Best Practices in Teacher Pay: Front-Loading Base Pay for Professional Growth
Best Practices in Teacher Pay: Front-Loading Base Pay for Professional Growth A comprehensive, professional compensation plan includes layered pay strategies that build on one another to ensure the recruitment and retention of a high-quality workforce. This is the first in a series of blogs highlighting best practices in teacher pay featured in detail in BEST NC’s report, Teacher Pay in North Carolina: A Smart Investment in Student Achievement. Front-Loading Base Pay for Professional Growth We begin this blog series by examining a key component of any competitive compensation model, a base pay schedule that provides a living wage and builds with professional expertise. We refer to this foundational component as “Front-loaded Base Pay” and will utilize the next four blogs in our series to highlight the many benefits of a front-loaded pay schedule, beginning with Part 1: Front-Loading for Professional Growth. In contrast to pay practices in most professional industries, teacher compensation in North Carolina and across the country is driven by a 100-year-old step-and-lane salary schedule that bases pay solely on years of experience and educational attainment. As discussed in our recent blog, BEST NC Releases Comprehensive Teacher Pay Report – BEST NC, we find that this outdated pay and retention structure fails to recruit and retain the top-tier teaching candidates our students deserve. Exhibit 1, Below, demonstrates the difference between a traditional step-and-lane pay structure like North Carolina’s and a front-loaded pay schedule. Although lifetime income is the same if someone stays in the profession for 30 years, the front-loaded pay schedule allows teachers to reach their maximum base pay earlier in their careers. This aligns with the years in which most teachers demonstrate the greatest amount of professional growth, as well as living wage increases that we will examine in the next post. Note: This graph only represents base pay on top of which teachers should be eligible to receive additional supplements, bonuses, and raises later in their careers, including by taking on Advanced Teaching Roles and extending their reach to more students. Additionally, the entire schedule shifts up over time, typically to address inflation. A front-loaded base pay structure is used in many professional industries and is premised on the fact that pay rises along with employees’ sharp increase in professional skills early in their career. Like these other professions, research that suggests increases in teacher effectiveness are most significant during the first three years of a teacher’s career and level out after year five. This can be visualized by examining student growth data for North Carolina teachers at various points in their careers (see Exhibit 1 below). The most significant gains are seen between 0-2 and 3-5 years of experience and peak, on average, around the eighth year of teaching. A front-loaded teacher pay schedule aligns pay increases to the parts of a teacher’s career in which they are making the largest gains in their ability to positively impact student learning. Increasing early-career teacher pay also has implications for teacher retention. A study of teacher pay and retention in Texas from 1996 to 2012 found that increases in teacher base pay had greater positive impacts on teacher retention during the early parts of a teacher’s career (years 1 to 7) and no effect on the retention of teachers with 12 or more years of experience. Exhibit 3 below shows the number of teachers in North Carolina by years of experience and their attrition rates, affirming that, in the first 20 years of a teacher’ careers, the greatest attrition happens in the first six to eight years of teaching. Increasing and front-loading North Carolina’s teacher salary schedule works to combat these high attrition levels by providing a compensation incentive for more early-career teachers to continue in their careers. UPCOMING: The next blog in our teacher pay series will explore how a front-loaded teacher pay schedule better aligns with one’s need to earn a living wage to support a family.
