Teacher pay - correspondence - Letter to the Editor

Education Next, Winter, 2004 by T. Allen Lambert

Richard Vedder points out that teachers are not paid as badly as everyone thinks ("Comparable Worth," Forum, Summer 2003). Unions like to use measures of annual salary, while Vedder suggests that hourly wages provide a more accurate gauge of teachers' pay. But neither is a very good unit of measure.

Teachers commonly work many more hours than the official time they spend in school because they typically prepare for class, grade exams, and perform other tasks outside the formally defined school day. In my experience, most teachers work as much as other professionals, about 50 hours per week.

The best unit is the number of contractual work days, which for teachers is typically about 182 days per year. The work year for most workers is 238 days. In other words, a teacher's annual salary is based on about 76 percent of a standard work year. Thus a teacher's salary of $45,000 translates into a full-year salary of $59,000.

T. ALLEN LAMBERT

Ithaca, New York