By Tom
There are a lot of people who look at the teachers’ salary scale and complain that it unfairly rewards teachers for simply staying on the job. They cite studies showing that after about three years, teaching experience has little impact on student achievement. They notice that 15-year veterans get the highest salaries, regardless of their performance. They can even name names, from their own school or district. These people tend to be younger teachers, and they also aren’t very good at noticing the experienced, competent veterans or the rookies who have no idea how to handle a classroom. They see what they want to see and proclaim the current salary scale unfair, obsolete and bad for students.
These people quite literally have no idea what they’re talking about.
A better way to look at the salary schedule is on an individual basis. Teachers are encouraged to grow professionally and learn from experience. And after about fifteen years, a teacher is expected to reach her peak and stay there for the rest of her career. Teachers may differ in regards to the height of that peak; one teacher may be better after two years than another teacher will ever be, but what matters is that each individual teacher continues to grow. Looking at it this way may make the teacher salary scale more palatable.
It would, however, be another completely inaccurate way to look at it. The idea of gradually giving teachers more money for each year they work was never intended to reflect the quality of their work
Here’s how you should look at it.
Picture your entire salary, over your entire career, as a stack of money. The money would be divided into thirty stacks, one for each year of your career, all lined up next to each other. What might this giant stack look like? That depends on the denomination of the bills you use and the amount you get paid each year. Ideally (from your perspective) you would get the same amount each year, and that amount would be large, say a hundred grand a year. After all, teaching is a difficult and important job that requires caring, competent and well-trained people. $100 per year sounds about right. And since the job was just as difficult and just as important the first year of your career as it will be during the last year, you should get that $100,000 starting from year one, right? Your stack of cash should look like a large rectangle, with thirty piles of one hundred thousand dollars all lined up, ready for you to spend them.
The trouble, of course, is that the state simply can’t afford to pay you three million dollars over the course of your career. There just isn’t enough money for that.
What the state could afford to do is to give you a shorter stack of money, maybe $50,000 for each year of your career. But they’re smarter than that. They decide to give you a stack of money somewhere between your ideal stack (the 30 X $100K stack) and their affordable stack. (the 30 X $50K stack) This stack is thirty years long and 65 thousand dollars tall. It does, however, carry a considerable caveat:
The upper left-hand corner is missing.
Why would they do this? Or more to the point, how could they do this?
One word: attrition.
They know that many, many teachers don’t make it to the end of their careers. Think about it; start counting the teachers you’ve worked with who’ve left before retirement. You’ll run out of fingers in a hurry. And the state knows this. They know full well that there will always be a disproportionally higher number of teachers in the first fifteen years of their careers than in the last. Always. So they’ve designed a salary scale that backloads the big money, so to speak, so that every teacher who leaves before they max out represents a bargain.
The only question at this point is the size and shape of that missing corner in your stack of money. From an employee (or more accurately, union) perspective, that corner should have a steep slope, with the stack as close to a rectangle as possible. From the state, or management, perspective, that corner should have a gradual slope, with the stack looking as much like a right triangle as possible.
The end result represents a compromise. Teachers start out at around $30,000 or so and max out after fifteen years at around $65,000.
It looks a lot like teachers are getting paid for just sticking around. And it makes the people who look at it that way really, really mad. But in fact it has nothing to do with that. And it never did.
It’s simply the state backloading the bulk of a teacher’s salary, banking on the fact that many teachers leave before they actually get it.
In other words, it’s simple economics.
I don’t hear too many teachers pushing for change. Most of what I hear is resistance and demands for more money, fewer students, more resources. While I agree that education is underfunded where the funds affect kids (and overfunded where they don’t), I think that argument is a separate one from changing the structure of our schools. And I think the positions of power have been calling for change for years now, to no effect. There is no more powerful voice in this conversation than that of the teacher.
Thanks for starting this conversation, Tom. A colleague of mine and I felt a bit put off when we sorted through the TNT’s release of teacher salaries at each school and found that our PE teacher is making basically our salaries put together. He smokes cigarettes. We teach subjects in testing years and our work will largely dictate how our school is measured. I agree with Kristin and Leslie that re-imagining our current system such that we are able to attract and retain high-performing teachers should not be eschewed any longer despite the common arguments against and excuses made. It is the children who we must consider first, and if we all agree that the current system demotivates teachers in any way to do their best for them, we must change it. Simply put.