BEST NC Releases Comprehensive Teacher Pay Report
BEST NC Releases Comprehensive Teacher Pay Report In 2023, BEST NC released a new report on teacher pay entitled Teacher Pay in North Carolina: A Smart Investment in Student Achievement. The BEST NC team, along with leading economists and experts from across the country examined the complex issue of teacher pay. In our analysis, we uncovered important new evidence that the existing teacher pay structures in North Carolina, and across the country, fail to address dramatic decades-long shifts in our national workforce and are inadequate for meeting the personal and professional needs of today’s teachers. This teacher pay report offers specific, actionable recommendations for both an increased and transformed teacher salary structure that can help retain exceptional educators and attract the next generation of top-tier talent into North Carolina public schools. You can access the full report and the executive summary here. Below is an overview of the report. This is the first in a series of blogs that will highlight key concepts and recommendations from the report. Background: Why Professional Compensation Matters Research has consistently found that teacher quality is the most important in-school factor for student success, with high-performing teachers producing significantly higher achievement gains than low-performing teachers. Given this reality, it is essential for teacher compensation to attract highly qualified candidates into the profession and to support continued professional growth throughout their career in the classroom. In his NYT best-selling book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Daniel Pink contends that professional compensation is fundamentally important to fulfill an individual’s biological need to support oneself and one’s family (compensation must be adequate), and individuals must feel that they are fairly paid for the skills they hold and the work they do (compensation must be equitable). The Teacher Pay in North Carolina report considers Pink’s framing of professional compensation, compared to the current, 100-year-old teacher step-and-lane pay structure that is used in North Carolina and across the country. Through this lens, the report finds that our teacher pay and retention practices are outdated and fail to recruit and retain the top-tier candidates our students deserve. Beyond baseline requirements of adequacy and equitability, Pink finds that high-skilled professionals are motivated to perform at their best when their jobs present the opportunity for mastery, autonomy, and purpose. Current teacher pay practices and organizational structures, in stark contrast, encourage a “one-teacher, one classroom” approach that stifles growth and leaves high-performing teachers with few opportunities for professional advancement. Five Key Challenges of Current Teacher Compensation Models An exploration of research on best practices in teacher compensation revealed five major challenges, each of which is examined closely in the Teacher Pay in North Carolina report. Challenge 1: Teaching is a Mostly Female Workforce, Yet Teacher Pay Has Not Kept Up with Increasing Opportunities and Pay for Female, College-Educated Professionals. Nationally, between 1985 and 2021, median income for women with a bachelor’s degree grew by 22% when adjusted for inflation, compared to just 10% for teachers. Earnings for college-educated women have now eclipsed earnings for teachers. Women still comprise the majority of the teaching workforce, but, as women have more professional opportunities than ever before, teaching is arguably less attractive now than ever before for top-tier female candidates. v Challenge 2: Under the Existing Salary Schedule, North Carolina Teachers Must Wait Far Too Long Before Their Salaries Provide a Living Wage that Can Support a Family. Outside of retirement, teacher attrition is highest in the first five years of a teacher’s career. These years coincide with the time that teachers are starting to build their families. At this crucial juncture, the traditional step-and-lane schedule does not provide a living wage that allows teachers to support a family. The Teacher Pay in North Carolina report uses the Living Wage Calculator from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which leverages geographically specific data on living expenses (e.g. housing, health insurance, food, childcare), to estimate that nearly one-third of North Carolina teachers earned less than a living wage for a family of four in 2021-22. Even when compared to other public sector employees in our state, teachers earn less and take much longer to reach the top of the base salary schedule. Challenge 3: The Traditional Teacher Compensation Model Does Not Provide Meaningful Professional Promotions that Attract Top Talent and Keep Effective Educators in the Classroom. Research has demonstrated that the traditional step-and-lane salary schedule limits overall earning potential and discourages high-aptitude individuals from pursuing a teaching career. Reinforcing this notion, a report issued by McKinsey in 2010 revealed that 87% of top-tier candidates indicate that their preferred occupation provides opportunities to advance, compared to just 45% who believe teaching will provide similar advancement opportunities. The same report noted that nations that perform at the top on international assessments recruit 100% of teachers from students in the top-third of their class. In the United States it is 23%, and only 14% for teachers in higher poverty schools. Advanced Teaching Roles provide one pathway for highly effective educators to advance professionally as they take on greater responsibility and leadership. Currently, approximately 1,000 North Carolina teachers are working in advanced roles, earning up to $20,000 in additional pay. However, with just 21% of districts currently participating, there is significant room for growth. Challenge 4: Existing Pay Structures are not Designed to Fill Hard-to-Staff Subject Area Positions and Schools, Leading to Persistent, Critical Vacancies and Disparities in Student Access to Effective Educators. Like most states, teacher staffing inequities in North Carolina are driven, in part, by the structure of the state teacher salary schedule, which requires that teacher base pay is the same for equivalently experienced teachers, regardless of what, where, or how well a teacher teaches. In high-demand fields like STEM subjects, average teacher pay significantly trails average wages for recent UNC System graduates for those majors. These subject areas also see markedly higher teacher vacancy rates. Additionally, there are tremendous disparities in student access to highly qualified teachers […]