Teacher Pay: Myths, Reality and Union Shenanigans That teachers are underpaid and that teachers’ unions are beneficial for educators are enduring fables that need to be debunked. By Larry Sand
https://amgreatness.com/2024/09/18/teacher-pay-myths-reality-and-union-shenanigans/
Teacher pay
Chad Aldeman, a leading researcher who focuses on school finance, the teacher labor market, and assessment and accountability policy, recently wrote, “Wrong Ideas about Teacher Pay, Happiness May Keep Students from the Profession.”
The essence of the piece is that teachers generally like teaching and stay in the profession for about as long as accountants or social workers stay in theirs. “Teachers may not get rich, but they live comfortably middle-class lives. Plus, teachers get to retire a couple of years earlier than other workers.”
He then delves into the common misconception that teachers don’t earn a decent wage. “In 2021, Education Next asked a random sample of Americans to guess how much the average teacher earned in their state. Those guesses weren’t just wrong; they were consistently too low—by about 50%, or about $22,000. According to the latest data from the National Education Association, the average teacher salary in 2021-22 was $66,745.”
Just Facts takes the data one step further and adds that in the 2021–22 school year, the average school teacher also received another $34,090 in benefits (such as health insurance, paid leave, and pensions), which brings the total annual compensation to over $100,000. Additionally, full-time public school teachers work an average of 1,490 hours per year, which includes time spent on lesson preparation, test construction, and grading, providing extra help to students, coaching, and other activities, while their counterparts in private industry work an average of 2,045 hours per year, or about 37% more than public school teachers.
The great purveyors of the underpaid teacher myth are the nation’s teachers’ unions, which continually drill into teachers, legislators, and the general public that educators are paid a peon’s wage and need the unions to raise their salaries.
Actually, the opposite is true. Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Institute has dug deeper, claiming collective bargaining agreements (CBA) hurt the bottom line of all teachers. “Teachers in non-collective bargaining districts actually earn more than their union-protected peers—$64,500 on average versus $57,500.” Petrilli’s study was conducted in 2011, and research by Michael Lovenheim in 2009 and Andrew Coulson in 2010 bore similar results. Also, University of California San Diego professor Augustina Pagalayan reported in 2018 that CBAs do not improve teacher pay.
Leaving the union
The Supreme Court’s 2018 Janus decision asserted that no teacher or any public employee has to pay a penny to a union as a condition of employment, but the unions have made it very difficult for teachers to leave. The main source of entrapment concerns itself with “windows,” which the unions do their best to keep foggy. Dissenting teachers can quit, but only during a brief time period, which the unions often obscure, or they are sucked in for another year.
If you are a dues-paying Education Minnesota member and choose to quit, your annual opt-out window is September. Period. If you miss the Sept. 30 deadline, the union has you for another 11 months.
In California, the opt-out window for many is arcane. An educator who signed up with a California Federation of Teachers affiliate must submit their letter “not less than 30 days and not more than 45 days before 1) the annual anniversary date of this agreement or 2) the date of termination of the applicable contract.”
Exclusive representation
Teacher union power exerts itself in yet another immoral way. Even if you leave your union or never sign up in the first place, they still represent you. No law forces the responsibility of exclusive representation on the unions—in fact, the unions themselves demand it. As Mike Antonucci explains, “The very first thing any new union wants is exclusivity,” whereby “no other unions are allowed to negotiate on behalf of people in the bargaining unit.” Individual teachers cannot hire their own agents or represent themselves.
Union dues and politicking
The price is high for those who remain in a teachers’ union. Invariably, there is a unified dues structure whereby a teacher not only pays his or her local union but must also support its state and national affiliates. For example, in addition to local union fees, which are typically about $200 per year, California educators must also fork over $786 to the California Teachers Association (CTA) and $208 to the National Education Association (NEA).
The great majority of union spending does not benefit its members but instead goes to politics, almost exclusively to left-wing causes that often have nothing to do with education. For example, the CTA recently contributed $250,000 to a ballot initiative that would enshrine the rights to abortions and contraceptives in the state’s constitution.
In Chicago, teachers pay $1,403 a year to be union members. However, the Illinois Policy Institute reports that just 17% of Chicago Teachers Union spending is dedicated to representing its members.
Americans for Fair Treatment reports that NEA’s latest financial filing, which covers the 2022-2023 school year, shows that the union spent $10 million more on politics and lobbying than it did on representing its members. While NEA’s representational spending increased by about $2 million when compared to the previous reporting period, spending on politics and lobbying increased by $8.5 million.
The NEA also encourages teachers to get political with their students. The union’s writer and senior editor, Tim Walker, wrote in 2018, “Education is Political: Neutrality in the Classroom Shortchanges Students.” He quotes Alyssa Hadley Dunn, a professor of teacher education at Michigan State University: “Everything in education—from the textbooks to the curriculum to the policies that govern teachers’ work and students’ learning—is political and ideologically informed. Both what is taught and how it is taught are shaped by the cultural, social, political, and historical contexts in which a school is situated. We can’t pretend that teachers can leave these contexts at the door.”
Walker notes that Dunn is correct, “especially after the election of Donald Trump” in 2016.
Many teachers are ignorant about how the union affects their lives
The unions also like to instill fear in teachers about their post-union life, and too many teachers buy into it lock, crock, and barrel. A national poll commissioned by the Teacher Freedom Project in 2019 showed that many teachers are clueless about their professional benefits. Almost a third erroneously assumed that they would not be covered by their union’s CBA should they leave their union. Nearly a quarter thought that they’d lose their tenure protections, and 18% said they’d lose their health insurance—all untrue. The unions invariably foster or ignore teacher ignorance on these matters.
Also, while 70% of teachers understood that they would lose their liability insurance provided by the union should they leave, not many know they can join the Association of American Educators or Christian Educators Association International—professional organizations—and get better coverage at a much lower cost. Additionally, The Freedom Foundation announced in July that it will be launching the Teacher Freedom Network in January 2025 for teachers who want to leave their union. The organization will offer options that unions typically offer, like liability insurance.
It’s a shame that more educators don’t recognize the downside of being in a union. If teachers quit, they would be better off, the unions would be less powerful, and children and society would greatly benefit.
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