"That means that each week the average teacher in Oregon makes about $250 less than someone else with a college degree. "

That's not much if you consider the teacher gets 3 months off paid vs. 2 or 3 weeks.

If we want to make the front line teachers have better pay, cut the salaries of some of the non-union administrators or just get rid of some mid-level non-essemtial management..or both.

That's not exactly true, I think it's more like 5 or 6 weeks. There's a lot of planning that goes into a school year, and a lot of work 'behind the scenes'.

Phil M: The analysts at EPI aren't dumb. Of course they took into account the fact that not all teachers work 12 months out of the year. That's why they're looking at weekly wages, to compare apples to apples.

The report states: "This analysis of the relative wage of teachers relies on comparisons of weekly earnings, rather than annual or hourly earnings, the approach taken by some authors (e.g., Hanushek and Rivkin 1997; Greene and Winters 2007). We elect to use weekly wages to avoid measurement issues regarding differences in annual weeks worked(teachers’ traditional “summers off”) and the number of hours worked per week that arise in many studies of teacher pay." (page 16)

The teaching penalty is real: $250 per week in Oregon.

if you consider the teacher gets 3 months off paid

Public school teachers are not paid during their (closer to two, not three) summer months unless they find a paid internship (or similar) or a regular summer job (perhaps teaching, perhaps something else). They do, however, work upaid, preparing for the year ahead. When I was a kid, my father had his salary prorated across all months of the year so that there was summer "income." I only have summer income if I raise it for myself or teach summer classes.

Knowing quite a few teachers, I believe that the benefit of having an extended summer of non-work is considered at least partial compensation for less pay overall.

That being said, it is unfortunate that the teachers' unions continue to violently oppose one matter that could considerably raise teacher salaries - merit pay. In a sense the average and below average teachers are holding down salaries for their excelling peers, by requiring that all teachers with the same seniority get the same pay.

Yes, I know the counterarguments - merit pay could be abused by principals and administrators to reward sycophancy and punish independence. But isn't this true of any profession, public or private sector? The teaching profession is no less susceptible to this than many other professions where increased pay for increased competency and merit is standard operating procedure.

I notice that Mr. Shetekoff does casually dismiss merit pay near the end of his post. Big mistake.

I don't believe that mediocre and bad teachers are underpaid. I do believe that good and excellent teachers are underpaid. A good merit pay based system can remedy that situation.

And I don't think a party or cause that professes to want to improve education should jump on the "End No Child Left Behind" sloganing. I think "Replace No Child Left Behind With Something Better," might make a better impression.

It's too bad we stop at talking about teachers. There is a host of other government sponsored professionals such as residential treatment facility workers, child care workers, nursing home workers, etc. that have salaries often through non-profit organizations that get funded from the State.

The year I left working in residential treatment programs (1994), I sat down with the school district teacher who taught in the classroom on our site. At that time we had equal credentials. I had 20 years experience, a masters degree, and if anything a job with a larger scope of work as I directed a program with 15 employees. She had 20 years experience, a master's degree, and supervised a half-time teachers aide. Not considering benefits such as health care and retirement - she made almost exactly twice as much as I did. Our health care was nearly equal, her's a little better than mine. But on retirement - I literally had nothing, and she had PERS.

So, I'm not taking anything away from the fact that teachers are underpaid (my son is a teacher after all!). But I'd just like to point out that those on-line staff in all those facilities that we depend upon for all of our social services are actually paid less, much less, than even poorly paid teachers.

Our society has this really odd idea that if you are doing something worthwhile and good for society, that is reward enough in itself. Somehow, we reward these hard working people by making their lives difficult. But if you are doing work that exploits our society, you should get even higher pay.

We believe in really odd things in America.

I am not sure where this argument about salary goes. Is Chuck going to argue that teachers are less qualified than they would be if they were paid more? is there a quality problem now with teachers?

I'd also be interested in seeing some statistics about the number of applicants per job. In my local district there are always plenty of qualified applicants at existing pay levels. There is no pressure to raise salaries because the queue of qualified applicants more than meets the need. Isn't that generally the case in most school districts?

Chuck: Thanks for a good post. I think most teachers know they will make less going in and are willing to accept it, but misguided mandates that diminish individual professional decision making are often the final straw.

