Duncan Calls for Differential Pay
Hat tip to Education Week for providing this transcript of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s remarks to the National Science Teachers Association in New Orleans last Friday. Here is the takeaway quote:
But we need to respond to the market by paying more to teachers in high-need subjects like science and math.
I’m a big believer in differential pay. I want to reward excellence by paying teachers and principals who do a great job in the classroom.
I want to reward them for going into struggling school districts. That’s where the challenge is. If you’re going to take on a tough job, you should be rewarded.
I want to incent schools to attract and support great talent in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects.
NSTA posted a video of the speech, but I can’t get it to work properly.
We haven’t heard any union spin on this speech yet, but before we do, I thought I should pull a couple of quotes from the February 2008 report of the NEA Professional Standards and Practice Committee on compensation systems:
…NEA is in opposition to three main concepts when it comes to compensation beyond the single salary schedule:
1) Pay based on student performance (such as pay based on student test scores);
2) Pay based on the evaluation of an education employee’s performance (such as a subjective evaluation by a principal); and
3) Additional pay for shortage areas (such as math and science).
The rationale for #3 is:
The NEA values all teachers and all other employees in the school district, and we value the need to create a school community. To pay “shortage area” teachers more than others will create a value system that is not conducive to strengthening our public schools. It will give the appearance that we value high school math and science more than reading in elementary school. It will cause divisions amongst the staff that lead to an unnecessary and unhealthy lack of collegiality. In addition, simply paying more for “shortage areas” alone does nothing to address the real issue of the low salaries that face the entire teaching profession.
Subject matter differential pay has the potential of causing more divisiveness between NEA and the Obama administration than does performance pay. A lot of school districts may talk about performance pay, but most will be happy to continue without the bother of creating a new system. Districts everywhere would like the freedom to pay more to hire teachers in shortage areas, which would require very little change.
