NCES EDGE Comparable Wage Index for Teachers (CWIFT)

The Comparable Wage Index for Teachers (CWIFT) is an experimental index created by the Education Demographic and Geographic Estimates (EDGE) program at the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to facilitate comparison of educational expenditures. The CWIFT is a measure of the systematic, regional variations in the wages and salaries of college graduates who are not PK‌-12 educators as determined by reported occupational category. It can be used by researchers to adjust school district-level finance data in order to make comparisons across geographic areas. The CWIFT is based on data from the American Community Survey (ACS), a continuous household survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. The ACS provides information about the earnings, age, occupation, industry, and other demographic characteristics for millions of U.S. workers. The CWIFT measures wage and salary differences for college graduates, using an analysis that is modeled after the baseline analysis used to construct the original CWI released by NCES in 2006.