Phil M: Public school teachers receive health insurance contributions from districts for 12 months, but the deductions required to cover their out of pocket costs for their health benefits are subtracted in the same cycle in which they receive their salary. Public school teachers are not paid salary for the two summer months that they do not work unless their district allows them to spread a ten month salary over twelve months thus decreasing their weekly pay. I am not sure whether the 10 versus 12 month spread was indicated in the survey, but it would obviously be a factor in weekly wages.

Urban Planning Overlord: I think your assertion that merit pay would somehow increase teachers' salaries is misguided. Oregon lacks the tax base to make any long term commitment to increase teachers' salaries-- merit pay or not. Unless you are ready to promote a sales tax, I don't know where you are planning to find the money.

In addition, I don't why you and others seem so surprised that unions would be opposed to merit pay. An inherent principle of unionism is to provide defined and equal levels of pay for all members. It is how you attempt to get and keep your members in the middle class. If you are a union electrician, you make an apprentice rate that gradually increases for 5 or 6 six years until you make the journeyman rate which is the same for all journeyman in the union. This is the same for most union trades. You seem intent on blaming unions for thier failure to promote policies that have their foundation in private professional white collar work. Unions draw their principles from union foundations not private industry.

Finally, the biggest reason to eliminate No Child Left Behind is because it is an assault on local control and it is time to end our tacit approval of the federal government overstepping its bounds. The Department of Education and laws like ESEA/NCLB were never authorized by the Constitution and it is time that they were eliminated allowing states to take back the power that is rightfully thiers.

The greatest underperforming variable in K-12 education is the parents, the third rail of education.

As a society and in politics we argue vociferously about small changes in variables which have little impact.

Teacher pay should be at the heart of all education reform efforts- before facilities, books, tests, technology and even curriculum- we need to look at who is the center of attention in a child's life 6.5 hours a day.

I would start them at $80,000 a year and bump them to $100,000 after three years. After 20 years a good teacher should be taking down $250k minimum. I want the best and brightest fighting tooth and nail over every job opening. Teaching is the second most important job in the world (behind parenting) and its worth should never ever be undervalued.

The tradeoff to the teacher's union for massively bumping their pay would be an agreement to allow a more stringent, rational and comprehensive assessment of who is a good teacher and who is not. Good teachers stay- bad teachers go, simple as that. (and this does not necessarily have to turn into some perpetual Office Space style justify-you-existence inquisition- those are mean spirited and counter productive. It is more a matter of identifying truly bad apples and removing them, not playing fast and loose with people’s careers over a few percentage points on a test).

Once we roll out a generation schooled by the very best, all the problems that seem unsolvable today will just fall by the wayside.

the queue of qualified applicants

There is also a very high turnover rate. It's hard to produce what folks tend to think of as "excellent" teachers when the idealism that led a person to teaching (despite knowing full well that the pay would be low and the support uneven) is squashed by the realities of the job. Excellence in teaching develops over time, as a result of experience and mentoring from more mature teachers. It's difficult to develop this with a high turnover rate driven by the economic realities of the job.

merit pay

Merit pay is divisive. The issue is not so much the potential for abuse as it is the situation that economics plays as much of a role in defining excellence (how much $ there is in the pool) as does performance and because "excellence" is evaluated sujectively.

extended summer of non-work is considered at least partial compensation for less pay overall.

So by extension if every American lost their job and had no income at all, we'd be the happiest country on the planet! You first.

Steve: In comparing the 15 people you managed to the one part-time teacher's aid your friend managed, I couldn’t help but notice that you left out the 180 odd kids per day that came through her classroom. Surly they count for something.

(or, if she was elementary, the 30 odd kids whose early stages of development she oversaw)

Merit pay makes no sense if it is a zero sum game. That means in order to promote merit pay, you need to increase funding. The big problem is that principals and adminstrators do not have the buget flexibility to base salaries on performance. This is also happening in the non-profit and even some for-profit organizations that have the wider salary ranges in each pay grade.

Lately, raises across the board seem to difer only by 1-1.5% between "superstars" and the employee that meets minimum requirements.

truffula: high turnover rate?

I have really not seen anything in the way of statistics to measure or verify this. Are teachers significantly different from any other profession in their turnover rate?

I suspect for most of us that the benefits of experience are mostly acquired in our first years on the job anyway. After that, we just keep making the same mistakes (or doing the same good deeds) over and over again.

I still am not quite sure whether you and Chuck are saying that there is a problem with the quality of our teachers now. I don't think you want to make a case for that position. There is no market based upward pressure on teacher salaries because the quality desired is being met at present pay scales.

