TEACHER SALARIES IN WISCONSIN

MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL - December 30

Read the NEA's full report at www.nea.org/edstats/ images/rankings08.pdf

The average salary for Wisconsin public school teachers rose 2.4% last school year, capping a decade in which teachers in only seven other states saw their pay increase by less, according to a new survey by the National Education Association. With an average salary of $49,051 in the 2007-'08 academic year, the state's teachers ranked 21st in pay nationally. That was a slip from the year before, when they averaged $47,901 in pay but ranked 20th in the nation, according to the NEA annual survey. Surveys by the NEA and the American Federation of Teachers, the country's largest unions for teachers, are considered to be among the best gauges of salary trends in the industry.

But while teachers in Wisconsin may not have seen their salaries increase as much as their counterparts elsewhere, that hasn't been true of their benefit packages. Reports from the U.S. Census show that Wisconsin has some of the highest per-pupil costs for benefits paid to teachers, ranking third in the nation for 2006, the most recent year for which information was available. "We owe a lot of that to the cost of health care," said Dustin Beilke, a spokesman for the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state's largest teachers union and an NEA affiliate. "Health care is eating up a lot of what would be salary increases just because the cost of health care is so high in Wisconsin."

Some state legislators and school board members, however, have blamed the high health-care costs on teachers, saying they could receive more pay if they accepted less costly insurance plans. Under the state's qualified economic offer law that allows school districts to limit teacher compensation to annual increases of roughly 3.8%, more spent on benefits often translates to less for teacher salaries. Chris Kliesmet, president of the Citizens for Responsible Government Foundation, which has studied school spending in Milwaukee, pointed out that living expenses in Wisconsin are lower than in some of the higher-paying states. He said that combined with generous benefit packages and other advantageous working conditions, Wisconsin's teachers are doing well. "We're still in the upper half," he said. "We still have, despite it all, a pretty good compensation system for teachers." But information from the NEA shows that teacher pay has taken some hits over the years in Wisconsin.

Since the 1997-'98 school year, average teacher salaries in Wisconsin rose 24.6%, the 44th highest increase among the states and the District of Columbia over that time period. Taking inflation into account, the teachers union estimates average salaries have decreased 5.7% in Wisconsin over the last decade, as compared with a 1.5% decline nationwide. It also projected the average salary for classroom teachers would rise to $50,424 for the current school year, for about a 2.8% pay increase.

OBSERVATIONS
* Considering that the per capita income in Wisconsin is $34,405, teachers seem to be doing well in Wisconsin.
* In Ripon, teacher fringe benefits that total an average of $26,159 per teacher. Average wages are $51,833. Total compensation for 2008-09 averages $77,992. This comes from the district's website, so it appears that teachers in Ripon are doing well compared to the state average.
* Like most of us, the loss of relative income due to inflation is a disturbing trend. Real wage growth in this country has been a problem for a number of years
* This comment - "Some state legislators and school board members, however, have blamed the high health-care costs on teachers, saying they could receive more pay if they accepted less costly insurance plans" - is something I have been in agreement with for some time. I wish, at the very minimum, that we could comparison-shop the insurance packages for the teachers, and all public employees, not with the intent of forcing them into anything, but, at the very least, be able to see what options are out there.