Do they earn as much as they should? No, they do not (more on that below). This is a serious, intellectual job that demands serious pay. But if we keep exaggerating how bad our teachers have it, no one will want to become a teacher–and policy makers will continue to dismiss salary increases as an unimaginably expensive reform.
On the other hand, if we ground the conversation in facts, we might discover that the situation is not as overwhelmingly hopeless as we thought.
First things first: What does the evidence show about how well US teachers are paid? There are different ways to compare salaries. One way is the straightfoward way: compare teacher salaries across countries. To do this, you take a country’s average teacher salary at different grade and experience levels, convert the figure into equivalent US dollars using Purchasing Power Parities to adjust for cost-of-living differences, and see how things stack up.
When you do this, as the OECD does, then you find out a startling truth: US teachers make more than teachers in Finland at every grade and experience level.
The pay gap is most glaring for elementary teachers. Here is the average salary (in equivalent USD converted using PPPs) for new elementary-school teachers in 15 countries:
1. Luxembourg $64,043
2. Germany $47,488
3. Switzerland $47,330
4. Denmark $43,461
5. United States $37,595
6. Netherlands $36,626
7. Spain $35,881
8. Canada $35,534
9. Australia $34,610
10. Ireland $33,484
11. Norway $33,350
12. Belgium (Fl.) $32,095
12. Belgium (Fr.) $31,515
13. Austria $31,501
14. Portugal $30,946
15. Finland $30,587