>> the winner is, food inc. [applause] accepting the emmy, >> -- >> accepting the emmy, robert. >> the fast-food industry fought against giving you the calorie information. if there is trans fat in it. they prevented country of origin labeling. they fought not to label genetically modified food. 70% a processed food has a some genetically modified ingredient. [applause] >> wow. well, i am a lucky man. for many reasons. one is, there are so many

wonderful film makers who are in this category. it is such a great profession to be in. i am lucky to be part of this world. and you get to work with some many wonderful people. i am honored to be here among all of you. hopefully we can go out and keep making the world a better place. thank you. [applause] >> please welcome the chairman of the national academy of arts and sciences, -- >> thank you. you must be happy to see me because i am the final act. i want to congratulate the winners and everybody have a safe trip home. thank you. [applause]

>> tomorrow on "washington journal," the impact of the deficit reduction committee's cuts. after that, look to the future of education policy with dennis van roekel. later, the president of the alzheimer's association, harry johns, talks about a new report on the disease. that is live at 7:00 a.m. eastern here on c-span. sunday on c-span, newspapers, with the grover norquist, president of americans for tax reform, on the deficit reduction debate. that is at 10:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. on c-span. >> in his new autobiographical narrative, decorated veteran and best-selling author karl marlantes comes to terms with his posttraumatic stress disorder decades after vietnam.

>> i started telling this guy about my symptoms. jumping up in the middle of the night and running outside without knowing what was going on. you know, a car would honk behind me and i would get out of my own and just attack the car behind me. and he said to me, have you ever been in a war? and that hit me so hard. in the middle of this room, 80 people, i started bawling, snot coming out of my nose. if you have ever been in a war -- it was that simple. and when he got me back into some semblance of control, he said, you've got ptsd, have you ever heard about it? and i said no. >> sunday night on q&a. >> next a new study looking at pay for public school teachers. this is about 30 minutes.

public school teachers of make about $1.50 for every dollar that they're supposed to garner and private-sector jobs. and your biggs, explain to us what led you to do this study. >> obviously public sector compensation is a big deal around the country. states and localities are looking to balance their budget and they're looking at these pensions and retiree health benefits. whether you want to reduce those benefits or other forms of pay in order to balance the budget, it depends on whether you think public school teachers or other public employees are being fairly paid, overpaid, or

underpaid. if they are as underpaid as people claim, then reducing those benefits is not just unfair to them but it will bite the government. you cannot recruit the people that you need. there'd been a number of studies that look at the public school teacher pay. we are hardly the first. some claim that they are significantly underpaid, some find that they are over by. we saw flaws in those studies. we took and our own to correct those flaws and to get a better picture of where compensation is. >> in an op-ed you wrote for the wall street journal, you wrote that while salaries are about even, fringe benefits put teacher compensation well ahead of comparable employees in the private economy. the trouble is that many of these benefits are hidden. meaning that lawmakers taxpayers and even teachers themselves are sometimes unaware of them. telesis about the hidden benefits that the teachers do not even know about.

>> what they do not know is how generous the benefits are. if you look public-sector pay, they let it benefit data that comes from the bureau of labor statistics. it examines a wide range like paid time off, health insurance, pensions, taxes paid on behalf of workers. but a couple of major -- three major failings with that data. people do not really realize it. i do not want to blame bls. it underestimates the value of defined benefit pensions that teachers receives because there is essentially a difference of counting between the public and private sectors. these are arcane things, but you take the same person and run their earnings through a typical teacher pension and then run their earnings through a typical 401(k), for a full career worker, the difference in benefits at retirement is huge.

it could be four times higher. if you do not know how the accounting words, getting out of these benefit numbers is hard to do. most full-time employee workers qualify for full-time help kurds. if you retire at 50, you cannot require rigid qualify for medicare and to your 65. bls does not cover anything about retiree benefit coverage. and if you look at their data on paid time off, the claims that teachers have less paid time off than other public employees, and other than -- how can that be? we know that they do get the summers off. deep in the footnotes of the data, you find their benefit is based on the assumption on 185 days in a working breed of private sector employee has 260 days on average.

you have to include all of those things. when you do, the benefit package for teachers is roughly twice as generous as what a private- sector worker working for larger employers would receive. that trumps everything else. genu have mentioned a couple of times about public-sector workers. why did you focus on teachers as opposed to other public-sector workers like police, fire and sanitation. we have done work on the other federal employees. we have looked to public-sector employees in general in several states. there are differences in how you calculate the salaries. in terms of comparing salaries for teachers to private sector workers, it is difficult.

