Teachers Earn Less According to American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation

Recently, I received an email from Kathleen Marsh.  Kathleen Marsh is a Wisconsin public employee who started a petition to tell our politicians that they should keep their paws out of our deferred compensation or pension as some call it.  It is only a pension if you actually receive your pension.  Well, she provided a link to an article from Andrew Biggs in the Wall Street Journal.  Here is the original paper that he wrote for the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation entitled, Are Teachers Overpaid? (http://www.aei.org/article/education/k-12/higher-pay-than-private-sector/)   If you want to see how a research paper shouldn't be written, this paper is an excellent example.  It would never be published in an actual research journal with standards.     

Here are the horrible highlights of Assessing the Compensation of Public-School Teachers upon which Are Teachers Overpaid is based.

1. Falsely assumes that markets set accurate prices.  If markets accurately set prices there wouldn't be asset bubbles such as the housing bubble, stock market bubble, or tech stock bubble.  Markets require honesty and transparency to work, neither of which has ever happened and will probably never be. 

2. Uses lots of anecdotal evidence to support predetermined conclusions -- also known as dogma. 

3. Cites non-peer reviewed sources, including a blog on page 7 citation #18.

4. Asserts without evidence that the better grades of education majors are a by product of low grading standards instead of the improved effectiveness of people who are experts at instruction or the ineffectiveness of instructors who have no expertise in instruction.   (Page 7 paragraph 6).

5. Uses anecdotal evidence to deny statistical evidence that teachers are in fact underpaid.  On page 6, they state that, "In other words, public-school teachers receive salaries that are 19.3% lower than non-teachers who have the same observable skills."  That is the statistical evidence.  Now here is the anecdotal evidence, "If we added an indicator for architects to the regression, for example, we would find that architects receive a wage premium over similarly skilled workers.  Yet, few people would immediately conclude that architects are 'overpaid.'"  Few people?  Who are these people and where did Mr Biggs find them?  

6. On page 6, Biggs asserts that experience does not have an impact on teacher quality without evidence to back up his assertion.  In reality, the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance states that expertise requires approximately 10,000 hours of effortful practice.  Hardly something a new teacher would possess.  Teachers work approximately 200 days a year.  Multiply this by seven hours a day of instruction, and you get 1400 hours.  It would take about seven years to put in the appropriate number of hours to be an expert and that is under perfect effortful practice conditions, not necessarily a classroom.