Latest Edu-Reads

Max Marchitello finds that pension spending in Maryland is regressive. Accounting for pension spending amplifies the total spending gap between high- and low-poverty school districts by 34 percent.

“Chicago has the most pension debt of any major U.S. city, a shrinking population and an $838 million budget gap—and the city’s teachers have been striking since Thursday.” That sentence pretty well sums up this WSJ article on the many challenges facing Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot.

Here’s a longer deep dive into the structural issues and the tough trade-offs pensions are forcing on state and local budgets.

In her 2003 book, Elizabeth Warren proposed an open enrollment system for schools. After reading her recent education platform, Andrew Ujifusa is asking, “why didn’t Warren propose open enrollment for public schools in her platform? Does she no longer support such a system? If not, why?”

Why do we assign new teachers to the hardest jobs? Although they can’t answer that question, a new study by Paul Bruno, Sarah Rabovsky, and Katharine Strunk documents the extent of the problem.

Speaking of new teachers, this is a great new ECS resource on what states are doing to support teacher recruitment and retention.

This is a cool piece from EdNavigator on how they think about building a language-inclusive culture and how it relates to their work with parents.

Mike Goldstein, the founder of Match Education in Boston (and a frequent Eduwonk commenter!), has a great entry in Fordham’s Wonkathon about why struggling students remain below grade level, and how to help them.

And here’s an update on the school that LeBron James supported in Akron.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman  

Latest Edu-Reads

Chicago teachers are out on strike today. The strike is not primarily about pay or benefits, but those issues are certainly lurking in the background.

A new study finds that universal free school lunch had positive benefits for poor and non-poor students. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates its new rules on school lunch eligibility could take away these very same benefits for up to 982,000 students nationwide (h/t Lauren Camera).

How to read charts accurately, or, how to make your own graphs more accurate.

Millennials aren’t drowning in student debt, argues Beth Akers.

Christopher Ruszkowski points out a recent Collaborative for Student Success estimate that more than 200,000 more students of color were reading at grade level in 2018 versus 2015. Christopher is right; we should be talking about that progress more!

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman  

New Column–Retirement Plan Options Vary By Education Sector

Why do higher ed employees have different (and, in my opinion, better!) retirement plan options than K-12 employees? This isn’t just an issue of higher ed faculty versus K-12 teachers; we’re also talking about librarians, janitors, bus drivers and secretaries who happen to be employed in one public educator sector or another.

That question is the subject of my new column for The 74 Million which you can read here.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman  

 

We Should Probably Stop Citing EPI’s “Teacher Wage Gap” Data

When writing about teacher pay, it’s tempting to cite the Economic Policy Institute’s work on the “teacher wage gap.” As of 2019, EPI authors Sylvia Allegretto and Lawrence Mishel purport to find the teacher wage penalty hitting an all-time high of 21.4 percent.

It’s a compelling statistic that aligns with much of what we hear from teachers across the country. But the underlying methodology is flawed in four key ways that have become increasingly apparent over time:

Flaw #1: It’s measured in weekly wages. 

Allegretto and Mishel are quite transparent that they are measuring the weekly wages of teachers. On one level this makes sense, because teachers need current wages to pay for their current expenses, everything from mortgage payments to groceries to childcare.

But teachers aren’t paid like everyone else. Teachers work plenty hard during the school year, but they typically only teach for 10 or 11 months of the year. As others have pointed out, differences in weekly wages don’t account for the differences in time spent across an entire year.

Still, I wouldn’t classify this as a fatal flaw in the data as long as they are accompanied by appropriate caveats. Other flaws, however, start to compound the issues.

Flaw #2: EPI’s benefit calculations are incomplete. 

To EPI’s credit, they do attempt to factor in the relative advantage teachers have in benefit spending. They’ve improved that methodology over time, and their main analysis attempts to combine the teacher salary gap and the teacher benefit advantage into one overall picture of total compensation.

However, as I pointed out in The Hill earlier this spring, EPI’s benefits methodology is still inaccurate. The comparison group they use includes teachers–that is, EPI is comparing public school teachers to a larger group that also includes teachers, and in fact teachers are largest sub-group within that comparison group. This decision biases the EPI results and makes the teacher benefit advantage appear smaller than it really is. Once you correct for that, total teacher compensation has not budged relative to other professions in at least 10 years.

Moreover, EPI’s calculations take the current benefit spending at face value. If states and districts are under-counting their pension benefits, as many economists believe, then more realistic assumptions would drive the teacher benefit advantages even further away from their private-sector peers.

I would probably rate this as a mid-level concern, but the problems are starting to mount.

Flaw #3: EPI’s state comparisons drop the benefit advantage entirely. 

In their national figures, Allegretto and Mishel carefully combine the teacher wage gap and the teacher benefit advantage to come up with a figure for the total compensation gap. Even though I disagree with EPI’s calculations on benefits, they at least deserve credit for attempting to balance out the changes in salary with the changes in benefits.

