Education Week reports this week on efforts by reform-minded district leaders to recruit and retain better teachers by "front-loading" teacher compensation to pay new teachers significantly more than they'd make under a traditional salary schedule:
Economists who study teacher compensation say most salary schedules, combined with defined-benefit pension plans, tilt compensation strongly toward veteran teachers regardless of those teachers' effectiveness at raising student achievement.Low starting pay, they argue, discourages talented individuals who might otherwise consider teaching from giving it a try. And lock-step salary increases can drive away young teachers who feel they aren't earning what they are worth.
The driving idea behind front-loaded pay systems is to bring the teacher-development and -compensation trajectories together, thus giving beginning teachers the opportunity to win high salaries sooner, and by extension, improving districts' ability to recruit and retain teachers.
District leaders may be able to change the paychecks their teachers receive, but their hands are tied when it comes to teacher retirement benefits, a big piece of the teacher-compensation pie. In Ohio, Governor Ted Strickland announced in his State of the State speech this week that he wants to make teaching more inviting to mid-careerists and top college graduates. His plan to promote the state's alternative licensure option is smart, but he'll still be hard-pressed to recruit people to teaching unless their compensation is competitive with what they'd earn in other professions.
Though the governor has presented an audacious plan "to build our education system anew," there is no indication that he's willing to tackle the Buckeye State's obsolete and costly teacher pension system. (Despite teachers paying 12 percent of their salaries into the pension system and districts contributing another 14 percent, the system's unfunded liabilities top $20 billion-some $4,000 per Ohio household.)???? In a 2007 Fordham report, Michael Podgursky and Robert Costrell--economists at the University of Missouri and the University of Arkansas, respectively--concluded that Ohio's "system is out of step with the state's current teacher needs, labor markets and career patterns. While Ohio's teacher retirement system provides impressive benefits to teachers who make it through a 30-year career, these benefits come at a serious cost to younger system members, to taxpayers, and to the state."
Ohio's teacher retirement system and others like it across America are a serious impediment to front-loading remuneration to new teachers, and it is one states need to figure out how to overcome.
