SOME BIG APPLES FOR TEACHERS, THANKS TO NEA

"I sensed and air of envy for our perceived strength," an anonymous National Education Association hack consoled the teachers union's members in a reply posted on the Internet to Forbes' recent cover story (Comeuppance, Feb. 13).

The hack is right on one point: The teachers union has a lot of clout and uses it stranglehold on public education to enrich its members at taxpayers' expense. Because it began as a professional association rather than as a trade union, the NEA gets to provide the U.S. government with widely cited data on teachers' salaries.

The long-term record shows that teachers have drawn well ahead of the average wage earner. While the average wage earner has never quite recovered from the stagflation of the late 1970s, teachers most triumphantly have. But that's not the whole story. What about benefits -- like retirement, Social Security, health?

U.S. statistics show that, for the average worker, benefits grew from about 8 percent of wages in 1960 to 22 percent in 1993. How have teachers fared on fringes? The NEA doesn't say.

We can now make a good guess, however, because of figures leaked by a disgruntled members of the NEA's Indiana State Teachers Association to William Styring of Indiana Policy Review. Since Indiana is a typical state, the figures suggest that teacher benefits far exceed the average worker's, amounting to 53 percent of teachers' wages in Indiana in 1993.

Styring's figures also show the danger of using average teacher salary data: Wide spreads exist between teachers in the top category (long-established, master's degrees) and entry-level teachers. Of course, individual teachers in the top category can extract much more. For example, some Bucks County, Pa., teachers are paid $80,000 -- not counting benefits.

A key component of teacher benefits is the imputed value of the two month's vacation they get in excess of the average worker's. It is sometimes argued that teachers need this time to retool -- as if their jobs were more taxing that other people's. Some teachers "retool" by taking second jobs.

Teachers also have advantages unknown to the private sector, such as the ability to boost their pensions by paying nominal sums to represent additional years worked in school systems where they may only have spent a short time.

Styring says sunlight pays off. On March 6 the Indiana Senate voted to kick full-time officials of the local branch of the National Education Association out of the taxpayer-funded teacher pension plan, after Forbes had reported Styring's exposure of their backdoor participation.

Keep this article hand for the next time your local school district caves in to wage and work-rule demands from the teachers union.

This article is excerpted from the April 24 issue of Forbes magazine. The story was accompanied by charts showing that salaries for teachers and other wage earners were fairly even from 1930 until the 1950s. Teachers' annual compensation currently is near $38,000, while wage earners' annual compensation is below $30,000. More importantly, benefits for teachers have expanded considerably more than the estimated average for wage earners.