By Linda Darling-Hammond
Opinion

Are American teachers overpaid? Really?!

Ask the average teacher in Colorado earning less than $800 a week, while her counterparts with a comparable level of education and experience bring home over $1,200 a week. Ask the parent of a college student in Michigan why he is trying to talk her into a degree in accounting or engineering rather than teaching middle school math. Heck, ask any of the young people signing up for two-year stints through Teach for America why they are heading for Goldman-Sachs when they leave in year three.

The study that posed this question—presumably with a straight face—could only do so by inflating data on what teachers earn—by including pension costs that are not available to teachers during their working years and are never accessed by about 40 percent of them—and by underestimating the actual hours that teachers work—using "contract hours" rather than the 50-plus hours a week teachers actually spend preparing for classes, grading papers, and communicating with students and parents outside of school hours.

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