2006

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But that makes sense. Really smart girls (and guys) who go to selective, EXPENSIVE colleges now look at teaching the way many of us do -- as the refuge for kids who could barely hack it at a podunk college. Why go through all the headaches of being a classroom teacher when the rewards for a job well done are so much greater? You spend your whole childhood being a hard-working, high achiever, and being rewarded for it. Why spend the rest of your life being a hard worker without the attending rewards? Why not pay off your student loans faster by doing something else?

-- BrendaM - 25 Jul 2006

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"On further reflection, we were not quite so surprised by the results. For one thing, the overall timing of the decline in teacher quality corresponds to the rise of collective bargaining within education. Teacher unions won collective bargaining rights in key cities and states during the 1960s. Over the next 20 years, collective bargaining spread from state to state across the country."

The 60's and early 70's were also when the Women's Liberation movement came into full force. I don't see how you can possibly discount the importance of the new opportunities for women.

Of course, I may be biased because I went into teaching primarily because I graduated from college pre-Women's Lib. And there is no doubt that Women's Lib gave me the courage to aspire to an advanced degree. However I don't think I would have stayed in teaching no matter what -- the public school environment is just too unpleasant.

It's misleading that the charts don't go back farther. I'm old enough to have known some of the grand old women teachers both as teachers and colleagues. There was a time when teaching was almost the only professional career for women.

-- SusanJ - 25 Jul 2006

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I don't think she's arguing that feminism didn't have an effect (though I've GOT to clean my desk, so won't go back and check just now).

Isn't she describing a "push-pull" hypothesis?

I think she's saying that feminism "pulled" high-ability women out of the profession while, at the same time, unionization & equalization of wages "pushed" them out.

Meanwhile, unionization "pulled" low-ability women in.

(I think.)

-- CatherineJohnson - 27 Jul 2006

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Title:	teacher pay studies
TopicType:	WebLog
SubjectArea:	EducationResearch, SchoolFunding
LogDate:	200607201423