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Get rich: be a teacher.

Article Excerpt
THE FACT is that teachers are better paid than most other professionals." So wrote Jay Greene and Marcus Winters in a paper from the Manhattan Institute, titled "How Much Are Public School Teachers Paid?" Naturally, this paper received lots of attention from conservative think tanks and op-ed pages like the Wall Street Journal's.

Greene and Winters attempt to give more credence to their contention by pointing out that, really, this is not our conclusion. We just took it from the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics' National Compensation Survey (NCS). This particular NCS provides figures for 2005 in terms of hourly and weekly wages. Sure enough, teachers clock in at $34.06 per hour, while economists garner $33.85, and architects earn a meager $30.22.

Greene and Winters don't bother to calculate wages on an annual basis because, they say, the NCS provides only the hourly wage and length of work week. The main table in the text does not have annual wages, but supplemental tables do. The NCS for 2005 put the average teacher's work year at just over 1,400 hours, while the year for economists and architects exceeds 2,100 hours. An average of elementary and secondary teachers' annual salaries (they don't differ much) comes to $46,995. Economists earn $72,810, while architects take in $65,108.

The figure for teachers is close to the annual estimates made by the teacher unions, and, while it is not a starvation wage, neither is it a princely sum. It would certainly be hard, though, to argue from this figure that "teachers are better paid than most other professionals."

In addition, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has now rejected reporting some occupations' compensation in terms of hourly wages. Said one BLS official, "We...