Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics - IEA

PART 2: NORWAY
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based instruction, 190 hours per year to school-organized work collaboration, 37.5
hours to post-secondary/in-service education, and 540 hours to planning (out-ofschool
work) (Hansen & Simonsen, 2001).
Despite having a comparatively high GDP per capita relative to other OECD countries,
Norway spends a comparatively low share of this money on teachers’ salaries. Teachers’
unions in Norway are committed to parity in teacher salaries. There is no systematic
difference in wages between male teachers and female teachers at the compulsory
schooling level, nor are there systematic differences in the salaries of primary and lowersecondary
school teachers (OECD, 2004).
According to the OECD, teacher salaries in Norway are, on average, below teacher
salaries in other OECD countries. In 2000, starting salaries in compulsory education
were somewhat higher than the OECD average. However, the salary at the top of the
scale, for teachers who had completed 15 years in the profession, was 10% to 25% lower
than the OECD average (OECD, 2004). The last three to four years have witnessed
an increase in teacher salaries in Norway. This increase holds despite an increase over
recent years in the hours that teachers typically work. Salary negotiations during 2002
led to an average rise of 7.7% over existing salaries, which had actually begun increasing
during the 1996 to 2001 period.
The average annual income and average lifetime incomes of teachers do not compare
favorably with those of other professionals with similar qualifications. We asked the
Department of Research at the Norwegian Statistics Bureau to estimate detailed age/
earning profiles for teachers, engineers, and other scientists relative to short- and longduration
post-secondary education. They took the teacher-related information from
the National Educational Database and information on the other professionals from
the matched Employer/Employee Register.
Tables 36 and 37 and Figures 46 to 49 show the department’s estimates of median annual
earnings for teachers, engineers, and “other scientists,’’ according to gender and across
two levels of tertiary education. According to the departmental researchers (personal
communication):
Teachers are defined as individuals with relevant education, working in schools. Some
effort has also been made to distinguish them from non-teaching staff (principals, advisors,
and other administrative staff) by use of data on occupation. Teachers with short tertiary
education mostly have Teachers College, while teachers with long education mostly have
a university degree and pedagogical training. Engineers are defined from inspection of a
more detailed underlying classification, as a sub-group of those having tertiary education
in the fields of sciences, vocational and technical subjects. The category other science
consists of the rest of all individuals with education within this field.
The age-earnings profiles shown in the tables and figures for full-time employed
individuals suggest that males employed in education in 2005 in Norway earned well
below the average earnings of science professionals and especially engineers. Data
not presented in the tables and graphs show that salaries are even more favorable
for engineers and those in other sciences (or with other science degrees) given that
engineers and other scientists average about a year less of education than teachers. For
example, a typical compulsory school teacher (with a short-duration degree) studies for
an average of 16.7 years, whereas an engineer or other scientist undertakes about 15.7
years of educational study. A teacher with a long-duration degree typically studies for
18.8 years, an engineer for 18 years, and a scientist for 18.3 years. Thus, if the differences