Teacher Pay

Denis Doyle, writing at EduStat Blog asks a question about teacher pay at private schools:

A little noted question continues to interest me – How do private schools get away with paying lower salaries than public schools? There are a multitude of small answers – religious order members take vows of poverty, but their numbers are few and shrinking; uncredentialed teachers can’t get hired in the public sector, but temporary credentials are easy to get in many jurisdictions; private school teachers are not unionized, but it’s not clear that unionization forces salaries up by much.

While it is true that most private schools pat teachers less than their public school counterparts, part of it may be skewed by the number of non-profits and religious schools in private education.

But I do want to take exception with the assertion that unionization forces salaries up by much. While on a strictly pay level, this may, MAY, be true, there is more to pay than actaul salary and the unions have been remarkably good at extracting non-monetary types of compensation, such as health care, reduced hours, vacation time, retirement benefits and the like.

Furthermore, as Nitin pointed out in the comments, public school teacher salaries are not subject to the normal market forces regarding labor that are present in other fields. As a result, we don't know if unionization has pushed public school teacher pay or not. My guess is that it has, but I don't know which way. Given the whining and complaining from unions on the teacher pay issue, you would think it would be higher, but unions seem unable to extract pay raises from school boards despite having professional negotiators on their side, facing largely volunteer school boards. In a era where education spending seems to be on the rise, you would think teh unions would be better at it.

But then again, the unions also press for smaller class sizes, meaning more teachers are needed, which results in depressed salaries since the salary pie is only so big.