MKD writes, "Steve: In comparing the 15 people you managed to the one part-time teacher's aid your friend managed, I couldn’t help but notice that you left out the 180 odd kids per day that came through her classroom. Surly they count for something."

MKD, you misunderstand. She worked in my facility as the teacher for the youth in residence. We worked with exactly the same number of children. She was paid by the School District, I was paid by the non-profit I ran.

Even if she had 180 students per day, it doesn't really count as a way to measure things. If I have 15 youth in residential treatment 24 hours a day, 7 days a week - you get where that comparison goes .... Besides, there is the whole degree of difficulty part. Youth in residential treatment are there because they cannot handle being in a less secure/intensive foster home, group home, etc. They are difficult to work with by definition, or they would be in a less intensive, less costly, setting. Now I understand that a "normal" youth in a school is no picnic either - but they are still able to be in school, versus the youth in treatment centers that are not to be trusted out in the general population.

Furthermore MKD, I think you really need to think about it more. She was paid TWICE what I was paid. I was the highest paid person otherwise. My staff, most with a BA and several years experience, made half of what I made.

It's time that we not only look at teachers, but that entire sector of people who work for all of us in various professions. We should pay fairly for work. We should not depend upon vague things like personal or professional commitment. When the wages are kept low in the professions paid by government financing, we always lose the best people.

I remember one of my best on-line counselors in a program I ran in the Portland area. At the time he left, he had a BA degree, and about 8 years experience in counseling. He got married, and when his wife was pregnant, he realized that he wasn't earning enough to make ends meet. As his boss, I was between a rock and a hard place. The State contract that funded the agency only allowed me to pay what I was paying. I knew he was worth more than I was paying him, but I had no way to pay him more. He ended up with a job painting houses - and earned about twice as much, and had better benefits. All I could do was give him a good reference.

Merit pay (how about higher incentive pay for successful teachers) does not need to be a zero sum game. It is only because unions kill anything close to merit pay, even when funded from outside the normal channels and not even taxpayer funded.

The Chalkboard project provide free, extra moneys to pay for excellence in teaching in Oregon. Sherwood School District took advantage of that program. Our district did not, in part because of union scare tactics. The district's teachers shot it down after hearing from the state union folks, who discouraged it.

Bill Gate's and Michael Dell's Foundations also provided $13M to Washington schools, and that was rejected, due to union contract rules. See the article for the full story. Here is part of the story:

"Two Seattle high schools are among seven statewide that will lose a chance to add and strengthen Advanced Placement courses in math and science because a $13.2 million grant that Washington state won last year has been scrapped.

The National Math & Science Initiative (NMSI), based in Dallas, announced that it will end Washington's grant because NMSI was unable to reach agreement with Washington's schools on the terms of the contract."

Sad but true. Unions are not interested in allowing anybody to pay more for better teachers. That is against the union philosophy. Better to have mediocrity all around than have some stars, some average and some below average. That is why union rules disallow even very bad teachers to get fired. And pedophiles?... well they just get passed to another district in their "pass the trash" formula. (Sad to say that some schools are like the old Catholic Church in that regard.)

Who cares if the kids lose, as long as the teachers in their unions win. That seems to be the zero sum game we are playing.

I forgot to include the link to the full story:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2004393644_webgrants05m.html

". It is only because unions kill anything close to merit pay, even when funded from outside the normal channels and not even taxpayer funded.

The Chalkboard project provide free, extra moneys to pay for excellence in teaching in Oregon. Sherwood School District took advantage of that program"

I would like to read some detailed discussion of this topic, not just union baiting. "Excellence in teaching" needs to be defined more specifically than saying we should all just shut up and agree with the Chalkboard definition (undefined in the comment). The first sentence of the second paragraph needs a proofreader.

How does the Sherwood model match up with what Denver did --a program written in coalition with the union rather than imposed on them?

Who determines merit? --building admininstrators? (favoritism has been shown to be a problem in such systems) ---competetion among staff? (there goes team teaching and collaboration!) ---test scores alone?

If a teacher is well liked by parents, is willing to go the extra mile by doing things like providing cards of various colors (green for a great day, red for a bad day, yellow for "tried but had these problems") for parents of first graders for a daily check on their progress, would that be counted towards merit? Or is there a checklist that teachers who meet the criteria are considered for merit pay and others are not? Is creativity part of merit, or only if it meets a written definition of "teaching excellence"?

