Two surprising new reports show that hourly pay and benefits for public-school teachers are higher than the compensation received by other government employees or similarly qualified private-sector workers.

Teachers enjoy greater average hourly compensation in wages and benefits than any other group of state and local government workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The BLS also said teachers get more than twice as much in average hourly wages and benefits as workers in private industry.

Public primary, secondary and special education teachers are paid an average of $39.69 in wages and $16.90 in benefits, BLS reported. That combined $56.59 is double the $28.24 in average hourly wages and benefits paid to workers in private industry.

State and local government workers took in an average of $40.76 per hour in combined compensation.

No category of state or local government worker earned more in average hourly compensation than public-school teachers, though some specific job titles within those broader classifications carried more lucrative payouts.

The BLS determines average hourly wages and benefits by surveying employers. It defines the number of hours a teacher works by the number of hours the instructor is required to be at school.

Because teachers generally work fewer than 200 days per year, their hourly rate of compensation appears inflated.

For example, BLS determined that public-school teachers worked an average of 1,405 hours in a year while government employees worked an average of 1,823 hours.

For each hour at work, according to BLS, the average American public school teacher is paid $4.78 in retirement and savings benefits alone, compared with just $1.02 for the average private-sector worker.

Andrew Biggs, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, said, "Teachers will push back that the [BLS] figures are based on their ‘contract hours’ rather than the actual hours they work, including grading papers at home, etc. These are longer than their official hours, but not that much longer.

"Teachers self-report that they work around 43 hours per week, and a different BLS study that was designed to catch work at home concluded that teachers typically work around 40 hours a week.

"This difference will make them seem a little less well-paid relative to other state/local workers, but I doubt it’s enough to change the overall conclusions," Biggs said.

Jay Greene, an education researcher at the University of Arkansas, reported previously that full-time public school teachers work on average 36.5 hours per week versus 39.4 hours for white-collar workers (excluding sales) and 39 hours for professional specialty and technical workers.

Private school teachers work 38.3 hours per week, Greene's research found.

A separate report co-authored by Biggs and Jason Richwine of the Heritage Foundation delved deeper into the compensation gap.

Their study, "Assessing the Compensation of Public-School Teachers," released last month, stated:

"Comparing teacher salaries to the salaries of similarly educated and experienced private-sector workers, and then adding the value of employer contributions toward fringe benefits, would indicate that public-school teachers are undercompensated. However, comparing teachers to nonteachers presents special challenges not accounted for in the existing literature."

For starters, Biggs and Richwine found that formal educational attainment, such as a degree acquired or years of education completed, "is not a good proxy for the earnings potential of school teachers."

"Public-school teachers earn less in wages on average than nonteachers with the same level of education, but teacher skills generally lag behind those of other workers with similar 'paper' qualifications," they asserted.

Biggs and Richwine found that: