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Professional Compensation for the 21st Century

By Blake West, President, Kansas National Education Association

What does it take to attract and retain highly qualified teachers in the education profession? A generation or two ago, it was common for women to enter teaching and nursing as their primary choices for professional work.

Today, the options are much broader. We’re no longer competing with Missouri, Colorado, Nebraska and Oklahoma for teaching candidates. We’re competing with Blue Cross, Sprint, Spirit Air and H&R Block.

Throughout this edition of Issues, we learn that beginning teachers are paid, on average, $5,000 to $10,000 less than people entering other professions with comparable degrees.

In fact, many education majors are being recruited away to other fields as they graduate from college without ever working a single day as a teacher.

Compensation for teaching must begin with an appropriate entry-level foundation that matches other professions. Ideally, teachers would also reach full professional compensation within 10 years in teaching.

Many policy-makers, though, argue that they won’t work to increase teacher salaries unless it is tied to merit. One of the most negative assumptions underlying this argument is the belief that teachers aren’t working hard or will only “do their best” if we use financial coercion.

What an insult!

Maybe I’ve been sheltered and fortunate to work with an unusually professional group of colleagues, but I believe that teachers are doing the best they can with limited resources.

The outstanding teachers of Kansas work far above and beyond “the contract”. Often, the time for collaboration is extremely limited and the support structures for new teachers are grossly inadequate to foster professional growth.

The best school administrators are working to overcome systemic limitations to classroom excellence by creating professional learning communities, ensuring sufficient time to collaboratively plan, review student work, engage in peer coaching, etc. In these settings, a culture of professionalism flourishes and student achievement is enhanced.

Is there a place for “alternative compensation”? Absolutely!

In 2001, an exemplary task force of teachers and administrator members of KNEA studied the gamut of compensation strategies being tried around the country and identified key best-practices. More recent experiences in places like Denver have served to confirm KNEA’s findings.

Here is a quick summary of the necessary features of alternative compensation systems.

Critical Attributes of Compensation Structures

More Money

Simply reshuffling existing dollars within current funding levels is a shell game and not a solution to attract and retain quality teachers or to adequately reward those persons already in the profession. Any alternative compensation system should be accompanied by increased funding for the salary structure.

Denver Classroom Teachers Association’s plan relied on a special vote by the citizens of Denver to increase school funding to add new compensation opportunities IN ADDITION to the basic salary structure.

State Funding

Study after study of the funding needs for Kansas schools has found the need to significantly increase school funding in order to meet the needs of every learner – yes, even increase funding much more than the legislature has put in over the last three years (basically, enough to help catch up with several years of funding cuts relative to inflationary costs.)

Most of these studies have also assumed that Kansas could continue to recruit the kind of excellent teaching staff that has typically worked in our schools… even though it is clear that fewer candidates are entering the profession each year.

Local Funding

School districts also have a responsibility to provide an appropriate level of compensation to all employees. One of the longest running alternative compensation systems in the country is in Douglas County, CO (DCC). One board member from DCC noted that, “if a district expects teachers to think differently about compensation, then the district must think differently about budgets, too, by increasing the overall percentage that is devoted to salaries.”

In DCC, the school board increased the overall percent of district budget devoted to teacher salaries as a part of their effort to institute their successful alternative compensation plan.

Infrastructure

Charlotte Danielson points out that evaluation systems lack the sophistication to be used for such high-stakes matters as teacher salary. Additional resources such as personnel time and expertise will be needed to administer a plan.

For example, if a system relies on teacher development of portfolios and observations to determine placement on a career ladder using Danielson’s rubrics, the system must have:

• 1) persons with time and training as evaluators,
• 2) a system to ensure inter-rater reliability,
• 3) record-keeping systems,
• 4) training for all staff to familiarize them with the criteria and
• 5) expectations of the career ladder, etc.

While it is understood that expertise will be developed and enhanced over time, some degree of readiness must be achieved at the beginning of implementation or a dismal failure will result.

District-Union Relations

Alternative compensation can only result from monies (possibly new monies) being directed to criteria other than the experience and degrees of the single salary schedule.

There must be a spirit of trust in the district that alternative compensation is not a shell game to decrease employee costs to the district. There must be trust that the system for determining eligibility for additional compensation is reliable, fair and congruent with the values of the district and its employees.

