Teachers Are Overpaid!

I like how the study says "few people" think that architects are overpaid. Maybe that is because 95% of the public has never hired an architect and has no clue what they charge.

At the The Heritage Foundation if you want to make a left turn, you have to make three rights.

that's what happens when you get your news from union bulletins/blogs. This is what was said..

The wage gap between teachers and non-teachers disappears when both groups are matched on an objective measure of cognitive ability rather than on years of education.
Public-school teachers earn higher wages than private-school teachers, even when the comparison is limited to secular schools with standard curriculums.
Workers who switch from non-teaching jobs to teaching jobs receive a wage increase of roughly 9 percent. Teachers who change to non-teaching jobs, on the other hand, see their wages decrease by roughly 3 percent. This is the opposite of what one would expect if teachers were underpaid.

Pension programs for public-school teachers are significantly more generous than the typical private-sector retirement plan, but this generosity is hidden by public-sector accounting practices that allow lower employer contributions than a private-sector plan promising the same retirement benefits.
Most teachers accrue generous retiree health benefits as they work, but retiree health care is excluded from Bureau of Labor Statistics benefits data and thus frequently overlooked. While rarely offered in the private sector, retiree health coverage for teachers is worth roughly an additional 10 percent of wages.
Job security for teachers is considerably greater than in comparable professions. Using a model to calculate the welfare value of job security, we find that job security for typical teachers is worth about an extra 1 percent of wages, rising to 8.6 percent when considering that extra job security protects a premium paid in terms of salaries and benefits.

http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2011/10/Assessing-the-Compensation-of-Public-School-Teachers

Yes, but the report also said that teachers should make less because majoring in education is easy.

As compared to nuclear physics?

As opposed to business administration?

How many college majors require you to student teach in a combat zone? Yeah, that is what I thought...

And on top of that, the teaching license exam has a 50% + failure rate. So yes, teaching is super easy.

> And on top of that, the teaching license exam has a 50% + failure rate. So yes, teaching is super easy.

do you have a link on that failure rate? impressive!

http://www.nctq.org/docs/Aspiring_teachers_fall_short_on_math_-_The_Boston_Globe.pdf

And on top of that, the teaching license exam has a 50% + failure rate. So yes, teaching is super easy.

This is not proof of a tough test. Biased sample

The data presented doesn't make a very compelling case that teachers are overpaid. On the other hand, it does perhaps argue that they aren't considerably underpaid, either. That may be the case for the current set of teachers. But assuming that we think that we want (on average) better teachers, I think it follows that we'd have to pay more to get that outcome. I'm not enough of an expert to opine on whether the average quality of teachers significantly influences our generally poor performance in educational outcomes, but it seems likely to be at least part of the equation.

Wonder how many teachers would get this right?

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5ESY-NOHla4/Tq9eMGZdH2I/AAAAAAAABQo/zoFPCfJ6kUk/s1600/multiple+choice+question.bmp

The identical percentage of any set of people you had answer the question.