Comparing Job Content: Teachers and Similar Occupations

Tony Milanowski

Teacher salaries have historically been modest. In other words, nobody goes into teaching to get rich. But exactly how do K–12 teacher salaries compare with those of similar occupations?

The trick lies in defining similar. Does one compare level of formal education? Level of literacy? Job content?

WCER researcher Tony Milanowski has been studying teacher compensation and has published widely on the subject. He recently mined several occupational databases to explore how information about work activities and skill requirements might be used to identify the occupations that most closely resemble the teaching profession and to determine how salaries for those occupations compare to teacher salaries.

The study used data from O*NET, the U.S. Department of Labor’s database of information on the characteristics of more than 1,100 occupations. O*NET includes 17 sets of descriptors covering worker characteristics, worker requirements, occupational requirements, and occupation-specific knowledge and skills. Each occupation in the database is rated on the level, importance, and/or frequency of the job content represented by each of more than 300 descriptors. Milanowski’s study concentrated on two sets of descriptors, basic and cross-functional skills and generalized work activities.

Among other things, Milanowski found that teacher occupations are rated higher than average on skills like learning strategies, monitoring, and operations analysis. They also rate higher on activities like thinking creatively, developing objectives and strategies, and judging qualities of things, services, and people.

Milanowski says this finding suggests that teachers use lots of analytical skills. This analytic dimension to the profession may often be overlooked, he says, within the education policy community and beyond.

Read the rest of the article here.

Press

Diana Hess says young people are more likely to vote if they understand the issues  (WKOW-TV27,   9 October).

Sara Goldrick-Rab discusses the economic downturn's effect on college affordability (Chronicle.com, 10 October).

The annual Minority Student Achievement Network (MSAN) student conference is covered in the The Capital Times (1 Oct.) and The Madison Times (19 Sept).

Doug Harris and Thomas Toch say the next U.S. President should work to make NCLB "a more legitimate report card of school performance, one that provides a fair and accurate gauge of educators’ contribution to their students’ achievement" (Education Week, 29 September).

Tim Boals discusses WIDA's new assessment for English-language learners who have severe disabilities, and new funding from the U.S. Department of Education (Education Week, 23 September).

Adam Gamoran discusses reform efforts in algebra instruction (USA Today, 22 September).

CENTER SITES

Two New Working Papers Posted

Using a unique panel data set of North Carolina public elementary school students, professor Jane Cooley finds that desegregating peer groups has minimal effects on the racial achievement gap across the achievement distribution. Read “Desegregation and the Achievement Gap: Do Diverse Peers Help?” here.

In a second paper, Cooley provides a link between the theoretical and empirical models of peer spillovers in the education context. She shows that the implications for identification and policy are quite different, and that the tendency to focus only on spillovers from predetermined characteristics of students may be misguided. Read “Alternative Mechanisms of Peer Achievement Spillovers: Implications for Identification and Policy” here.