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As presidential candidates and other office-seekers pledge to improve public schools and reward public school teachers, a new study suggests that in both Pennsylvania and the nation, more pay hikes for public educators are sorely needed.

According to a report released Friday by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) in Washington, DC, and the Keystone Research Center in Harrisburg, public school teachers in Pennsylvania between 2002 and 2006 earned in weekly wages, on average, about 81 percent of what college graduates in other jobs made. Nationally, teachers did slightly worse, with weekly earnings averaging about 76 percent of those of college-educated non-teachers.

The study by the nonprofit, nonpartisan EPI found that the average Pennsylvania public school teacher in the 2002-2006 time period made an average weekly wage of $1,014. Meanwhile, the average college graduate in an occupation other than teaching made $1,241 a week, or $227 a week more. Nationally, in the same time frame, teachers earned an average weekly wage of $967, compared to the $1,260 a week, or $293 a week more, made by non-teachers.

In Pennsylvania, the teacher “pay penalty” is particularly severe in many of the commonwealth’s less wealthy school districts, said Ron Cowell, president of The Education Policy and Leadership Center in Harrisburg. “These underfunded districts are disproportionately challenged in teacher recruitment and retention,” Cowell said.

The recently completed education “costing out study” done in Pennsylvania proved as much, said Mike Krajovic, chairman of the board of Good Schools Pennsylvania and president of the Fay-Penn Economic Development Council. “Many public schools, especially those in rural, distressed areas, do not have the funds to pay for top professional talent, despite higher-than-average tax rates,” Krajovic said.

The EPI study also compared teachers’ weekly pay to the weekly earnings of a core group of occupations with educational and skill requirements similar to those of teachers. That group included accountants, reporters, registered nurses, computer programmers, clergy, and personnel officers. The comparable occupations, the authors explain in the report, were chosen based on occupational skill level data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics National Compensation Survey and on a point rating system used by the federal government to rate its white-collar jobs.

“These data allow us to compute summary measures of overall skill for each occupation and identify occupations that have skills comparable to teaching,” the authors wrote.

Nationally, according to the report, the teacher pay penalty translates to weekly earnings that are, on average, about $154, or 14.3 percent, lower than those of people in the comparable occupations. 

Although the size of the teacher pay penalty varies from state to state, the penalty exists in all 50 states—that is, there is no state where weekly teacher wages are equal to or greater that the weekly wages for similar occupations. The penalty actually exceeds 25 percent in 15 of the 50 states, and is less than 10 percent in only five.

Even obtaining an advanced degree yields only a small improvement in the gap, according to the study. Among teachers with only a bachelor’s degree, earnings were 12.2 percent less than those of peers in similar jobs. But teachers with master’s degrees fared just slightly better, earning 11.3 percent less than their non-teaching colleagues.

The report also examined the claim of some public education critics who argue that lower teacher salaries are offset by generous health insurance and pension benefits. The authors found that taking total compensation into account would have narrowed the pay gap by only three percentage points.

Particularly ominous, according to the authors of the report, is their finding that the pay penalty is most severe among the most experienced teachers. For early-career teachers (those ages 25 to 34), today’s pay penalty is only slightly larger than in 1996—a change of 0.5 percentage point. The brunt of the widening pay gap has fallen instead on senior teachers (ages 45 to 54), whose pay deficit within their age group has grown—since 1996, among women—by 18 percentage points. Women comprise the vast majority of teachers.

People, especially women, who went into education decades ago due to lack of other employment opportunities, are now heavily recruited to become engineers, researchers, and technicians in the private sector, Krajovic said. “Today, in the competitive game of free agency for highly skilled technical employees, schools need to pay more if they expect to get better talent,” he noted. “But to maintain that talent, schools also need to mandate more training days each year for the professional development of their teachers. And training should be viewed as an investment and benefit for teachers, not as a negative burden.”

“Teachers are the single most important ingredient in educational success—and it’s important for schools to compete for and keep the best qualified teachers,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of EPI and one of the report’s authors. “But this widespread and systemic devaluing of teaching sabotages those efforts. If you deliberately set out to design a plan to drive away your most experienced teachers, this would be a good way to do it.”

The study also found that the erosion of pay for mid- and late-career teachers may affect teacher recruitment, in that potential teachers often compare what their earnings may be over a lifetime to expected lifetime earnings in other professions.

According to the report, the teacher pay gap over the last decade increased 10.8 percentage points—from a 4.3 percent shortfall for teachers in 1996 to a 15.1 percent difference in 2006. The gap grew markedly during the latter half of the 1990’s, when the earnings of college graduates increased on average by 12.7 percent, but teacher earnings did not grow at all.

“Teacher compensation seems to be prosperity-proof,” said economist Sylvia A. Allegretto, another author of the report. “Even in a period of solid economic growth, high employment, and rising wages, teachers were left behind.”