“How long will it take me to reach the top annual salary in my profession?”, the newly hired teacher asked. Her first-year salary was just above the national average for starting teachers. “Twenty-one years,” the district’s Human Relations officer told her. Twenty-one years.
Why must teachers wait more than two decades before they receive their district’s top salary?
First, let’s set this scenario, one that is so common that it should be accepted as the norm. There is a real difference between the observed and evaluated job performances of first year and veteran teachers. The first year on the job is expected to be a major learning and refining experience for qualified new hires. But, by the young teacher’s third year on the job there is very little difference between the job performances of “high performing” young teachers and “high performing” veteran teachers. Observations and evaluations show that teachers in these two categories equally cause all students in their instruction to successfully learn their respective curricula. Yet, the salaries for “high performing” young teachers and “high performing” veteran teachers are tens of thousands of dollars apart. Why?
The constraint is archaic. It is based upon these three imposed concepts.
1. Local school boards cannot afford to pay all teachers a top salary. There is a planned and artificial distribution of low, mid and high salaries that school boards must maintain to stay within their annual revenues. School board budgets are always sum pre-determined and never sum sufficient.
2. Once a teacher has committed five or more years in a district, it is to their advantage to stay. All new hires start at the bottom of the pay ladder. A teacher who moves to another school district goes back to the beginning of the pay schedule.
3. Teaching is a low-paying profession. The public expects teachers to accept low pay for seasonal (nine months) work.
How wrong is this? The answer is “really wrong.” While it might have been adequate in the 19th century, it certainly is not in the 21st.
I watched woodpeckers drill holes in a 55-foot tall red pine. They were chasing bugs and, to get the daily food the required, they made more than a dozen holes, some four or five inches in diameter and three to four inches deep into the tree trunks. Why is this mentioned? Because that tree was dead but did not know it. Holes drilled by woodpeckers were the tree’s death knell. Within several years’ time the tree above their holes will die from lack of nutrition.
The teaching profession is like the tree; dying and not knowing it. The profession’s slow death is driven by visible and invisible causes. Among the visible causes is “edu-politics.” Public education is an easy and soft target for politicians who want to cut state spending, arouse a voting base with promises of school choice for parents, and find a cause – we need to improve schools by …. Edu-politics is eradicating teachers’ unions and their ability to mount a professional argument. More to the point, in the name of cutting taxes, edu-politicians promise to cut the cost of public education, and 80% of that cost is salary and benefit. Tax reformers hold up each homeowners’ local tax bill and point to the school levy tax. Cutting taxes cuts revenue to schools which requires diminished salaries and benefits which diminishes an interest in the profession of teaching.
The invisible cause of the profession’s death is the low esteem college undergraduates have for teaching. When planning for their post-college careers, college students consider teaching a soft occupation for those disposed toward care giving and social work. It is not the chosen profession for go-getters. And, when comparing earning power, college students see a 21-year pay ladder to a top professional salary that college graduates in other careers can achieve in less than a decade. So, why be a teacher? The answer is, college graduates aren’t.
Sadly, the disease of ed-politics is difficult to eradicate. Politics is what it is. But, the perception of teaching as a valued career choice can be changed.
We return to the original question. “Why must teachers wait more than two decades before they receive their district’s top salary?” The answer is “they must not have to wait.” The solution has two steps. School boards must retain only high performing teachers, and, teacher salaries must be performance based and not experience regulated. At the end of the probationary employment period, only high performing teachers should be provided with continuing contracts. School boards that advance young teachers from probationary educator to continuing contract status based upon the observation and evaluation of the teacher’s professional work should pay a professionally-equivalent salary. And, that is a top-of-the-ladder salary identical to the highest salary an identical “high performing” colleague receives.
Teacher pay ladders must be four or five steps from bottom to top and not twenty-one steps. When school boards take the necessary and decisive action of releasing low performing probationary teachers, they can take the high ground of providing all teachers with appropriate high performing salaries. Teachers who are “high performing” by the end of their third year should be paid a “high performing” salary.
Lastly, there is a widely-held myth that teachers do not teach for the money; they teach so that they can help children learn. While the second part of the statement is very true, money matters to everyone. It matters to those who are teaching and to those who want to teach. Money matters because it connotes value. To attract and retain the “high performing” teachers that our children need, this myth must be debunked and teacher pay must be competitively professional. School boards and school communities, just like all other economic enterprises, get what they pay for and the best educational talent needed today and tomorrow will cost more. It is time to change the antiquated system used to hire and retain teachers.