many people to become teachers major in education as college graduates. there is research going back around 50 years indicating that an education degree is not as rigorous as many other college degrees. it would not surprise you to hear that someone who majored in physics or finance will earn a higher salary later than someone who majored in a less rigorous degree and research industries that education is on the less rigorous and. so if you do not account for that, you will not compare apples to apples. instead of relying on those credentials will look that teachers scoring relative to the s.a.t. scores, and other tests. when you look at that, the teachers hours, ought to be around even with what similar private sectors workers get. the salaries are even and then the benefits kick in and make it

more generous. we had a look at both of them to get the picture right. >> we are talking with andrew biggs, a resident scholar with the american enterprise institute that -- about a joint study about teacher pay. if you want to get involved in the conversation, the numbers around the screen. we have a special number set aside first public school teachers. our first call comes from a school teacher and your on the line. caller: morning.

you are from the american enterprise institute which is a conservative think tank and, of course, and public-sector jobs are good for you. -- verboten for you. have you ever studied the ceo's salaries? in one year, some of them make what a teacher makes a lifetime. if there is no one more important in children's lives, it is the teacher. now you are trying to denigrate them and make them almost like second-rate citizens. what you are trying to do is you are trying to make them seem like inconsequential. if you do not have a good education which is absolutely important in today's day, you will not even get a job as a janitor. i would like your group to study the pay of people other than bill lowly schoolteachers. in michigan, we are fairly

compensated. i have a friend that teaches in florida and she makes $28,000 per year. this bogus statement that you make that they only work so many hours and i have the whole summer off -- our school year ends in the middle of june and they start back in august. host: let me cut in for a second and let andrew biggs response. first of what a find out a couple of things. you teach in bloomfield hills, mich. -- how long have you been a teacher and was subject to you teach? caller: i am a language teacher. i do not teach here. i travel among different school districts. my particular specialty is children of immigrants, mostly slavic. i go and help them during the

week acclimate to the studies they have to do and things of that nature. it incenses me that someone would come on and say what he is saying about teacher's pet. -- about how much money teachers are paying. do you know what is like when you're trying to reduce teachers' salaries and you try to teach 30 kids. host: we will leave it there. guest: let me start with a language that is used. she is saying we don't like teachers. if you look at the opposite in -- the op-ed and the study, it does not contain any language like that. we are making a factual argument which is either correct or incorrect. it is what it is. if what we say it turns out to be correct, you have a significant public policy issue. when we are overpowering for

the quality is we're getting, that's the issue -- when we are overpaying for the quality of teachers we are getting, that's the issue. we're not trying to be pejorative in this. teachers tend to interpret any criticism as personal. i'm not a teacher so i cannot see why that is that that is not the case and what we are doing. she makes a couple of substantive points and looking at the length of the school year. we looked at two school year lengths. the bls assumes a 158-day school year. -- 185-day school year. we worked with that number. in some cities, the school year is laundering by the washington, -- is a longer, like the washington d.c. and chicago have close to 195-day work years. how much of a difference will it make for overall results? if we assume all longer work year, it really makes very little difference there is a whole range of factors pushing through measured teacher pay,

the pension benefits, retiree health benefits, the longer paid vacation. any reasonable chance to those will not change the overall results. she also talks about the hours that school teachers work. it is a valid point made against some of the other studies that have been done on public school pay since the look at only the formal hours, the contract hours, 9:00 a.m. - 3:00 - we don't rely on those hours. we look on self-reported hours. teachers are asked how many weeks -- hours a week they were. that will differ from person to person. we account for that. we use census data, bls data, time-use studies were people give us details of the time they spend on work in the classroom and home. those magic to the hours quite well. -- they match up quite well. host: our next call comes from and that, for democrats from alabama.

arnett -- caller: my question is this and i do have a comment -- why did the american enterprise institute once again attacking some of the foundations of the american country? in attacking that, why is it that you guys are doing studies -- public school teachers of the basic foundations of this country and education is what everyone needs. with that, i would like to say that along with public-sector jobs, along with the postal service and along with offshore american manufacturers, those

are the largest hirers of veterans in this country. guest: i think this goes back to the idea that we are attacking the foundation of america. that is not the case. they say we are cherry picking data. people can point that out if that is so. we are very open to that. in any study as complex as this, you will make errors. we have made errors in the past and we corrected them. when somebody finally made an error, we will correct that, no problem. if people think we are cherry picking data, we should point it out. host: we want to make sure the audience understands this is a joint report that you did in conjunction with the heritage foundation leadership for america. guest: it was a report co- authored with the heritage foundation. it is a product of my work and their work and does not

