Average teacher pension is $40,000

This letter is in response to Al Palash, who questioned my use of the average teacher pension of $40,000 in the state of Illinois as "distorting the facts" in my original Fence Post letter.

The arithmetic mean, or average, is a common statistic used to provide the most accurate representation of a data set. For example, local schools list the average ACT test score of their students. With a smaller set of data, the median may used to eliminate the highest and lowest values which may skew the average in one direction or the other.

An example of this would be communities listing the median price of a home sales in the area. This, of course, means that half of the homes sold for more than the median and half sold for less.

The average pension of $40,000 includes all retired teachers and administrators in Illinois only, including any outliers. An outlier is a data point well outside of the norm. When one attempts to "distort" or misrepresent information they use outliers, as the Daily Herald did in some of their recent articles concerning the pension system, and Al Palash himself did in his May 30 Fence Post.

Would it be an accurate assessment to say that Naperville students score 36 on the ACT, homes sell for $6 million and P.E. teachers retire making $152,000? To get the most accurate picture, I will stick with the average or the median, not the outliers.

Don Young

Naperville