Effective teachers are demonstrably the most important resource schools have for improving the academic success of their students. Yet for many school leaders, recruiting and retaining talented and effective classroom teachers remains an uphill battle. Whether teacher salaries are sufficient to attract the best graduates into teaching remains an open question, but there is little doubt that the recent fiscal crisis in the states has reenergized the debate over teacher compensation. As this debate proceeds, sound evidence on the comparability of teacher pay is critical for maintaining and improving the quality of the teaching force in the United States. In this issue brief, the authors summarize the main findings of their 2004 and 2008 reports, and update key estimates of the teacher pay penalty through 2010. Using data aggregated over the 2006-10 period (to ensure a sufficient sample size in all 50 states and the District of Columbia), they computed the weekly wages of public school teachers relative to comparably educated workers. Some of their findings are the following: (1) Trends in weekly earnings show that public school teachers in 2010 earned about 12% less than comparable workers, a gap equivalent to that found in their 2004 study; (2) Analyzing the weekly earnings of occupations comparable to K-12 teachers confirms the substantial erosion of teacher pay relative to their peers through 2006; and (3) If the policy goal is to improve the quality of the entire teaching workforce, then raising the "level" of teacher compensation is critical to recruiting and retaining higher quality teachers. (Contains 2 tables.)