Jonathan Gardner (Photo – caltech.edu)
The president of Pasadena’s teachers union, Jonathan Gardner, recently penned an opinion piece in response to my article about recent PUSD raises.
By Todd Maddison
Mr. Gardner’s piece claimed some different data than mine. I would like to investigate his claims, but his comparison of pay between PUSD and “Los Angeles Area Workers with Bachelor’s degrees” doesn’t include links to the source data for either so we have been unable to validate the data.
My calculation of the median pay of a full-time certificated PUSD employee is sourced from actual pay records of PUSD, (available here). Data on the educational attainment of PUSD teachers (from 2019, the latest available from the California Department of Education) is here. And data on median pay of private LA workers, from the US Census Bureau, is here.
No sources
UTP quotes the average pay of their teachers in 2022 as $75,000. With no source data we can’t validate that or determine where their math may have gone wrong, but the actual average of a full-time certificated PUSD employee, taken from the District’s own pay records (as reported to the IRS), was $89,838. We suspect they made the somewhat common error of including data from employees who did not work full time for a full year in their average.
Their quoted average of $85,000 “for Los Angeles workers with bachelor’s degrees” is also not sourced, so at the moment it can’t be verified.
The US Census Bureau uses medians, not averages, so we’ll use medians to compare apples to apples.
Where’s UTP raw data?
Using the PUSD payroll data we see that the median pay of this group in 2022 was $94,275. The Census Bureau data for LA County is broken down by bachelor’s degrees ($69,000) and higher ($92,256.) The California Department of Education says 41.54% of PUSD teachers had just bachelor’s degrees, the rest higher levels. If we weight the Census Bureau numbers this same way – and allowing for an additional year of education for teachers to reflect the requirements for certification, we get a comparable median pay number of $85,010 for private employees with the same educational mix.
Which means, as we said in the article, a PUSD teacher in 2022 made $9,000 more than a comparable private employee. That would be called “above-market” using UTP’s terminology.
This is actual, verifiable data from reliable sources. I’d love to see UTP’s raw data.
Regarding housing affordability, housing in the area is even more unaffordable for those private workers making $9,000 less than a UTP teacher. And almost no one buys their first house on a single income in today’s world. If two median-paid PUSD teachers live together they would make almost $190,000/year. Possibly that would afford them the ability to live in even a high cost area like Pasadena.
When the union says “PUSD students are being prioritized by the current PUSD administration” I think of Joe Biden’s quote: “Don’t tell me what you value, show me your budget and I’ll tell you what you value.”
Todd Maddison is the Director of Research for Transparent California, a founding member of the Parent Association advocacy group, and a longtime activist in improving K-12 education.
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