Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics - IEA

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TEACHER PAY AND STUDENT MATHEMATICS ACHIEVEMENT
Results of the teacher salary case studies
The 20 countries that we studied represent a wide array of economic development
levels and national education policy structures. In many, teacher labor markets,
teacher-education policies, and schooling curricula are controlled by national
education ministries. In others, policies are set in a much more decentralized fashion.
For example, in Botswana and Chinese Taipei, education policy is highly centralized,
whereas in the United States, teacher salary structures are often determined by school
districts, and teacher-education standards are set by states but implemented by highly
autonomous university faculties of education. Germany is also highly decentralized in
terms of educational policies and education recruitment and training, but the federal
government sets salaries nationally.
Table 2 presents a brief summary of the main aspects of the country case studies
presented in Part 2 of this report. Almost all of the countries surveyed require primary
and secondary teachers to have a university degree, but there are still many teachers
in most countries without this qualification. In most countries, the vast majority of
primary teachers are women. But this is not usually the case in the secondary schools of
many countries, where the majority of the secondary school labor force is male. Teacher
labor forces also vary considerably in their age distribution, with countries such as
Germany and Italy employing a relatively old teaching force, and other countries, such
as the United Kingdom, having a much younger teaching force.
Our main focus in regard to the country studies was on teacher pay relative to the pay
of other professions, particularly mathematics-oriented professions. Teachers in all these
countries are generally paid at the same rate whether they teach mathematics, science,
or other subjects. Thus, we compared the pay of teachers as an occupational group
with the pay of other professionals with similar education, and we also bisected this
comparison by gender. Where possible, we collected separate data for primary and
secondary school teachers, given that secondary school teachers usually have different
educational requirements and, in some countries, receive higher rates of pay.
Table 3 shows teacher salary ratios in the early 2000s for the 20 countries we studied.
We estimated this ratio by measuring the ratio of median earnings of teachers with
Bachelor’s degrees to the median earnings of those in scientific occupations with
Bachelor’s degrees, as well as in relation to the age brackets of 25 to 29, 30 to 34, and
35 to 39 (or 35 to 44 in those countries where the 35 to 39 category was not available).
Our assumption in setting the age range from 25 to 39/44 was that the relative pay
offered to workers during their first 15 to 20 years of work life is an important factor
determining workers’ choice of occupation. 4 We then averaged the three ratios to get
the figure in Table 3 for each country. We estimated this ratio for males and females
separately. We also measured the ratio of male to female earnings at the three ages for
the science-based occupations. (For some countries, we could have measured ratios of
relative hourly earnings, but the number of these ratios available was too small to allow
for relevant comparisons with student test scores. We therefore limited ourselves to
using median annual earnings.)
4 The gradients of teacher salaries vary from country to country. In some, such as Australia, teacher salaries start
out relatively high but are relatively flat in later years. In others, such as Korea and France, starting salaries are
relatively lower and the gradient is steeper, which means that senior teachers earn relatively high salaries. Because
our estimates give greater weight to the earlier salaries, our results may be somewhat biased.