Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics - IEA

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TEACHER PAY AND STUDENT MATHEMATICS ACHIEVEMENT
areas. Teachers wishing to increase their salaries can also, through a competitive process,
become school inspectors or school administrators (Cros et al., 2004).
Spanish teachers earn salaries that are generally above the average of OECD countries. In
2005, beginning Spanish teachers at the lower-secondary level earned, in terms of PPP
dollars, $35,840, compared to the OECD average of $29,772. Spain’s salary complement
at the lower-secondary level was, in fact, the fourth highest among OECD countries,
below only Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Germany. Using the ratio of salary to GDP
per capita, we established that Spain’s 2003 ratio of 1:52 at the lower-secondary level
(after 15 years of experience) was higher than the OECD average ratio of 1:30. However,
the premium for experience, as measured by the ratio of the highest salary (after 39 or
more years of experience) to the lowest (beginning salary), was lower in Spain (1:45)
than in the OECD countries (1:71) (OECD, 2007).
Although Spanish teachers enjoy a relatively small premium for their experience, lowerand
upper-secondary teachers earn considerably more than primary teachers for the
time they spend teaching. In 2005, Spanish upper-secondary teachers with 15 years
of experience earned $61 per hour of net teaching time, compared to $58 for lowersecondary
teachers and $42 for primary teachers with the same level of experience. In
percentage terms, upper-secondary teachers with 15 years of experience earned 46%
more per teaching hour than primary teachers with the same experience, somewhat
higher than the OECD average of 42% more (OECD, 2007). Of course, teaching hours
are not equivalent to working hours: in 2003, both primary and upper-secondary
teachers in Spain were required to work 1,140 hours at their schools each year (OECD,
2007).
Despite the relatively good salaries earned by teachers in Spain, trends over time
indicate that the fortunes of Spanish teachers are actually decreasing. Between 1996 and
2002, Spain was the only country among both OECD member and partner countries
to experience decreases in real salaries at both the primary and upper-secondary levels.
In fact, real salaries for Spanish teachers at primary and secondary levels fell by seven
percent during this period. The ratio of teacher salaries to GDP per capita also decreased
between 1994 and 2001 (OECD, 2004).
While the discussion above uses national averages, there is considerable variation in
salaries across Spain’s regions. For example, primary teachers in Asturias earn the highest
salaries of all regions, while Ceuta and Melilla pay the lowest salaries. Among secondary
teachers, the Basque Country pays the highest salaries, while Andalucía, Ceuta, and
Melilla pay the lowest salaries. There are also interesting cross-regional differences in
the salary range between beginning and experienced teachers. This difference is smaller
in the Basque Country (25%) and the Canary Islands (nearly 26%) and larger in
Andalucía (just under 50%), the Balearic Islands (57%), and Ceuta and Melilla (almost
50%). These differences suggest that, in the former regions, officials hope to recruit new
teachers, while in the latter, they hope to retain more experienced teachers (Sanz Vallejo
et al., 2003).
Although we were able to obtain data from the 1995 and 2002 employment surveys
for Spain in order to conduct comparisons of relative teacher salaries across the two
years, we encountered a major problem with the 1995 data. For some reason, the survey
excluded the education sector as well as public administration, agriculture, and one
or two other sectors. So we had on hand only 15 “secondary teachers” (code 22 in the