Our friend Jay Greene has a great post over at his blog today.  It seems the NEA is making the claim that , as their headline puts it, “Teachers Take ‘Pay Cut’ as Inflation Outpaces Salaries.  Average teachers’ salaries declined over the past decade.” Interestingly their own data do not support this claim.

Jay takes a look at their report and finds that:

In Table C-14 “Percentage Change in Average Salaries of Public School Teachers 1998-99 to 2008-09 (Constant $)” we see that salaries increased by 3.4% nationwide over the last decade after adjusting for inflation.  The increase in average salary outpaced inflation in 36 states, which is very different from the claim that  ”Inflation over the past decade has outpaced teachers’ salaries in every single state across the country…”  Check for yourself, the table is on p. 20 of the report, which is p. 38 of the pdf.

I can’t find a single table or figure in the report that would justify the headline and claims in the press release.  But when the Ministry of Truth speaks who are you supposed to believe — them or your lying eyes?

Ministry of Truth indeed.

P.S. Check out this video from NEA president Dennis Van Roekal. On a technical note, it looks like they made this mistake by comparing the average salary growth in constant dollars (inflation adjusted dollars) to the inflation rate.

UPDATE:  So, it looks like the NEA has realized their error and have yanked the video I linked to and altered their report. Jay has a follow-up post here.  Here is the video I tried to link to just in case you missed it: