Redesigning Teacher Pay

The long-established structure that determines how teachers are paid, as a growing number of educational leaders are concluding, needs an overhaul to enable it to meet the challenges of a 21st century education. That pay structure, which dates back to the 1920s, is based on a single salary system in which teachers with the same “paper” credentials and years of service receive the same compensation. Originally created to prevent favoritism, this pay system has become increasingly out of sync with current research, trends, and goals in education, according to a new study published by the Economic Policy Institute, and should be replaced. The question for schools then becomes: With what?

In Redesigning Teacher Pay: A System for the Next Generation of Educators, Harvard experts Susan Moore Johnson and John P. Papay offer an answer. The authors make the case for a new pay structure designed to both reward and foster leadership and excellence in the teaching profession. This proposed new structure is carefully built to align teacher pay with broader educational goals such as improving educational outcomes and enabling school districts to attract and retain high-quality teachers. The structure also provides a way for schools to leverage the skills of the most gifted and accomplished teachers by enlisting them as trainers and mentors in efforts to raise the quality of teaching school-wide.

The study recognizes that efforts to create pay-for-performance structures have met with largely unsuccessful results. The authors built their plan on an examination of those previous and current results, positive and negative, to learn from and avoid the pitfalls of changing from a familiar system to an unknown one that poses such daunting challenges as deciding how to measure teacher performance.

The system Johnson and Papay propose has two interrelated parts. The “tiered pay-and-career structure” is a four-level system of increasing responsibility, professional skill, and pay, and through which teachers can advance as they develop and exhibit leadership skills. The second part is the “learning and development fund” for investing in the ongoing development of skills that advance the school’s core goals of promoting excellence in teaching and learning.

Among the school districts with pay-for-performance plans described by the authors as case studies are: Houston, TX; Hillsborough County (Tampa), FL; Charlotte-Mecklenburg, NC; and Minneapolis, MN. The authors also cite as examples of schools that have been experimenting in this area: Denver and Douglas County, CO; Toledo, OH; Rochester, NY; Boston, MA; Cincinnati, OH; Montgomery County, MD; New