Survey Says Teachers Fairly Well Paid, Happy

Adding to a growing controversy over teacher pay, a new survey, partly funded by the Education Department, said Tuesday that teachers earn more than other people with comparable education and that they are a highly satisfied group.

The findings, released by the National Center for Education Information, a private research group, incensed the nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Assn., which has been trying to make a case for pay raises. But Education Secretary William J. Bennett praised the report, using it to bolster his assertion that teachers earn enough money.

In Orange County, the report produced reactions from teacher-union leaders that ranged from laughter to heated anger.

“I think Secretary Bennett, with this report, is sticking his head in the sand,” said Bill Ribblett, executive director of the teachers’ unions for both Tustin Unified and Santa Ana Unified school districts. “He’s pouring gasoline on a fire.”

Ribblett contended that Orange County teachers are underpaid--an issue that led to a strike last fall in Tustin. The Washington report’s “average national salary” figures do not take into account “that teachers face unemployment when the school year is over; many of them can’t find summer jobs,” he said.

Public school teachers earn $136 a day, while other workers with at least four years of college are paid $129 per day, the report said. However, because other workers average 250 days a year, their salaries work out to more than $32,000, compared with close to $25,000 for teachers, who usually work only 180 days, the report said.

Orange County teachers’ average salary for 1984-85, the latest year available for such averages, was $29,292 per school year, the county Department of Education reported. Since the median school year was 186 days, according to the department, that made the Orange County teacher average about $157 a day, higher than the national teacher average. Officials, however, pointed out that Orange County’s cost of living is among the highest in the nation.

The national report said that teacher raises more than doubled the inflation rate during each of the last four years.

But John W. Lepp, regional manager for the California Teachers Assn., said that those pay raises were simply attempts for teachers to “catch up,” and that the raises still have failed to give teachers an adequate salary. “I can’t imagine how they arrived at those figures in the national report,” said Lepp, who is based in the city of Orange. “I find it hard to believe that thing was ever published.”

But in Washington, the report was stoutly defended and said to be proof that teachers are making good financial progress.

“Teachers have made great headway” on pay, said C. Emily Feistritzer, author of the survey. And they have “a much higher level of satisfaction in almost every aspect of their lives” than do people of comparable ages and education, she said at a news conference.

Feistritzer, director of the center, said the year-long survey, which cost about $150,000, is the most comprehensive profile of teachers ever produced. It surveyed 1,592 teachers--1,144 in public schools and 448 in private institutions--asking them about matters ranging from their pay to politics.

The 92-page survey was released a week after the National Education Assn. issued an annual report complaining that, though teacher salaries have increased to an average of about $25,000 a year, 31 states still pay less than the national average. NEA President Mary Hatwood Futrell said the salaries “remain too low to attract large numbers of talented young people into the teaching profession.”

Bennett retorted: “Only the NEA would be gloomy in the face of good news.”