What is fair teacher compensation? In a fiscal crisis, what does “fair” mean?

With states, cities and towns frantically adjusting their budgets to the new realities of anemic and declining revenues, just about everyone is flinging around the word “fair.”

Fights over salaries and benefits in public-employee contracts have very real and scary issues at stake, for everyone involved. But the last thing we need in this crisis is to tear each other apart. We will emerge a stronger community, and each of us will get a better deal, if we can be mindful of each other’s desires to be treated fairly.

But what’s most important about “fair” is that it’s a feeling, a human sensation. “Fair” has no objective standards. It’s in the eyes of the beholder. In public disputes over budgets and contracts, for example, “fair” is only achieved when it’s a feeling shared by the stakeholders.

So I’m starting to think that mediators should facilitate these contract disputes, to keep as many as possible out of the purely adversarial courts. Legal decisions make winners and losers, and do not promote a sense of shared mission or fairness.

Conversely, mediators could get groups of stakeholders to say what “fair” would look like to each of them. But all parties need to hear each other in order to expand their points of view to include more realities than just their own.

About this time last year, Education Week’s annual Quality Counts megareport included a teacher compensation study. The one-page chart, with its visually-rendered data, tells a compelling story. If you google Quality Counts 2008, it comes right up. Pick any state’s report and scroll down to page 11.

The researchers (Editorial Projects in Education, EPE) identified private-sector occupations that require training comparable to K-12 teachers. The occupations include accountants and auditors, clergy, counselors, editors, news analysts, reporters and correspondents, insurance underwriters, occupational therapists, physical therapists, registered nurses, and others.

The researchers averaged the earnings of all 16 occupations and used that number to draw a “parity line” across the center of the chart. Against that line they graphed each states’ average teacher compensation — salary and benefits — to indicate, on an admittedly gross average, how well teachers were paid as compared with their private sector counterparts.

When looking for an anchor for what “fair” compensation means — in a fiscal crisis — this parity is an excellent reference.

Nationwide, the researchers found that teachers are generally underpaid, making only 88 cents, on average, for every comparable private-sector dollar earned. But the graph plots the states from most underpaid to those who make more, revealing how different states are from one another.

North Carolina underpays their teachers the most, at 78.8 cents on the dollar. Then in ascending order come Missouri, Louisiana and Texas. All but 9 states are underpaid, if only slightly.

Two huge states, California and New York, pay their teachers about what the private sector gets. These states’ teachers have parity.

In real-dollar terms, Massachusetts’ and Rhode Island teachers are paid similarly. However, since the Massachusetts economy is far more robust than Rhode Island’s, Massachusetts teachers — at 96 cents on the dollar — are slightly below parity with their counterparts in the stronger private sector.

Seven states pay above the parity line. Rhode Island is at the extreme end of the chart, paying 112 percent of parity, or 12 cents per dollar more than the private sector average.

So Rhode Island teachers are doing relatively well, while lots of private-sector people are losing their jobs, or having hours and benefits cut back. It’s only natural that teachers would freak when their salaries and benefits are threatened. A loss of income, however minor or manageable, feels neither good nor fair.

But private sector people who have lost their jobs must now somehow get health care, since we are the only industrialized country that still ties health care to jobs. And they must also pay the taxes, quite high in Rhode Island, that maintain their luckier, unionized, protected brethren. This feels royally unfair. As such, the resentment growing in Rhode Island’s private sector is now mushrooming.

Unions and their members consider their contracts done deals, not up for discussion. But the towns can’t sustain the over-optimistic promises they’ve made in the past. Already towns are cutting services critical to the low-income, the medically-needy, the elderly. So on top of the deprivation and desperation born from a fiscal crisis, all stakeholders believe their own treatment has been unfair. It’s an awful feeling.

We can not mitigate the misery inflicted by the economic meltdown, but we can choose to minimize the misery we inflict on one another while it takes its toll. The parity chart indicates that Rhode Island has been more than fair in compensating teachers to date.

Still, all stakeholders — parents, taxpayers, officials, teachers — deserve a chance to talk this over and keep talking until they feel reasonably confident that everyone understands their plight or position — not agrees with it, but understands. Excellent, workable agreements will emerge only if all the parties manage to behave as though they care about the others. Only empathy will get us to resolutions that feel fair to all.

We can choose to be more or less civilized about how we go about solving our huge problems. But if we do it right, the crisis will help us build ourselves as a community.

Julia Steiny, a former member of the Providence School Board, consults for government agencies and schools; she is co-director of Information Works!, Rhode Island’s school-accountability project. She can be reached at juliasteiny@cox.net , or c/o EdWatch, The Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, RI 02902.