Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics - IEA

PART 2: MEXICO
121
Teacher salaries
Mexican teachers saw their real incomes and wages decline sharply in the 1980s relative
to average incomes in Mexico, but these began to recover at the end of the 1980s and into
the early 1990s. Lopez-Acevedo and Salinas of the World Bank compared the salaries of
teachers with the salaries of other professionals who had completed upper- secondary
and/or higher education in 1988, 1994, and 1999. They found that teachers’ monthly
income and hourly pay rose relative to professionals’ monthly income and hourly pay
in the early 1990s, but fell in the late 1990s (Lopez-Acevedo & Salinas, 2001). As we
document below, we found a similar downward trend in the period 1996 to 2000, but
another increase, particularly for female teachers, during the period 2000 to 2004. The
rise in the early 1990s can be explained partly by the implementation of the Carerra
Magisterial in 1993.
Our analysis of secondary teachers’ annual and hourly salaries in Mexico involved
comparison with the salaries of scientists, engineers, and social scientists for three
years—1996, 2000, and 2004. Although, surprisingly, the average levels of education
for scientists and engineers were lower than those for the secondary school teachers,
who were mostly college graduates or had some graduate education, we restricted
ourselves to comparing teachers with people from other occupation groups who
were college graduates. Because of poor data, our restriction also extended in the year
2000 to individuals with postgraduate levels of education. The social scientists in the
employment survey sample were also almost all college graduates or had some graduate
training.
Table 35 presents the results of our estimates of annual salaries for the four occupational
groups by gender across the three years; note that we controlled for level of education.
The teacher category in the table comprises secondary teachers only. The results suggest
that secondary teachers lost some ground, salary-wise, to other professionals in the
1996 to 2004 period, and that this loss held for both male and female teachers. By 2004,
male teachers were earning one-half the monthly income of social scientists, the most
comparable group education-wise; female teachers were earning about 80% of female
social scientists’ average income.
The results in Figures 42 to 45 for the hourly wages of secondary school teachers
suggest a similar pattern regarding annual earnings. However, because teachers work
fewer hours than those in other professions, teacher hourly salaries tend to be generally
higher than the salaries in other professions. In 2004, female secondary school teachers
earned relatively more compared to females in other mathematics-oriented professions,
while male teachers, more experienced ones particularly, earned wages lower than those
of males in other mathematics-oriented professions.