Ministry of Education claims that the 'average” salary of a secondary teacher is $71,000 demonstrate either that they are being deliberately deceptive, or that Ministry officials need to go back to school themselves and learn some basic 5th form statistics.
The 'average” (mean) is only a meaningful figure if the spread of data approximates a normal distribution. When the distribution is skewed, with a few getting a very large salary and most getting very little, then this statistic is meaningless.
Far better to use the median (the middle amount), or the geometric mean, both of which take skewness into account.
I would suggest if these figures were used, this would paint a different picture from the one the Ministry wants to portray.
Dr. Michael C. Morris, Greerton.