represent the institutional views of the organization. there are some people at the american enterprise institute who work in education who don't agree with me. these are not organizational views. these are two people working together trying to come to some conclusion on these things. host: how long did take you end jason richwine to do this study? guest: we have been working on this for several years. the teacher element is the focus on salaries. there are a lot apostles we had -- there are lots of puzzles we had to go through to get this thing right. -- vera lot of puzzles we had to go through to get this right. host: you confine this on the heritage website, heritage.org. i imagine you can find it at the

aei web site. guest: also aie.org. we need the traffic. host: good morning. gerry, a teacher in randolph, new jersey. you are on the "washington journal." caller: i work for a major corporation for 25 years in new jersey. i had marvelous benefits. i had a whopping salaries and in 2002, i decided to go into teaching because i wanted to. now it is 2011 and i am making 50% less today than i made in 2002 for a major corporation. yes, i have nice benefits in teaching but you said you don't count the hours because not everybody. is the everybody is the same. i get up to 6:00 in the morning

and prepare for the day and i leave school at 6:00 at night and bring papers home to grade. i am not done until 10:00 at night at 50% less than what i made in 2002. i make $50,000 now. i made $102,000 then. you say that teachers make more. i have never worked so hard in my life and i do because i want to do it. it is because i want to educate and help children and watch them grow. host: before we get a response, tell us about the private sector job and what subject and grade level are you teaching now? guest: i work for a huge pharmaceutical corporation where i receive great benefits because i had free prescription drugs and great hospitalization. now, i teach fourth grade and i

have a huge class because of layoffs. we have class sizes that are huge. i don't mind that. my job is there to help these children. guest: again, i understand where you are coming from. she points out that she switched from the private sector job to teaching and she makes less than before. is a very common statement among teachers that they could make much more in the private sector and we were able to test that. we used data from the census bureau that allows us to take an individual person and follow their earnings over time as they switch into and out of

jobs. what you find is the typical private sector employee who shifts and becomes a teacher receives a modest salary increase. the typical teacher who leaves teaching for a private sector receives a modest salary cut. i am not denying her experience because we are talking about averages and we are talking that each case can be different. on average, people -- teachers do not burn more when they shipped until the private sector. that is one thing we were trying to test and more able to do that where we took the same person and so what they earned of the private-sector and would earn in teaching. speaking about our work hours, i don't deny that she works longreported hours. i think that gets of the broader point that people accuse you of being bad and tried to pin cherry pick. most of the objections they have, we try to address that and make an honest effort to get at these things and we think

results hold up host: in your report, one area talks about the problems with education as a measure of teacher quality. explain that guest: it is a standard economic approach of doing these wage comparisons. look at the formal education. the educational level tends to be a strong driver of a person's future earnings. if we were looking at federal employees as a whole, the quantity of education, the degree you get, that is a decent

correlation to earnings because we have different types of degrees and colleges mix evenly among the population. with teachers, you have a large number of teachers who had education degrees. and a large number of people who take education degrees are teachers. at that point, if there's a difference between quantity of education, the number of years you spent in school, and quality of education, the rigor of the degrees utah, when you have a concentrated population like teachers who tended to be certain agrees, that can be a problem. if you back 50 years, it shows that individuals majoring in education are twice as likely to receive an 'a' grade as those working in liberal education or science. education researchers have concluded that education at the degree level is not as rigorous

as other courses of study. likewise, there have been a number of studies that show that master's degrees in education, in most cases, do not add to the value of the teacher. they do not make a person become a better teacher. in that case, you have to look at the quality of education instead of just quantity. is difficult to quantify the quality. we looked at objective measures of cognitive ability like how well they did things -- dead on things like the sat or the military skills test. the idea is not that you'd be paid according to your sat score, but when you take the sat we are all taking the same test. if you major in education or business or physics, you are taking different courses of study. we cannot assume they are worth the same thing because they are not. host: you say here that the implicit assumption is

consistent across fields of study. if i and an education major and you are an engineering major, i know one graduation day that you will be making more money than i will. guest: sure, if a major in education are urging engineering or finance, it is not surprising i would earn more than you. if we had the same degree, it would be assumed we would earn the same amount. if you earn less than me, you'd be considered underpaid. that is the problem with the standard approach on things. you are not comparing apples to apples. there are different types of degrees in terms of their river -- in terms of their record -- rigor and we assume there is a range of quality of colleges,

harvard might be better than others -- the standard approach to teacher pay that if teachers are in less than the average, it means they are being cheated or underpaid. it might simply be that the rigor of education is lower than the average. there is evidence to that. host: if we come out of graduate school and you have a master's degree in engineering and i've a master's degree in education, our salaries should be similar? guest: the standard answer assumes that it would be the center of our study does not assume that. we cannot assume that all the grease have exactly the same quality in terms of what they will bring later in life. host: we will go back to the phones. our next call comes from carlsbad, new mexico, on our line from republicans. caller: i remember reading your article when it came out on the national review.

