Waging the Wages – GR’s Top Earners
February 9th, 2009 at 4:23 pm by Anne Schieber under News
The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its latest survey on National Compensation. The reports come out four times a year and gives hourly wages for just about every job description you can imagine. The reports are chock full of information and may give clues about why some areas face employment hurdles. You can look to see how your wage stacks up against workers in other industries or you can determine if there is a surplus or shortage of workers in your field simply by looking at wage growth or declines.
I went throught the latest report for the Grand Rapids/Wyoming - April 2008 The average worker in the metro area makes $18.91 an hour. If you work in the private sector, your average wage is $18.10. If you work for the government, you’re making on average $28.68. Union employeess make about five dollars more an hour than non-union workers. If you are paid by the hour, you make $18.19. If you are paid by output (often known as “piece-meal”), you earn $29.28. Workers at large organizations make more than those at smaller companies. The difference is about $4 an hour.
Now, the interesting part. I took a look at jobs requiring college degrees. Coming in tops, no surprise, are physicians, surgeons and CEO’s. Their hourly wage tops $84 an hour. Top lawyers make a mean of $59.73 an hour (some professions, like this one have a huge pay differential, so you dig deep into the date).
The next highest might surprise you - public school teachers, who command $50.54 an hour. They make more than architects, engineers, geologists, and computer scientists. One reason is the time they actually spend on the job. I did a report on this in November. I found West Michigan teachers are now spending between 152 to 180 days teaching students. Salaries may not have gone up, but when there is more time off, it will boost hourly pay. And when it comes to pay, teachers in Grand Rapids and Michigan are close to the top. I looked at a hand full of cities and found teachers making much less, even in places with a high cost of living like San Jose, California ( $46.49) and Northern New Jersey ($48.37) Other lower paying areas include Raleigh Durham($27.44), Rochester, New York ($36.45), Austin, TX ($29.33) and Salt Lake City ($31.62)
The $50.54 mean hour wage for local teachers does not include teachers in the private sector Their mean pay is $19.16 an hour.
Wages have become huge interest in both the public and private sectors and the Michigan economy gets squeezed more and more.
To see where your pay stands, you can check this table on line from the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics. It lists 800 job descriptions:
$50.00 dollars a hour for being a school teacher, not bad. I wanted to be a teacher. In high school they told me I wasn’t smart enough to go to college.
Thanks for the info, maybe is time for a career change!!!
Well, I can see where this writer hasn’t a clue about the hours put in by teachers. They don’t get paid for grading papers, having to attend off school hours events like teacher meetings, staff meetings, chaperoning various events, things like that. The average teacher works 60-hours a week. Average meaning some work more hours and some less. Also, they don’t get paid for tutoring students after regular school hours.
That pay then degrades to about $20 per hour, which is why they are on a salary of sorts. If they were on an hourly basis, all schools would be in a bankrupt state with today’s economy, many schools would be closed, and class size would increase to 60 students or more. Given those stats, it doesn’t make any difference what the pay is, the teaching profession would soon have a shortage making it one of the worst professions on the planet.
Rob:
Maybe you can explain why are Michigan teachers making $10-$15 more an hour than teachers in other parts of the country? Are they putting in more overtime in Michigan?
AUS
Anne,
Do you aspire to ensure that Michigan has low payed workers? Should we try to make sure that our teachers are only as qualified as average and our students are no better than average? Would you like to send your children through a public school in Mississipi where teacher pay is nice and low, and so are test scores? Help yourself. I want my children to be taught by the best professionals available.
The Superintendent of the Niles District near Chicago makes a base salary of $411,511. That’s more than 2.7 times what the governor of Illinois makes (poor Blogo). The Homewood-Flossmoor District Supt. collects $402,331…that’s more than the President of the U.S. In Illinois pensions are based on the salary of the teacher in the final years (five years, I think) of teaching and are paid by the state, not just the taxpayers of the district where they teach. So, salaries can be jacked up in the last couple/three years to really boost the pension. For example, the salary of Schaumburg High School business education teacher Martin Barski rose from $91,151 to $142,536 in his final years with District 211, district records show. At 55, Barski retired with a pension of about $72,000. If he lives to age 90, with cost-of-living increases, he’ll rake in over 3.5 million dollars in pension money, plus other benefits.
this is the kind of equalized info that makes sense to me. Thanks for the info!
Sounds like we’ve got some future teachers here!
Get busy and earn the degree, interview for the job, and live the high life with those rich educators!
Man, those folks in District 211 must party like rock stars (or teachers)!
I remember back when everybody was making all that money a few years ago, and those poor, dumb teachers were working for peanuts compared to the big salaries, raises, and stock options everybody in the private sector was getting. Now those teachers are fat cats with Cadillac insurance and bank-busting pensions. And some of them are still getting those 1% – 2% raises that seemed like so little then! Wow! Maybe they’re the smart ones? That starting pay of thirty-some thousand with benefits sounds pretty good right now.