Pezz makes an excellent point. Teachers advocating for Ed reform sounds about as credible as lawyers pushing for tort reform or bankers pulling for banking reform. It’s ironic, too, because it’s the practitioners who best know how to improve the system.
Sadly, Kristn, I think teachers are often dismissed for one reason or another, though primarily as being only out for self-interest or the status quo.
We really need advocacy from positions of power.
Dr. Pezz, I’m advocating to move education forward.
And I think that’s key, Tom. Many people say something similar and then attach their own personal desire. It’s like those pork barrel projects attached to bills; “I’ll vote for it if you put my pet project in it.”
Even though I disagree with part of Leslie’s assertion (the tired “can’t fire teachers” line based on a faulty assumption of the term tenure), I do agree that we need to attract the best.
Who is going to advocate for salaries on par with other like-educated professions? to entice administrators to truly evaluate? to give them the time? to stop allowing politicians to make uninformed policy decisions?
However, my question still stands: who is really advocating to move the profession forward?
All I see are politicians looking for the quick, popular sell and powerfully backed money groups looking out for their own interests. Most parents I’ve known are great at advocating for their own kids but not so good advocating for all kids.
It looks like Leslie’s willing to pay. With certain conditions.
I just don’t think the public wants to pay for a system that will attract our best. As soon as a price tag (of any amount) is attached, the discussion ends. The American way is the cheap way rather than the best way.
There’s a lot of lip service, but who is really advocating to move the profession forward?
There are times I would love to start from scratch.
Leslie, the main problem with school reform, at least from my perspective, isn’t whether to change or not, but what to change it into. Specifically, using salary as leverage for better instruction makes sense, but measuring better instruction, believe it or not, is far more complicated than it might seem.
I’m really not that enamored with the status quo, but I want to be sure about where we’re going before we start to go there. I don’t want to see us just blow up the current system and start from scratch.
“Actually, the point I was trying to make was simply that criticizing the current system for not providing incentives to improve is like criticizing a dog for not being a cat. It wasn’t designed to do that.”
This is exactly why the current system is being criticized. Parents and taxpayers don’t want a dog we want a cat. We’re disgusted with a system where egregiously bad tenured teachers who can’t be fired and we’re sick of a system that doesn’t attract, reward, and encourage excellent teachers. I’m happy to pay teachers more and pay the taxes to fund that but not in the current union system. It seems like you’re too caught up in the status quo to see where non-teachers want to see our education system go.
Actually, the point I was trying to make was simply that criticizing the current system for not providing incentives to improve is like criticizing a dog for not being a cat. It wasn’t designed to do that. My “theory” isn’t exactly my own concoction, by the way. A long time ago I worked with an alternative compensation task force. We went all over the country looking at different systems (including Denver’s ProComp) and when we tried to figure out how we ever came up with our current system, this was our best explanation.
Please know that I’m not advocating for this system or any merit pay system. I’m only explaining what this system is and what it isn’t.
I don’t really understand the core point you are trying to make in this post, Tom.
If they don’t plan on many teachers making it past 15 years, why not shoot for the moon and cap it at 30 years at 125k? What could it hurt to build the schedule out that far? As it is, maxing out at 65k after half a career pretty much encourages a teacher to leave at that point, or settle for tighter and tighter household budgets….especially if voter-approved cost-of-living pay increases are continually suspended by the legislature.
Also, you mention that “Teachers are encouraged to grow professionally and learn from experience” and then in the next sentence state “and after about fifteen years, a teacher is expected to reach her peak and stay there for the rest of her career.” Does that mean teachers in the autumn and winter of their careers have done all the growing they can? The experience gained in years 16-30+ is not worth anything? I may be a young’un with not even 10 years under my belt, but I work with several veterans, some with more than 30 years already, who are still trying to better themselves as practitioners of their craft…on their own dime and in many cases because the nest at home is finally empty and they have the time to devote to honing their skills. Shouldn’t those even at that top end of the schedule continue to see salary steps to reward not only their experience, but also their continued devotion to bettering themselves for student learning? If anything, the current salary schedule in this regard devalues our veteran teachers and their potential contribution to the profession… after 15 years in, our veterans are apparently no longer worth the investment. Is that the right message to send our most experienced teachers?
