A first-year teacher with a bachelor’s degree in Prince George’s County Public Schools receives a $44,800 salary. Ten years later, that teacher would make about $56,500.

New research released Nov. 1 by two Washington, D.C.-based think tanks, American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, says that’s too much.

“There is this widespread perception that teachers are underpaid,” said Jason Richwine, one of the study’s authors and a senior policy analyst for the Heritage Foundation. “Teachers are not underpaid in salaries, and may, in some cases, be overpaid.”

The study concluded that teachers who move to private-sector jobs in fields from architecture to nursing to computer programming, make an average of 3 percent less, and that “teacher skills generally lag behind those of other workers with similar ‘paper’ qualifications.”

Both U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and former first lady Laura Bush, have asserted that teachers are underpaid. Starting salaries should be at least $60,000, Duncan told teachers at a back-to-school rally at Dr. Henry A. Wise High School in Upper Marlboro in August.

“We desperately underinvest in education,” said Duncan, who also advocates for a longer school days and years. “You shouldn’t have to take a vow of poverty to teach.”

Jacob Stettes, a science teacher at North Forestville Elementary School, said teacher salaries aren’t competitive with those offered in the private sector.

“How can we expect to churn out the next generation of scientists and mathematicians to compete with the Indias and Chinas of the world if we aren’t hiring and competitively compensating our brightest minds to teach the future?” Stettes wrote in an email to The Gazette.

Prince George’s teachers with doctorates and 20 years of experience can earn about $110,000 annually, according to pay scales from the Prince George’s County Educators Association, a teachers’ union.

Kenneth Haines, the PGCEA president, called the report’s findings “patently absurd.”

“Compensation is seldom, if ever, within the top three reasons that teachers come to the profession,” Haines wrote in an email to The Gazette. “It is almost always within the top three reasons for why they leave it. Look at the salaries of credentialed professionals in any realm, especially late in a career, and it is obvious why more than half elect to leave the teaching profession.”

About a third of new teachers quit within the first three years, and almost half leave the field within five years, according to research done in 2007 by the D.C.-based National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future.

First-year teachers with bachelor’s degrees make more in Montgomery County — $46,410 — and the District — $51,540 — than in Prince George’s, according to information from the school systems’ websites. Fairfax County starts its teachers at $44,440, while first-year teachers in Alexandria, Va., make about $43,630, according to the systems’ websites.

Nationally, teachers’ generous pension plans, retiree health coverage and job security add substantially to teachers’ total compensation, said Andrew G. Biggs, co-author of the study and a resident scholar at AEI.

Haines countered that teacher retirement benefits are “a combination of ‘deferred’ compensation and employee contributions accomplished through the collective bargaining process.”

He also noted that the average teacher works almost 60 hours per week, completes professional development and other coursework over the summer, and spends their own personal funds each year on classroom materials.

abrownback@gazette.net