A new study on teacher compensation is out from Andrew Biggs and Jason Richwine. The conventional wisdom on the issue is that teachers are underpaid. But the new study finds that compared to what you’d expect teachers to make in the private sector, they’re doing very well, on balance. Their retirement benefits are especially generous here in Illinois.

The 2010 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report in Illinois shows that the average benefit paid to a 60-year-old retired teacher with 35 to 39 years of service—a full working career—was $67,452.

That’s good money. Looking at national data, on balance the total benefits package of a similarly qualified private sector work is far less than what the typical teacher receives. Illinois teachers are likely doing even better. Our teachers are some of the highest salaried of any state.

Biggs has been great on this issue for a long time. He has previously argued that teachers might be paid less than their private sector “counterparts,” but that’s only because they’re not comparing themselves to their true peers:

Put bluntly, public school teachers enter college with below-average SAT scores, major in the easiest undergraduate course of study, take Master’s degrees in education that have no appreciable impact on teaching quality, and then wonder why they’re not as well paid as someone who got a Master’s in chemical engineering. They shouldn’t.

His new study cleverly overcomes this hurdle by controlling for IQ score, or something very near it, scores on the Armed Forces Qualification Test. Thus his findings in the cute graphic below: