Lewis Solmon makes the case for rewarding better teachers with more money.
For more than a century, public education has worked under a single salary schedule that compensates teachers for college credits, education degrees, and years of experience, but not for their effectiveness in the classroom. (See Figure 1.)
In fact, research shows that the degrees, courses, and experience that teachers have, beyond the first few years of teaching, are unrelated to how much their students achieve. Furthermore, the current salary schedule does not normally take into account the fact that teachers work in schools offering different levels of nonmonetary benefits, such as a safe, pleasing environment. Nor does it recognize that students come to class with different levels of preparation and home support.
Paying all teachers with the same experience and credits the same salary also ignores the fact that graduates of different fields have vastly different alternative career options; think of a physicist compared with someone having a bachelor’s degree in elementary education. School administrators report that it is very difficult or impossible to fill elementary teaching positions about 6 percent of the time, while positions in math, physical sciences, and special education are difficult or impossible to fill more than 30 percent of the time. According to the American Federation of Teachers, the estimated starting salary for teachers with a B.A., in 2003-04, regardless of discipline, was $30,496. The National Association of Colleges and Employers tells us that the average starting salary for accountants that year was $41,110, and for graduates in computer science, $49,691. (See Figure 2.) Starting salaries for mathematicians with a B.A., the year before, averaged $40,512; for physicists with a B.A. in 2002, according to the American Institute of Physics, $78,000. Is it any wonder that it is so difficult to hire and retain math and science teachers?
Extra pay for those in hard-to-staff fields would acknowledge the laws of supply and demand–greater opportunities for math or science majors bid up their earnings in other careers, so getting them into teaching requires competitive salaries. It would not mean that physics teachers are more important than elementary teachers.
In the current system, an increase for one teacher requires increases for all. If, for instance, we decided that our teachers are underpaid, as state officials from all parts of the country tell me, current practice would make a meaningful pay increase prohibitive. Just to bring the salaries in the below-average states to the national average would cost $8.5 billion–an amount that is fiscally irrational. It may seem like a meaningless argument, except that such an amount is dictated by the current uniform salary schedule, which requires those below-average states to raise each teacher’s salary. It would be much cheaper–not to mention more educationally effective–to raise the salaries of just the most-effective teachers, those deserving of the increase, rather than all teachers. Then there would be money available to give larger raises to the very best teachers.
It would be similarly impossible to bring all teachers’ salaries up to the average level of other professions. Why would we want to pay more to the least-effective teachers anyway? What we end up with, then, are paltry average annual increases (as teachers gain experience and course credits), ranging from the high of a $1,498 average increase in California to a meager $503 at the low end in South Dakota.
In the Madison School District in Arizona, the lowest salary for a new teacher with only a bachelor’s degree is $31,304 and the highest salary after many years and 72 postbaccalaureate credits is $57,251, an 82 percent increase over a career! Compare that with the legal profession, where the lowest-paid 10 percent earn less than $44,490 and the highest 10 percent earned more than $145,600–a 227 percent difference! The flat salary schedule for teachers is a good reason for those in Madison to welcome the stipends of