CommenTerry: Volume Twenty-five | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: The author of this post is Dr. Terry Stoops, who is the Director of Education Studies at the John Locke Foundation.

Teacher Pay Rankings: Use At Your Own Risk

    In this week's CommenTerry, I review some of the problems and challenges associated with the teacher pay rankings published by the National Education Association.
    I have been discussing teacher pay rankings for years. In fact, three years ago I wrote a newsletter piece titled, Education spending in North Carolina: The ranking problem. In that piece, I outlined the major problems associated with the National Education Association (NEA) rankings of teacher pay included in their annual "Rankings and Estimates" publications. I pointed out the following:

• The current-year rankings were educated guesses based on the budgetary trends from previous years;
• NEA comparisons do not take into account cost-of-living differences among states;
• NEA researchers also do not address variations in how states, localities, and districts fund their public schools; and
• Because of these difficulties, NEA researchers urge caution when citing state-by-state estimates published in "Rankings & Estimates."

    Many of the issues and themes addressed in the newsletter referenced above were reiterated in subsequent analyses of the rankings, which can be found here and here. In addition, Don Carrington's Carolina Journal article on the relationship between teacher and private sector pay is an incredibly valuable contribution to the discussion.

    Every year, NEA researchers send two short surveys to state education agencies, asking them to provide and update basic demographic, economic, enrollment, financial, and personnel data for the state (See Facts and Stats below). They acknowledge that the data they receive can be dicey,


    NEA researchers encourage states to provide clarifying information, but only about half do. North Carolina is not one of them. In most cases, it is difficult to know what elements are included or excluded from states' average salary figures.

    On the other hand, Illinois reports that salary data "may include extra-duty pay." Education officials from Oregon write, "Where applicable, 'average teacher salary' includes the contract amount plus 6 percent for the employer portion of retirement contributions." New York declares that their "teacher salary data are medians, not averages (arithmetic means)." Given these and other variations in reporting, it is safe to say that the NEA data do not lend themselves to apples-to-apples comparisons. Unfortunately, that has not stopped the mainstream media and public school advocacy groups from exalting the report.

    If there are crippling problems associated with the NEA report, why do we use it? The answer is simple. There is nothing else out there. Data collected and reported by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) often lags by two years or more, depending on their data collection schedule. Even when they report statistics in a timely manner, NCES researchers encounter many of the same methodological challenges that plague the NEA.

    Elected officials use the NEA report to declare that North Carolina is ranked X in average teacher pay (Democrats) or will rank X next year when we raise teacher pay (Republicans). Unfortunately, few have been informed that the rankings they cite are terribly flawed. Others simply choose to ignore that fact.

    Click here for the Education Update archive.