Many of us who are skeptical of merit pay have seen excellent teachers (the kind who go the extra mile, the kind who are remembered by students years later) get into trouble because they ran afoul of administrators or red tape. And as hard as it might be for union-baters to realize this, one of the reasons Mike Huckabee was so popular among people who didn't agree with him on 90% of his politics is that he put the onus on education management! He talked about the importance of supporting teachers because his state lost so many teachers to burnout before the 5th year.

I agree with Chuck "Yet experiences in other professional fields suggest that merit-based pay schemes are a double-edged sword. "

I distrust all of those who say merit pay is the answer and anyone who asks logistical questions is just some union lover.

Currently I work for a non-profit, and I am someone who has enormous respect for teachers, esp. at the elementary level.

Before Harry bashes unions again, I suggest he tell us about the last time he was in an elementary classroom. People who talk like Harry are usually the type who couldn't last a few hours around elementary school kids (who are very high energy) much less a whole day or week.

Harry, Are you under the impression that Oregon teachers have tenure? And that if only teachers would do X, Y, Z then all students would exceed expectations?

What would you do if you were teaching a class which included some students who had medical disabilities (asthama, difficulty walking, etc.), some whose parents don't speak English at home, some who are less mature than others, some who excel in one subject but struggle in another--and on top of that have ADHD problems?

Or doesn't that matter because if only we had no teacher unions we would have better education? As often as I have tangled with the lobbyists for unions, I do know that before collective bargaining, teachers often were required to work without a lunch break---and there were old time teachers who remembered almost being too tired to drive home.

People working full time in department stores get an hour for lunch. Teachers are lucky to get the duty free half hour they are supposedly due. Who has a tougher work day--the sales clerk or the teacher?

LT, thanks for catching my bad grammar. I knew that sentence was incorrect, but I hit 'post' anyway. My bad.

<h2>"Before Harry bashes unions again, I suggest he tell us about the last time he was in an elementary classroom."</h2>

I have volunteered in both Elementary and Middle schools. Maybe I'll get to the High School someday. I have also served on the local school site council, as well as the school board. My first hand experiences with school unions (classified and certified) are a direct result of working with certain teachers who are also union negotiators during contract negotiations, in good times and in bad times.

<h2>"People who talk like Harry are usually the type who couldn't last a few hours around elementary school kids (who are very high energy) much less a whole day or week."</h2>

Maybe those "people like Harry are usually the type who couldn't last a few hours around elementary school kids" really couldn't last around 7 or 8 year olds, but I would only be generalizing. I can only talk about what this Harry likes to do. I am a past soccer coach (Elementary age kids) and a past little league coach (again same age group), and for the last four years I have coached 7-9 year olds where I spend about six hours every Saturday for the whole season with these kids, many with ADHD and ADD. I really do enjoy coaching that age group.

My wife has worked in jobs very similar to the jobs that Steve Buckman has worked in. Everything that he Steve says above is also true for her. For all the compaints from public school teachers, their lot is nothing compared with similar private sector jobs.

In all my experiences with school unions, I am most disappointed in their response in rejecting grants for projects around rewarding excellent teachers with additional financial rewards. I believe that excellent teachers should be rewarded for their excellence. The union people that I have been exposed to don't seem to want to do that, even if the money doesn't come at the expense of the other (poor performing or not) teachers, or the money doesn't come from the taxpayers, but from the Gates Foundation.

Public schools need reforming if we compare them to other countries. Bill Gates knows this, since MSFT hires more Sridars and Asoks from India than they hire Bills and Bobs from the states. And he is willing to put his money (Billions) where his mouth is. But the unions are rejecting it. It is sad, but not unexpected.

The teacher's unions are doing to government schools what the UAW has done to American auto manufacturers.

I volunteered this past school year as a reader with the SMART reading program. It gave me a close-up look at some teachers. The good ones are grossly underpaid.

We also need to look at the entire picture of education. Here in Redmond we just had a school bond with a lot of waste built into it. At the same time P.E. and music classes are threatened because of budget problems. The problem here is that construction funds come out of one pot and operating costs come out of another. And that is just one example of many where the people are talking out of both sides of their mouths on education.

Bil, thank you very much for your comment. Thank you for being a SMART volunteer. If everyone who complains about the quality of teachers would do such volunteer work, they would have a different view of the reality of education in the 21st century after years of underfunding schools. Back in the day when Betsy Close and Dan Doyle were arguing about the "bucket plan" (thank heavens we now have more rational state budget debates) the concern was how $2 bus fuel would cut into school budgets. Even if there were no unionized education employees in the state of Oregon, the current cost of bus fuel for rural districts would be a major cost to consider---but with no ability to union-bash, where would the anti-taxers vent their anger?