But then the authors proceed to drop benefits entirely when they report state-level data. These figures have been endlessly repeated in state and national media stories, but it’s simply irresponsible on EPI’s part to even include them absent more context. In many states, rising benefit costs fully account for flat or declining teacher salaries. EPI seems to recognize this in their national figures even as they ignore it in their state-level section.

Up to this point, I think the EPI wage gap figures might still be worth using given the appropriate context and caveats. But the next problem undermines them entirely.

Flaw #4: EPI’s wage gap methodology assumes credentials matter equally in all settings. 

At first blush, EPI’s wage gap methodology might make sense. They calculate the teacher wage gap as “penalties that remain after controlling for education, experience, state, and other factors known to affect wage levels. Generally, we express the teacher wage penalty as a percent disadvantage—how much less, in percentage terms, the average teacher earns relative to a similar college graduate in another profession.”

But this calculation starts to unravel if you know anything about teacher credentials in the education sector. That is, researchers have concluded that Master’s degrees and advanced credentials do not translate into better teaching performance, and yet school districts across the country have tied teacher pay to teacher credentials. As a result, teachers are now some of the most credentialed professionals in the country: 57 percent of public school teachers have a Master’s degree, up 10 percentage points in just the last 15 years.

As Andrew Biggs and Jason Richwine write in a new piece for National Affairs, teachers are now in roughly the 95th percentile when it comes to educational credentials. Under EPI’s assumptions, teachers would have to be paid accordingly in order to be paid fairly. But Biggs and Richwine find some alarming conclusions when they apply the same EPI methodology to other occupations:

EPI’s own pay-gap methodology leads to some other conclusions that are, to put it delicately, less intuitive. Using the same Census data and the same basic techniques that EPI applies to teachers, we find that registered nurses are “overpaid” by 29%. Meanwhile, telemarketers deserve a big raise, as they currently suffer a 26% salary penalty. Aerospace engineers are apparently overpaid by 38%, but “athletes, coaches, and umpires” are paid 21% less than their skills are worth. Photographers should consider going on strike, as they make 16% less than comparable workers. Firefighters are moochers by contrast, taking in 25% above their rightful salaries.

These stats should make anyone question the EPI comparisons. Worse, EPI’s findings of a rising teacher wage gap have been compounded by the changes in the teaching profession. As teachers have gotten more and more advanced degrees, teaching as an occupational group has moved up the credentials ladder. That does not mean, however, that those Master’s degrees would (or should!) be equally valued in the private sector.

To be clear, none of this confirms that teachers are under- or over-paid. Mike Antonucci has read the same studies and concluded that the narrative is more important than the underlying data. But to my mind, I’d still rather have more information about whether schools are able to recruit and retain high-quality teachers, whether higher salaries can solve those issues and for whom, and what happens to teachers who leave the profession. The research consensus so far–which Biggs and Richwine cite–suggests that ex-teachers do not earn higher wages in their next job. A recent paper on ex-teachers in Texas suggests that consensus may be wrong, and it may be skewed downward by people who leave the workforce entirely. Moreover, these types of analyses confirm that different types of teachers have different employment opportunities available to them.

That type of information would allow us to adjust compensation structures accordingly. It’s tempting to look at the sorts of synthetic comparisons that the EPI report constructs, but what we really need to know is if teacher compensation structures–in their unique labor market context–are set up to attract and retain a high-quality teacher workforce.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman  

Latest Edu-Reads

Texas is in the midst of redesigning remedial courses at the state’s colleges and universities. This Dallas Observer piece has a good overview of what they did and how it’s going. Here’s the key quote: “During the fall 2018 semester, the first after the new model went into effect, the state saw 10,000 more students pass their first college-level course than during the fall 2017 semester.”

This is a super cool data visualization tool on FAFSA completion rates from Ellie Bruecker. You can narrow in on certain geographic regions or search by school name and see how FAFSA completions are trending over time.

“UW-Milwaukee and UW-Madison lie just 80 miles apart, but they might as well be on different planets when it comes to access and outcomes.” That’s from James Murphy in a new brief for Education Reform Now.

Florida has been a leader on teacher retirement policy, but I suggest a couple ways they could do even better.

“The key argument against exit exams—that they depress graduation rates—does not hold for [end-of-course exams].” That and more in this Fordham report on end-of-course exams.

Speaking of Fordham, I’ve enjoyed Mike Petrilli’s summer blog series on big-picture trends in education over the last 25 years. The whole thing is worth reading, but this paragraph from his series finale provides a nice summary:

The achievement of low-performing kids and children of color rose dramatically from the late 1990s until the Great Recession. That was mostly because of improving social and economic conditions for these children, but accountability reforms and increased spending played a role, as well. Over the last decade, that progress has mostly petered out. And the gains we made were, of course, not nearly enough, as they mostly meant getting more kids to a basic level of literacy and numeracy and walking across the high school graduation stage—nowhere near the goal of readiness for college, career, and citizenship that is the proper objective of our K–12 system.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman