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Laird Maxwell, chairman of Idahoans for Tax Reform said, "In both reports, Dr. Wenders finds the teacher's union and their supporters spreading disinformation by misreporting portions which perpetuate the myths that teachers are in short supply and are underpaid. Wenders' analysis clearly shows that neither of these claims are true."
Wenders writes in his teacher compensation analysis: "When looked at objectively, one finds that teachers, both in Idaho and across the US, generally are very well paid relative to their counterparts in the private sector, and their above-market pay is confirmed by the perennial surplus in the general teachers' market and by teachers' relative low attrition rates on the job market." (Idaho's teacher retention rate is 92.4% with a 5.4% net resignation rate.)
Wenders clearly explains how the collective teacher salary "grid" is used as a political tool, as opposed to a market based approach where salaries are set individually. "Dolts get paid the same as superior teachers, and PE teachers are paid the same a physics teachers. Unlike in the real marketplace, teachers who perform well, or have valuable talents, never make more, and those who perform badly or whose talents are commonplace, never make less."
There is compelling evidence that the better graduates of the colleges of education become disillusioned when trapped by the public school inflexible salary grids and are less inclined to enter teaching and tend to leave once in the classroom. "One could not consciously design a policy with worse incentives for attracting and keeping good talent and performance," writes Wenders.
"The U-shaped relationship between the attrition rate and age means that generally teachers only leave their jobs early or late in their careers. Once past the first few years, they generally stay and ride the salary grids upward until retirement," Wenders reports. Moreover, since retirement benefits for teachers are usually higher than in the private sector, "teachers often find it attractive to retire early, often to become double-dippers."
Wenders cites numerous studies debunking the over-reported myth that decreasing class size uniformly improves student performance. Actually this myth is used to artificially stimulate the demand for more teachers plus perpetuate the so-called "teacher shortage" problem, and thereby padding union membership.
Additionally, when teacher quality is measured by student performance, Wenders concludes, "all the various certification, licensing, etc., standards are beyond detection."
For 2001, the national teachers' union reported "average" salaries of $43,335 for the US and $36,375 for Idaho. Wenders says "average" is a misleading number distorted by the continually changing mix of teachers in different parts of the salary grid. The reported average does not include the abnormally high fringe benefits which greatly underestimate teachers' total salary. Fringe benefits are about 29.45% of salary for Idaho teachers and around 26% for the US. (Private sector fringes are about 15.8% of salary)
Wenders reports, "Thus, total compensation for the 'average' teacher is $54,602 for the US, and $47,087 for Idaho. These are the data the NEA/IEA neither reports nor discusses."
However, Wenders challenges the "averages" by noting, "If the NEA really wanted to track teachers' salaries over time, it would take a random (or total) sample of real teachers in every state in 1990, and record their progress up through the elements of the succeeding higher grids until 2000, and see what happened to their salaries annually. It could then do the same for a sample of teachers in 1991. The result would be a table of how actual teachers' salaries behaved beginning in every year over this decade."
Wenders summarizes, "If annualized, 'average' teachers' compensation is $67,440 for the US and $58,140 for Idaho."
Maxwell encouraged school board members and media professionals to review Wenders' teachers' compensation study. "This news release simply touches the surface of why Idaho policy makers should move towards a market based approach of setting teachers' compensation. If lawmakers are truly committed to the state delivering the best education possible to our children and for our taxpayers, they would abandon the current collectivized and homogenized salary grid system."