Some of this debate sounds like Sizemore on one team, teachers unions on the other, the rest of us just spectators. Truth is, many parents and others are concerned about quality education.

Here in Salem we have the issue of the school bond, whether enough money is going to repairs of older schools and not just to build new schools, budget transparency, whether administrator salaries are too high and more importantly whether they are unexamined, why families in older neighborhoods worry they are subsidizing new schools while their old schools are not kept in good repair, technology upgraded, etc.

These are debates which go on with parents, school board members and others who are not members of any teachers union. It is time to realize that these problems will never be settled as long as the 1990s "anti-taxers vs. unions" is the bipolar and only way this issue is discussed.

The plethora of unapologetic anti-union rants responding to this post are emblematic of why the progressive left has come to regard BlueOregon as something less than well, progressive.

With respect to the specific question of teacher's pay, of course teachers are seriously underpaid. That makes them unexceptional in an economy that has been rewarding capital and penalizing wage labor since the Nixon administration.

The hard truth is this: if we as a society wish to address the problems that are crippling our educational system (and, as witness many of the comments above, it is by no means clear that there is a consensus to do this) then it will take money. It will take a lot more money than anyone in the Jeff Merkley wing of the party is talking about now.

We can pay this money remedially by quadrupling the school budget, doubling teacher salaries, drastically cutting the teacher-student ratio, bringing the educational infrastructure into the 21st century, creating many more aggressive options to address the social problems that are the detritus of late-stage metastatic greed . . .

OR

We can pay less money at the remedial end by seriously addressing poverty, racism, and ending the valorization of violence.

We will pay, one way or another, or we'll simply sink further and further into a Brazilian-style tiered economy, with lots of poor people and a small corporate elite who use their wealth to isolate themselves from the problems they have created (e.g. Portland's "school choice" policy).

Or else we might simply admit, in the prescient words of Hunter S. Thompson, that we are "just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable."

Now three hundred some million and counting. Down.

As aspect that is often overlooked when it comes to trying to determine what a teacher should be paid is that good teachers really can't be quantified. In their case, teaching is as much an art as anything else. There was a movie a while ago based on the book, "The Freedom Writers." It told the story of a young teacher who had a class full of what appeared to be dysfunctional kids. She turned them around and almost all of them went on to college instead of the streets where they were headed. How do you put a price on that? Whatever she was paid salary-wise was no way near enough.

What I saw during my experience with SMART was the way teachers did more than teach kids how to read and count. They took into consideration the kids' background and went the extra mile to make a difference. What's that worth? Another buck-fifty an hour? I don't think so. It's another example of how NCLB is flawed.

I moved here last year from Virginia, a right to be a slave state, and I look forward to having union protection from the wimpy school district that tried to fire a teacher, because she defended herself when attacked by a student who had a history of violent behavior. I look forward to getting some real backing from a union, instead of feeling isolated and alone as an antisemitic administrator tries to railroad me out of the school, as is happening to a friend of mine back at the school I left.

There's a free ebook you can google and download by a former Asst Sec'y of Education called the "Deliberate Dumbing Down of America" which looks at the history of education and how big corporations in the earlier 20th century sought to structure education to meet the needs for factory workers and low skilled labor. It makes a fairly good argument that some of those paradigms are entrenched in the bureaucracy to this day and are very much represented in Bush's No Child Left Behind. It's free and well documented and a fascinating read for those who care.

Chuck, You never have seemed to grasp the simple concept of supply and demand in any of your posts on this board, teacher salary is just another example of that.

I remember back when I was in college that the easiest degree to get was the education degree. Lots of people started off in engineering but they couldn't hack it so they switched majors and became teachers. I thought it was funny back then that the dumber students were the ones getting the education degrees. (look it up, check SAT scores for education degrees vs. engineering degrees.)

Now that I'm older and have kids of my own I guess I don't think it is so funny anymore. But that is just the way it is. An education degree is one of the easiest degrees to get so they graduate a lot of students. That large supply of young teachers keeps the salary range down. And then the protectionist union activities prevents the poor teachers from being flushed out of the system.

It isn't hard to solve, just get rid of the union and then allow schools to pay merit pay for outstanding teachers. After a few years of providing the correct rewards to the system you'll start to see the cream rising to the top.