While the current bill which sparked this debate does nothing to accomplish a valid reward system (the bill in question is punitive not constructive, imo), I don’t want to be in year 20 with no more options for increasing my pay as, let’s say, I’m trying to put three kids through college. I’ve already achieved all the degrees and credits I can, I have my NBPTS certification, I no longer bank on the COLA, and if my pay stagnates after 15 years, I’ll actually be moving backward, since inflation and COL will be advancing past me and each dollar I earn will be functionally worth less.
I’m fine with individualized teacher pay based on my job performance. However, I will not support any measurement of my job performance which (1) relies heavily on test scores…(Most years I teach special education inclusion, and actually am not even in a tested grade level this year, so what test scores could be used?) or (2) does not make ample provision for a competent reviewer/administrator to spend AMPLE time in my classroom evaluating my actual performance. By that I mean HOURS per month, not MINUTES per year of observation.
I hope I remember to come back and comment on this post. Suffice it to say I’m 100% completely unconvinced by this argument. It’s a new spin, but it actually absolutely ignores how compensating wage differentials work and how sorting in the job market works. So I’m not really sure where you think this “economics” because labor markets absolutely do not work this way.
The other point is precisely what Mike is making– it’s not typically the salary scale that is so problematic, it’s the benefits which tend to increase exponentially with longevity. The pay out differences on defined benefit pensions are tremendous, as are some other perks that often kick in with high longevity teachers.
Well, okay. And I didn’t think you were writing a post to me personally. But I worry that this opportunity for rich dialogue that solves some serious problems will be lost in some “us vs. them” stand-off, where two smart sides forget the goal in the heat of battle.
I know you are doing this work for kids, and also because it’s a fantastically satisfying career. Is paying teachers for longevity the best perk for either of those things? I’d argue, no. I’d argue that paying teachers to be effective and teach the most challenging kids is a pretty logical perk.
What we all should be doing is designing a system that pays teachers to teach well.
I certainly meant nothing personal, Kristin. Sorry if it came across that way. The comment about “not knowing what they’re talking about” refers to people who expect to see a reward system when they look at the salary scale.
You may be right. That may be the state’s intent, since of course everyone would assume a teacher would teach as well as she could. If we assume every teacher teaches as well as she can, and grows in skill every year, then the annual raise (which, in reality, doesn’t even keep up with inflation) makes sense, as does your triangle/rectangle model.
But I think that’s a separate discussion from the one where “young,” – and guess what, I’m one of those and I’m not young – teachers are frustrated. First, it’s not only young teachers who are frustrated. I’ve been teaching 15 years and I’m frustrated that some of the best teachers in my building earn a lot less than the worst. That bothers me.
I’m frustrated that we are expected to do this tremendously important and complicated, intricate job, and no one seems to be able to figure out a better way to pay teachers to work hard and perform well. And if someone attempts a solution, teachers shoot it down because it threatens their autonomy, their invisibility and their steady march toward retirement.
To say, “These people tend to be younger teachers, and they also aren’t very good at noticing the experienced, competent veterans or the rookies who have no idea how to handle a classroom” is a terribly unfair oversimplification.
I’m not a younger teacher, and I’m very good at noticing experienced, competent veterans. I go out of my way to mentor the rookies. And I’m one of “those people” who think our salary schedule is stupid. I think our salary schedule leaves students out of the equation. I’d like to see pay connected in some way to benefiting children, and I have never, ever said or thought that older teachers are worth less. I think lazy teachers are worth less, and I’m looking for a solution to the fact I see children having their time wasted with lazy teachers and my tax dollars supporting lazy teachers.
So I find it kind of disrespectful that you say I “quite literally” don’t know what I’m talking about, just because I don’t agree with you.
@Mike: You lost me at “unless!” Please explain.
Unless you have a defined benefit pension, with contributions from employees, and defines that benefit based on your 3 highest years.
Then it’s stupid economics. And it’s why the unions fight for steeper pay scales.