Differentiated Teacher Pay in Senate Bill 727

Several years ago, I was invited to give a guest lecture to a group of STEM educators seeking a doctoral degree. My task was to share with them ways in which my work in education policy overlapped with their world. My key point that night was that we need to change how we pay teachers. It was a point I have been making since the release of my 2012 report, "The Salary Straitjacket: The Pitfalls of Paying All Teachers the Same." Now, if Senate Bill (SB) 727 is signed by the governor, one of those recommendations from that paper may finally come to pass.

Teachers in nearly every school district are paid by what is called a "single salary schedule." This is a system that pays all teachers, regardless of subject matter expertise or teacher demand in that district, the same amount. These schedules generally provide raises based on years of experience and graduate degrees.

When I spoke with that group of doctoral students, I presented a hypothetical situation of a local business. When the business attempted to hire, they received numerous applications for one type of position and very few for another. I asked them what they might do to attract and retain people in that harder-to-staff position. The answer was clear-pay them more.

This is the very situation we have in public schools. Some positions may get few, if any, applications. These include subjects such as physics or, in some instances, special education. Nevertheless, school districts fail to use one of the key levers they have to attract and retain these teachers-pay. Instead, everyone is on the same salary schedule.

In that 2012 report, I argued that school districts could place teachers in hard-to-staff subjects at a higher level on the salary schedule. SB 727 followed that recommendation completely. The bill states: "The board of education of a school district may include differentiated placement of teachers on the salary schedule to increase compensation in order to recruit and retain teachers in hard-to-staff subject areas or hard-to-staff schools."

When I joined the Show-Me Institute's Director of Education Policy Susan Pendergrass on a recent podcast to discuss SB 727, I said there were things in the bill that people would like and other things they would not like. Allowing districts to differentiate pay for hard-to-staff subjects is a sensible policy that everyone should like. Of course, it would be even better if we could pay teachers based on everything they bring to the table, including their performance, but this is a step in the right direction.