Re: Losing their bargaining rights won't send teachers to the poorhouse

yes Michael J. Petrilli / March 21, 2011

Last week I showed that, by one measure at least, teachers in non-collective bargaining districts actually earn more than their union-protected peers?$64,500 on average versus $57,500. These numbers are for teachers with just bachelor's degrees who have reached the last step on the salary schedule.

Matt Di Carlo of the Shanker Institute responded in the comments section with an important analysis of his own:

Mike,

Why are you using the maximum BA salary as a measure of what teachers ?actually earn?? ?It would seem to me that this is the least appropriate choice for two reasons. First, unlike the starting and fifth year salaries available in the TQ3 database, the maximum salary doesn't ?control? for experience?the schedules vary as to how many years it takes to get to the top. Second, and more importantly, most career teachers (i.e., those who might get to the top of their schedules) get a master's degree (and are required to do so in some states), so very few teachers are actually located at the top BA step. It's probably the least appropriate choice as a measure of what the typical teacher earns.

I quickly replicated your analysis. My figures for the maximum BA salary are slightly different from yours, but close enough for the purposes of a comment.

Starting BA -- Non-CB: $41,314; CB: $38,696

BA 5th year -- ?Non-CB: $43,630; CB: $43,640

Maximum BA -- Non-CB: $63,731; CB: 57,628

Starting MA -- Non-CB: $43,960; CB: $41,771

MA 5th year --

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Re: Losing their bargaining rights won't send teachers to the poorhouse

Opinion: A modest proposal for pension reform

The Education Gadfly / March 18, 2011

Educator pension systems are becoming increasingly expensive and, in a number of states, plagued by severe problems of underfunding. Given concerns about cost and long-term sustainability, several states have cut benefits, usually for new teachers, and many more are considering doing so. However, in making these changes, policymakers should carefully consider their labor-market effects. Some of the proposed cuts reproduce?and even exacerbate?undesirable features of current systems.

That's because they violate the paramount principle upon which pension systems should be built: Benefits should be tied to contributions. In other words, benefits paid to any teacher should be tied to the lifetime contributions made by or for that teacher. If $300,000 has been contributed on behalf of a teacher (including accumulated returns) then the cash value of an annuity provided to this teacher should also be $300,000.

This principle is routinely violated in current defined-benefit pension systems. Our analysis, Reforming K-12 Educator Pensions: A Labor Market Perspective, shows that the current systems result in very large implicit transfers from young teachers working short teaching spells to ?long termers? who spend entire careers in the same system. In our view, a teacher who works ten years or thirty years should accrue pension wealth roughly equivalent to total pension contributions (with accumulated returns). [quote]

Illinois is a cautionary example of how not to reform teacher pensions. The Land of Lincoln recently implemented a two-tiered plan, with teachers hired after January 1, 2011 in the second tier.

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Opinion: A modest proposal for pension reform

Losing their bargaining rights won't send teachers to the poorhouse

yes Michael J. Petrilli / March 17, 2011

One of the most striking arguments made against Republican governors' efforts to curtail the bargaining rights of teachers is that it's an "attack on the middle class." I'm more sympathetic to that line of reasoning than you might think; for all their evils, unions have been successful in giving millions of people a path to prosperity. And, as I was reminded at my grandmother's (a.k.a. "Nonnie's") funeral this past weekend, many of my second and third-generation Italian-American family members benefited from employment in public-sector, union-protected jobs. [quote]

But is it true, for teachers at least, that unions are necessary to ensure good wages? That when collective bargaining is disallowed, teacher pay plummets? I was curious, so I dug into data collected by the National Council on Teacher Quality. The group collects information on teacher pay, benefits, and much more in its tr3 database for more than 100 of the largest districts from each of the 50 states. I broke out the districts in non-collective bargaining states (those where the practice is illegal--namely, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia)--and compared them to the rest. And I looked at the maximum salary a teacher with a bachelor's degree could earn. (See the data here.)

The surprising finding? Teachers in non-collective bargaining districts actually earn more than their union-protected peers--$64,500 on average versus $57,500. (See the chart below.)

Click

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Category: School Finance / Teachers

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Losing their bargaining rights won't send teachers to the poorhouse