RALEIGH – If you want to get the right answer, the first step would be to ask the right question.
Before you accuse me of exhibiting my keen grasp of the obvious, stop to consider just how often this simple rule is violated. How many people ask the wrong questions when buying a computer, a car, or even a house, and discover later that they made a poor choice? The answers they do receive may well sound good, but they don’t speak to the most-important issues.
In state policy debate, a good example of the question/answer mismatch is the annually repeated promise, first from Gov. Jim Hunt and now from Gov. Mike Easley, to raise average teacher pay in North Carolina to the national average. The question is flawed for at least two reasons.
The first one involves measurement. Most rankings of teacher compensation include only cash salaries and are simple averages of nominal figures. They don’t factor in the value of employer-sponsored retirement and health-care benefits. They don’t adjust the raw numbers to reflect wide disparities in living costs – as if offering $40,000 to teach in Manhattan had the same effect on recruitment and retention as offering $40,000 in High Point. And they don’t reflect any attempt to normalize the state-by-state averages for differences in teacher experience, even though younger teachers inevitably make less and growing states like North Carolina almost inevitably have a younger pool of teachers being surveyed.
Adjusting for as many of these factors as possible yields a result markedly different from what observers think they know by looking at the published, nominal rankings. JLF has performed a series of teacher-pay studies since 1991, and we have consistently found that adjusted teacher compensation in North Carolina is no lower than in most other jurisdictions, and often substantially above it. The most-recent study, by JLF education analyst Terry Stoops, found that North Carolina’s teacher compensation was about $1,000 higher than the national median and more than $2,700 above the national average.
The second reason why the question is flawed is that state-by-state comparisons of teacher compensation averages don’t really relate to the decisions made by most actors in the education labor market. Although North Carolina and other growing states do recruit teachers from out of state, these teachers comprise a small share of total teachers or even of teachers entering or leaving our classrooms. To some extent, North Carolina recruits out-of-state teachers in the same way that we “recruit” out-of-state students – by being an attractive state to emigrate to.
More importantly, the greatest competitors for the labor services of North Carolina schoolteachers aren’t other state’s school districts but other professions within a local labor market. It’s more important to ask how many of our public-school educators exit because of the prospect of a better-paying job in the private sector, whether in education or another field. To answer that question, you have to study many issues. You have to exclude exits due to other reasons, such as childbirth or a spouse getting a new job out-of-town, and you have to consider that nominally lower teacher pay may remain more attractive than other offers because of job security, the hours, or the longer vacations than most professionals receive. You also have to consider the possibility that some teachers leave the classroom because they (or others) discovered that they weren’t good teachers. Believe it or not, that happens at least as much in education as it does in journalism, sales, financial services, health care, or other professions.
As Stoops noted in his paper, one telling statistic is that North Carolina’s annual rate of teacher turnover is 12 percent, lower than the national averages of 16 percent for teachers and 17 percent for employees of all large businesses. It’s hard to square these numbers with the proposition that North Carolina is relatively low in teacher pay, resulting in a relatively painful exodus of teachers.
But I don’t expect politicians to stop such, er, propositioning.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.