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Indicator I-11
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Humanities Teachers’ Earnings
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NOTE TO READERS: Please include the following reference when citing data from this page:
"American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Humanities Indicators, http://HumanitiesIndicators.org".
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The data presented below are from the most recent year in which the SASS was administered,
2007–2008. Due to changes made by NCES in the way teachers’ fields of primary assignment
were categorized, these data are not comparable to the 1999–2000 data that were
the basis of the first iteration of this indicator. The Humanities Indicators has
recently obtained information from NCES that will permit us to render the two data
sets comparable and present a trend analysis (anticipated completion date: spring
2011).
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Primary- and secondary-school teacher salaries in the humanities are one indicator
of the value placed on humanities education (for faculty salaries at the postsecondary
level, see Indicator III-14,
Faculty Earnings). Because precollegiate teaching salaries are closely tied
to seniority, earnings data from the SASS are presented here by the career stage
of respondents. The earnings of new teachers are compared with those of both midcareer
teachers and educators with three decades or more of classroom experience.
For the 2007–2008 academic year, the median earnings
of precollegiate humanities teachers (base salary, as well as payment for extracurricular
activities and other services to their school system) were approximately $48,000
(Figure I-11; in 2007, the national median earnings of year-round full-time
workers age 25 and over were $42,196).)1
For those who were new to teaching (0–5 years of service), the median was closer
to $40,000. Among the most seasoned teachers, those with 30 or more years of service,
median earnings were just under $60,000.
The range of earnings was greater for more experienced teachers. The difference
between the 25th percentile and 75th percentile earnings of middle- and late-career
teachers was approximately twice as large as that for new personnel. A preliminary
analysis by Humanities Indicators staff suggests that this difference is attributable
to the fact that more experienced teachers are likelier than new teachers to hold
master’s and other advanced degrees.
Note
1 Figure I-11 displays, for earnings at each career stage, a set of
statistics referred to as the interquartile range, which describes the range of
“typical” or “usual” characteristics exhibited by a population of persons or objects.
Quartiles are statistics that divide the observations of a numeric sample into four
groups, each of which contains 25% of the data. The lower, middle, and upper quartiles
are computed by ordering the values for a particular variable (in this case teacher
earnings) from smallest to largest and then finding the values below which fall
25%, 50%, and 75% of the data. The lower and upper quartiles are the endpoints of
the interquartile range. The middle quartile is also known as the median.
The table from which the median income estimate for all full-time, year-round workers
was drawn was prepared by NCES personnel in September 2009 using data from the Current
Population Survey (U.S. Department of Commerce, Census Bureau). The table is available
for viewing and downloading at
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d09/tables/dt09_384.asp.
According to the Census Bureau, the collector of the income data from which this
estimate is derived, “A full-time, year-round worker is a person who worked 35 or
more hours per week (full-time) and 50 or more weeks during the previous calendar
year (year-round). For school personnel, summer vacation is counted as weeks worked
if they are scheduled to return to their job in the fall.” (Carmen DeNavas-Walt,
Bernadette D. Proctor, and Jessica C. Smith, Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance
Coverage in the United States: 2008, Current Population Reports, P60-236 [Washington,
DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2009],
http://www.census.gov/prod/2009pubs/p60-236.pdf.
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