Archived Information

Reinventing Teacher Compensation Systems

by Carolyn Kelley and Allan Odden

The views expressed here are those of the authors and are not necessarily shared by CPRE or its funding agencies.

In the 1980s, two main efforts were made to modify the single-salary schedule. Merit pay, designed to recognize and reward the best teachers, was tried in a few states and districts. And career ladder programs tried to alter the flat career structure of teaching. These efforts failed for generally the same reasons earlier efforts fizzled--they were not linked to the organizational needs and working processes of effective schools and thus were poorly designed.

For example, merit pay plans usually require individual teachers to compete against each other for a limited pool of funds. Such competition among teachers works against the collaborative culture found in most highly effective schools and thus is at odds with strategies to improve school performance.

Career ladder programs provide non-teaching jobs for a fixed number of excellent teachers, thus offering a way out of the classroom for the best professionals in schools, just the opposite of how a high-performance school should deploy its best workers. Further, teachers often were not integral partners in the design process, and too often funding was eliminated after the first years of implementation.

But other organizations in the country have been successful in implementing new compensation structures. Moreover, these new plans have been associated with wide worker acceptance, better employee morale, improved organizational performance, and higher individual salaries.

In this issue of CPRE Finance Briefs, the authors argue that it is now time for education to join these successful efforts and revise teacher pay systems. The brief provides a short history of changes in teacher compensation over the last century and a discussion of key organizational and educational changes today that could be reinforced by a new teacher compensation structure. It also suggests some new teacher pay elements and a set of principles states and districts could follow if they embark on the journey to redesign how teachers are paid.¹ Examples of leading-edge compensation programs are included in sidebars within this brief.

• History of Teacher Pay Changes
• Linking Compensation to Organizational Needs
• Elements of New Compensation Systems
• Design and Development
• New Structures and Approaches to Compensation
• References

1. The CPRE Finance Center's research on teacher compensation has been informed by a series of meetings held with leaders from several key education organizations, supported in part by the Pew Charitable Trusts. We would like to thank the Teacher Compensation Working Group for their insightful comments. The opinions expressed in this paper are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the members of the Teacher Compensation Working Group, CPRE, or the Pew Charitable Trusts.

The Consortium for Policy Research in Education

The CPRE Policy and Finance Centers are part of a nationwide network of university-based research and development centers whose mission is to strengthen the performance of American students by providing useful and sound information. The research agenda for both Centers is built around three goals:

• To focus research on policies that foster high levels of learning for all students, regardless of social or economic background.

• To conduct research that will lead to more coherence of state and local policies that promote student learning.

• To study how policies respond to diversity in the needs of students, schools, postsecondary institutions, and states; and to learn more about the connections between student outcomes and resource patterns in schools and postsecondary academic departments.

The views expressed in CPRE publications are those of individual authors and are not necessarily shared by the Consortium, its institutional members, or the U. S. Department of Education.

For further information on CPRE publications contact Dawn Weniger at CPRE, Carriage House at the Eagleton Institute of Politics, Rutgers University, 86 Clifton Ave., New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1568; 908/932-1331.

CPRE Management

Allan R. Odden
Co-Director, The Finance Center
Wisconsin Center for Education Research
University of Wisconsin-Madison

William H. Clune
Wisconsin Center for Education Research
University of Wisconsin-Madison

David K. Cohen
School of Education
University of Michigan

Richard F. Elmore
School of Education
Harvard University

Michael W. Kirst
School of Education
Stanford University

[History of Teacher Pay Changes]

Return to Publications page