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CBS Uses Immigration to
Push Teacher Pay Complaint
But teachers earn above the average U.S.
wage and young people are drawn to better-paying jobs by a strong
economy.
By Ken Shepherd
Business & Media Institute
June 7, 2006
America has a teacher shortage and immigrants are
helping to fill it, reported CBS’s Wyatt Andrews on the June 6
“Evening News.” Finding a negative spin to the development, the CBS
reporter highlighted the complaint of a teacher’s union president
about pay.
Yet Andrews left out that the average teacher earns almost 37
percent more than the typical American, or that a strong economy is
partly to blame for the high turnover in the education profession.
“At least 10,000 teachers are needed from abroad every year,”
Andrews noted, before adding that National Education Association (NEA)
president Reg Weaver “calls the importing of teachers a band-aid”
solution and that “low salaries and heavy workloads are driving
American teachers out” of the profession.
But some experts argue that teaching has
always been a volatile profession and teachers typically earn better
wages than most other American workers. “The proportion of new
teachers who leave the profession has hovered around 50 percent for
decades” Reuters reporter
Lisa Lambert
noted, citing Columbia University education professor Barry Farbe.
Lambert’s May 9 report focused on an NEA study that finds half of
all new U.S. public school teachers quit the profession within five
years.
Weaver’s own union found that teachers earned significantly more than the average
American. A June 2005 NEA salary survey calculated average teacher
pay in 2004 to be $46,752, over $12,000 more per year than the
average wage as calculated by the
Social Security Administration. And those numbers don’t
take into account the guaranteed pension included in most teacher
contracts.
Reporter Andrews also left out another explanation for why there is
a domestic teacher shortage: good-paying jobs elsewhere lure away
young people from teaching.
On May 16, USA Today’s Stephanie Armour picked up on a survey
showing higher starting salaries and a stronger labor market for
college graduates in 2006 over the year before. Armour reported that
the survey by National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE)
found a 14 percent jump in college hiring from the year before.
Many public school teaching positions require at least a bachelor’s
degree.
A month earlier The Christian Science
Monitor’s
Mark Trumbull noted in his
April 11 report that economists see a strong, well-paying job market
for educated professionals. And the viewpoint is not isolated to
fans of the Bush administration’s economic policies.
“As this recovery gets under way, professional services have begun
adding jobs fairly broadly,” Trumbull quoted Jared Bernstein, an
economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
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