Remember, though, that Michigan’s teachers are older on average than those in some other states … they’ve been teaching longer and have advanced degrees. This means they earn more and it skews the stats. It’s pretty simple-minded to compare the pay without taking that into account. You need to compare apples-to-apples so to speak by looking at the same degree status and step for it to mean anything. And throwing a couple of statistical outliers into a post means nothing – especially when you know darn well that there are VERY few teachers making anywhere near 142K … or living to 90.
1. Your link shows data from May 2007, not April 2008.
2. The numbers are quite different from what you quote. Mean hourly wages are: Lawyers, 50.49; Chief Executives, 71.40; Pediatricians,58.57; Surgeons, 87.45;
3. I have no idea where you get the teachers numbers. The highest listed for all educational professions is 32.10 for ‘Instructional coordinators’. The mean annual salary for elementary teachers is 47,350, for middle school 51,100, for high school 48,270.
Please clarify your sources. Maybe you could provide references for the data by type of employer, also.
Some other thoughts:
I also looked at wages compared to highest graduation rates (I assume this is one measure of school/teacher performance) The high school graduation rate in GR is 84.6%. The graduation rate in Rochester, New York is 91%, yet teachers there are making $14 less an hour.
I didn’t even talk about school administrator salaries which have gone through the roof, as Bill mentions.
Why is this relevant? Michigan is in dire straights.
The tax base is eroding due to declining jobs and population. The schools have been spared from any cost cutting. In real terms, their budgets
have stayed the same or improved and yet, we’re not seeing any big difference in student performance. Most tax payers do not realize how expensive public education is in the state. The biggest expenses are pay and benefits but we need taxpayers to support them.
Below are my sources. Keep in mind that the numbers reflect a “mean” – the average, a number that can be skewed by extreme numbers at the end of the curve. Scott is right. The issue regarding teacher salaries in Michigan is that teachers are compensated based on experience and graduate education. There is an active debate whether this is the best way to pay teachers. There are some who believe that compensation should be more merit based, that is, compensation based on performance, test results, student, parent and peer feedback. I’ve had some debates with teacher friends of mine and some are for it and others against it. Yes, my children have had superb teachers who were making very little pay, which was unfortunate. The schools could not pay them more because the teacher contracts prohibited them from giving them more. It is the system teachers chose to use. By the same token, you could have a really ineffective teacher making a lot of money simply because of seniority and post graduate work. I have yet to see any research showing the correlation between advanced degrees and teacher performance. I had one teacher friend getting an advanced degree in child psychology to prepare her for her next career.
1) For the 2008 teacher wage date on GR:
Go to page 14
http://www.bls.gov/ncs/ocs/sp/ncbl1200.pdf
2) For the wage data on all GR occupations: (May 2007 is the latest)
http://www.bls.gov/oes/2007/may/oes_24340.htm#b00-0000
3) For wage data of metro areas throughout the US:
Go to the map on the bottom of the right corner
at:
http://www.bls.gov/ncs/
(Some 2008 surveys are not in yet and I did not use those cities. The latest is May ‘08. Grand Rapids is April ‘08: I used the wage numbers for “public employees” Teacher: Elementary and Secondary)
From Waging the Wages – GR’s Top Earners, 2009/02/10 at 11:12 AM
2009/02/1
Thank you for the references.
Table 4 (pg. 14) gives the mean hourly pay for elementary, secondary, and special education teachers as $50.01. Table 13 (pg. 32) gives the mean annual pay as $60,894, with mean annual hours of 1200. This correlates with what Rob said about additional hours put in by teachers.
I see the tables that compare public and private, union and non union, etc. I do not see any data for lawyers, physicians, or CEO’s in the April 2008 data.
So that comes to 30 full weeks of work for $61K…not bad. There are plenty of jobs in our region requiring college degrees that pay much less than that and you have to work more than 48 weeks out of the year.
As for the physician, CEO data…you’ll have to go to the 2007 report which is listed in the #2 list of my above posted blog. It’s about 70 pages and you’ll have to scroll through it to find the job description you’re looking for.
This is important information and needs to be in front of more people than will see it here. Hats off to Anne for opening the topic. I hope there will be a feature on education administration salaries and perquisites on a news broadcast soon. There is a crying need for some kind of pay-for-performance in education. The tenure system really needs an overhaul because it promotes complacency and too often saddles a system with marginal performers who become entrenched simply because they have been around a long time. There are many, many dedicated, motivated people in education and they deserve to be earning salaries commensurate with their education and effectiveness. But the working world has been changing for several years. It is no longer realistic to expect benefits to come without some cost sharing. And taxpayers can not afford to be subsidizing a retirement plan that is not self-supporting. That should include teachers and any other public servant. There is going to be a lot of belt tightening for all of us going forward. Educators and the NEA need to step up accept the fact that public funds are not unlimited.
There are people with degrees from top universities who won’t go into teaching because they know their salary will peak no matter how well they perform. These are people who don’t want to wait 15 – 20 years to start making a good salary. Benefits and time off mean little. They want growth and they want to be rewarded for it.
Has anyone been watching what’s been going on in Washington DC? The Chancellor there wants to change the pay system for teachers. It’s been quite contentious but if it flies, other school districts will likely follow step. The Chancellor wants to get rid of the tenure system and base salaries and raises on performance, competency, etc. Teachers would get a big raise if they opt out of the tenure system.