i thought was interesting but i have a few questions. you say we should institute merit pay. i was curious about the metrics of doing that. guest: i will be the first to admit i am not an expert in how you would institute merit pay. this came out and make comments that the former dc school counselor michelle rhee said. she said the average teacher's salary is $55,000 bid isn't a great teacher were $55,000? the average pay as closer to $110,000 because the benefits are about equal to the salary. it is not just a great teacher getting neck, it is sort of a good teacher and a poor teacher and a teacher who should not be in the classroom at all getting bad. there's not much differentiation in pay between the best teachers and the not so

good teachers. the folks across the educational spectrum who may disagree with our findings often argue that we need to have some institution of merit pay. it cannot simply be based on how well your students are doing. some students come to school better prepared and others to learn. we cannot simply say that all teachers have to be assumed to be the same. the better teachers deserve to be paid for in the not so good ones should either be paid less or if they are bad, they should find another line of work. host: our next call comes from a teacher in richmond, virginia. what grade level and what subject to do you teach? caller: i teach math at the seventh grade level. host: what is your question or comment? caller: i have two questions

regarding how the benefits were looked at. when he talked about paid time off -- a teacher and virginia and always have paris we are a non-union state agree we are not allowed to have a union. the way our pay is based, we are required for 180 instructional days + 10 more days in terms of special development, preparing for school. they say 190 days and they a sign a daily salary amount. they multiplied times 190 and they paid out over 12 months. there is no paid time off for holidays or the summer or anything figure into that. the only paid time off that i would have added that 190 would be that i earn 10 days of sick pay per year that can approve and add up if i don't use it. i earn two days per year for

personal days but that does not accrue. to me, i am learning 12 days of paid time off, nothing about summers are hot is figured into that. i don't know how you were looking at the paid time off. i did not know how he was looking at paid time off. my other question as this. health care for after retirement, how do they figure out the vast differences between states that are unionized and states that are not? here in virginia and in the south where teachers are not unionized, and availability of health insurance even for us to purchase, paying a total cost in the group, after retirement, that has eroded in the last seven years to where in many localities, it is not available at all. we cannot even stay in the group when we retire.

guest: her first point on paid tide of -- paid time off and sours, it gets complicated. what i can say is that we account for this. some other studies have looked at weekly wages for a teacher and then you get complications' of being paid only during the time they are working or seasonally. we took the total annual earnings that teachers had, accounting for all the salary they are getting, and then account for the paid time off. princess said she had 180 work days plus 10 teacher days, 190 teacher days. our baseline was 185. so the value of her paid time off would be somewhere in the middle. it does not change the results. or by very small amount. she is right that there is changing value in retirement

health care for teachers. in some places, the only value of health care is the right to buy into the workers planned. that is worth something, because you were buying health care for a 55-year-old based on your average. but if you go to a milwaukee teacher, the average health care plan is next 18% of pay each year. there is a lot of variation. i do not know the exact value for virginia. in our paper, we had our range of values for different places around the country. the number that we used as an average, consistent with what other studies have shown. but you look at a steady -- a study of paying your own district, you have to apply to that. you cannot look at the national averages, because with retiree health care, there are a lot of variations. she does have a point in her

case. host: one of the charts in your paper has this headline, average benefit as a percentage of wages. total benefits, public school teachers had 41.2%, and for private workers, it was 41.3%. breaking that down, i guess, paid leave was for public schools teachers 6.6%, and for private workers a 11.4%. insurance plans, 16.1% for public school teachers, for private workers 13.3%. retirement and savings, 11.1% for public school teachers. 5.4% for private workers. and then legally required benefits, 7.4% for public school teachers, 11.3% for

private workers. the total benefits, it seems like they are pretty even. but then they'd bounce back and forth between lead, insurance plans, retirement, and savings. guest: people look at that chart and say that this proves is wrong. we are using this to see the baseline benefit data is from the bureau of labor statistics shows. if you take it at face value, you assume that benefits of the same. but public school teachers receive half of their vacation time than a private-sector worker that number said, i have to take a closer look at this.