Summary: I use material developed by the Economic Policy Institute to surface a practical definition of a "living wage" for teachers. I make no claim for its moral superiority. In its favor the EPI cost of living calculator is apparently based on data accumulated throughout the US. Further, it allows partitioning of the living costs according to how many adults and children are involved in the family. Thus a relatively objective, even if imperfect, start to illustrating an application of my Fair Shares principles for determining teacher pay.

I have, over the last 6 weeks or so, been focusing upon pay as an aspect of sociial justice (See . for example, my discussion of how teacher salaries are presently determined versus how they ought to be determined. (Overall the discussion occurs in this article; an analysis of distributive justice as it applies specifically to teacher pay here (a specific location in the article) starting at the top of the right-most column of the table. In my most recent entry I noted attempts to deal with various issues of fairness and tradition in Denver. Today I start with a salary calculator provided by the Economic Policy Institute as an even-handed device for determining the living wage component of my translation of Corning's Fair Shares principles into a process for paying teachers in a just manner.

EPI breaks family budgets into 9 components and calculates the costs of of equivalent purchases in local dollars.

The table below illustrates the results of this method by giving the minimum family budget necessary for two adults and two children living in each of five US locations (Northwest US bias).

The EPI-provided calculator allows family budget determinations for families of various sizes. (from 1 adult and one child up to 2 adults and 3 children). Comparison of these variations allows estimation of per child and per adult costs. In Bellingham, for example, I used this method to estimate the cost of the beginning nuclear family (or empty nesters, for that matter), a couple. The annual nuclear family living budget was calculated to be $28,819.

I will use this method as a starting point as I compare a beginning teacher's sequence of career salaries in the proposed Denver system to the same teacher's salary as determined by the Fair Shares salary method.