Bargained with member acceptance

Any plan must be collaboratively developed and implemented. A mere majority approval as is required in most places for approval of a negotiated agreement is not enough.

For a plan to be successful, it needs approval by some super-majority of the bargaining unit. Some locals have required up to an 80% approval vote.  By contrast, districts that have adopted plans where the approval vote was a simple majority have seen the plans fail and fall by the wayside.

Transitions

To be supported by a super-majority of teachers, an alternative pay plan should provide veteran staff with the option to remain on the “old” salary structure for a time or move to the new structure immediately with its options for increased remuneration.  

Veteran employees achieved their current status by complying with the demands of the current system and should not be penalized for having worked faithfully within the structures and values of the previous system.

Adequacy of bonuses

An alternative compensation system must include a “bonus” amount that is sufficient to demonstrate that the district and union place value on the new and different work or measurements of performance that are part of the plan.

For example, a bonus of $500 to a teacher who will sign up to spend six weekends developing projects aligned to a curriculum revision just may not be much of an attraction. Some may opt to participate in the project … but it would be out of intrinsic interest in the task rather than because they get to make $7 per hour doing more after a typical 60-hour teacher work-week.

Choice

Every employee is expected to complete their professional duties. To earn additional compensation based on individual actions needs to be at the discretion of the individual. There should be no professional stigma if any person chooses not to pursue individual elements of alternative compensation.

A desirable feature of many pay systems is multiple forms of alternative compensation or multiple criteria for achieving an incentive. Creation of options within a plan should be considered as the compensation system is designed.

Professional Development

An adequate system of support to help each employee must be an integral part of any alternative compensation system.

The plan must address both desired teacher skills and AND skills necessary to administer the compensation system. Principles of effective staff development are well established (e.g. ongoing, job-embedded) and must be inherent components of the district’s professional development plan.

Characteristics of reward criteria

Employees must be able to understand the system.

Complicated statistical formulas that attempt to represent the complexity of student behavior, family situation, learning difficulties, etc. will inevitably call into question the validity and/or reliability of the system.

Criteria for determining additional compensation linked to student learning must be quantifiable, reliably measurable and validly related to the intended goals of the system.

Appeals Process

To the extent that a new compensation system utilizes subjective elements as a criteria for determining a reward must be implemented in a manner that conveys fairness to employees. An appeals process for evaluations/assessments, for approval of goals, etc., is essential to maintain this fairness.

The challenging question of using student achievement to determine compensation.

What happens if students in classroom X consistently achieve higher scores than students in classroom Y?

If the school is managed with the style of leadership most common 75 years ago, it might make sense to leave the two teachers in their closed classrooms and give some recognition to the teacher with higher-achieving students.

For the 21st century, though, we should expect that school leadership provides peer assistance to the new teacher (or any teacher struggling to succeed.)

Collaboration must be the norm so that innovative projects find their way into every classroom. Team teaching and resource sharing are needed to extend the influence of the great teacher beyond the walls of a single classroom.

The additional leadership, mentoring, etc. also are legitimate opportunities within an alternative compensation system to recognize the outstanding teacher.

But no group of students should be relegated to a classroom with inadequate learning opportunities… and it is the responsibility of school leaders and our profession to foster growth to make sure every child/student has a great education.

One element that seems to work well in many compensation structures is the use of “group rewards.”

For example, the math and science teachers in a high school might work to design some integrated authentic projects that teach both math and science concepts. The group would set higher achievement goals for the students and, if they reach those goals, everyone within the group would receive some bonus. This structure fosters collaboration rather than building competition and isolation of the best teachers from their peers.

The bottom line

Professional compensation for the 21st century must match teacher salaries favorably against other professions.

We can’t expect teaching to be an attractive profession if it takes 30 years to reach the maximum salary. Compressing salary schedules AND providing opportunities for enhanced compensation are important strategies that warrant serious discussion.

If these ideas are intriguing to you, I hope you’ll watch for upcoming announcements about KNEA’s new Advisory Councils – online communities of interest that will tackle issues such as alternative compensation providing all members with the opportunity to participate in discussion, learn from colleagues and gain insights from experts in a range of topics.

Opportunities to sign up to be part of an Advisory Council should be announced by December 1. And after almost two years of development, the online environment will be “live” by January 1, 2008.

I look forward to meeting you there!

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