01:00 AM EDT on Thursday, June 16, 2005

FOR READERS who could not detect the fairly obvious flaws in Tom Coyne's analysis of teacher compensation ("A sweet deal for R.I. teachers," Commentary, June 9), here is a brief primer.

Mr. Coyne's financial flight of fancy starts with the average teacher salary in Rhode Island, for which he reports data suggesting average salaries as high as $64,700 for elementary-school teachers -- quite a leap from the true average salary, $51,076, for Rhode Island public-school teachers during the 2002-03 school year (an amount acknowledged by Mr. Coyne in the past, and previously cited on his Web site).

Not satisfied with this deception, he continues to promulgate the myth that teachers work only 187 days, thereby ignoring the time spent beyond the contractual school year, both in school and in professional development that other professional positions certainly count as work days.

Mr. Coyne compares the teacher work year with his stated belief that people in the private sector are working about 250 days a year. Since five days a week multiplied by 52 weeks a year gives 260 days, the clergy, lawyers, accountants and personal financial advisers Mr. Coyne chooses as comparative professionals are either getting no holidays and only two weeks' vacation or taking their holidays and getting no vacation whatsoever.

I'll readily acknowledge that the clergy work holidays, but the rest of those professionals should consider unionization if things have become quite that outrageous.

In any event, since Mr. Coyne's starting figures are so faulty, the rest of his salary analysis is quite useless, except perhaps to suggest that he has his own political agenda. (Perhaps he learned from the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.)

Mr. Coyne's flawed analysis continues in his pension discussion -- although he is kind enough to mention that I often remind folks that teachers pay 9.5 percent of their salaries into the pension system every year. Fortunately, his figures actually can be used to prove why the current pension system is more than fair.

Mr. Coyne notes that figures he received from The Vanguard Group suggest that providing a lifetime annuity of $28,462 with a 3-percent cost-of-living adjustment to a 58-year-old retiree would cost $604,331. A 23-year-old teacher, starting work this fall at a salary of $33,000, could expect to end a 35-year career at age 58 in 2041 with a salary of about $172,110, assuming step increases for 10 years and 3-percent raises thereafter. Under the current system, this would provide a pension of $133,717 (remember, this is 35 years in the future!).

Assuming that the teacher continues to contribute 9.5 percent of salary, as currently required, and the combined state and local contribution toward the pension is also 9.5 percent of salary (much less than the current amount, and recall that half of these teachers cannot contribute to Social Security, so the local community is saving 6.2 percent of their salaries), those contributions invested in the pension system at the projected and historical annual rate of return of 8.25 percent would generate $2,844,712, or enough to buy an annuity based on Mr. Coyne's figures of $134,118 -- enough to cover the suggested benefit for the rest of the retired teacher's life.

However, since the pension system has the advantage of not needing to buy annuities but can still invest the over $2.8 million related to that one teacher, both the individual and the entire state benefit from this aspect of a defined-benefit pension system.

Mr. Coyne has the right to push his own political agenda, however destructive it might be to our continuing attempts to attract and retain high-quality teachers in Rhode Island's public-education system. However, he owes it to all of us to do his homework thoroughly and base his analysis on the world as it is, not what he bitterly hopes it will become.

Robert A. Walsh Jr. is executive director of the National Education Association Rhode Island.