Of Salary Schedule Slopes and Climbs
George Clowes of School Reform News drew my attention yesterday to a post by Chad Alderman at The Quick and the Ed about salary schedule slopes. He said it sounded like something I had done years ago.
I had cobbled together something signficantly less sophisticated for One Yard Below: Education Statistics from a Different Angle, way back in March 1998. Alderman’s report for Education Sector illustrates how “the slope of teacher salary schedules is likely to have a significant impact on the quality and character of the teacher work force in any given district.” It makes a difference to teachers how quickly one can move along the salary scale, and whether it occurs steadily, or in fits and starts.
I went at this same problem in a different way. An examination of the salary scale itself is useful, but it doesn’t tell us where teachers are along the scale. Unions aim to negotiate salary schedules of 1:2-2.5. That is, the maximum salary should be 2 to 2.5 times the minimum salary. They will only stray from this rule of thumb if the make-up of the local membership dictates. If a local has lots of veteran teachers, there isn’t much incentive to change the slope of the salary schedule.
My method was to examine what I called the “climb” from minimum salary to average salary. This is problematic, too, since average salary is a moving target, but teachers are more likely to compare their salary to the average, rather than to the maximum. In Table 7 of my report (page 12) I showed the effects of varying climbs:
Compare the states ranked 15th and 16th in Table 7. Alabama’s minimum salary is $24,824. Rhode Island’s is $24,754. Since the cost of living in Rhode Island is much higher than that in Alabama, one might reason that it is easier to hire new teachers in Alabama than in Rhode Island. But when you account for the climb, the perspective changes. New Rhode Island teachers can expect a 69% climb while Alabama teachers can expect only slightly more than 26%.
Ohio, at $20,355, ranks 45th among states in starting teacher salary. This ranking may be politically useful in bargaining for better pay for starting teachers, but the 87.1% climb is certainly an important factor in choosing teaching over other professions.
Alderman suggests that adjusting the steps and slope of the salary scale to mirror the steps and slopes of teacher effectiveness could work as a compromise on performance pay. It certainly would be an improvement over rewarding teachers for things unrelated to performance, but the limitation of the traditional pay scale is not that it’s a scale (the military has one). It’s that there is little to no acknowledgment of individual achievement. No mathematical adjustment can compensate for a system that pays teachers as if they were as interchangeable as factory workers assembling widgets.
