In his report to the state board of education in June, Education Commissioner Wayne Lewis argued that Kentucky needs to rethink its structures for paying teachers. His remarks were part of a larger point that just increasing funding for education across the board - something Dr. Lewis supports - won't automatically result in greater student learning. Yes, teachers need to be paid more in general, the Commissioner argued, but districts also need greater flexibility to pay more for teachers in high-needs subject areas or who work with high-needs students, and also to reward teachers for excellent performance. Expanding this flexibility helps us impact the single most important factor in student learning within the control of schools: the performance quality of teachers in the individual classroom, especially in light of recent discussions about the statewide shortage of applicants for teaching positions.
As usual, what to people outside of education seems to be a common sense idea was met with outrage and opposition by some members of the education establishment and their media allies. Media reports misrepresented the Commissioner's points, suggesting that he was arguing that teachers should be paid based on student test scores (something he did not say), and the Kentucky Education Association, that perpetual defender of the education status quo, of course voiced its opposition to any change in the "single salary schedule," which essentially requires teacher pay to be based on degrees earned and years of experience. When I personally tried to engage with educator friends on social media to look more closely at what the Commissioner was arguing, I encountered a barrage of criticism that made thoughtful discussion of the issue nearly impossible.
Nevertheless, this topic is definitely worthy of more public debate. Kentucky law already has some provisions for better differentiating teacher salaries and I fully support the concept of giving school districts the freedom to experiment with new approaches to teacher pay, for the reasons I'll discuss below. In doing so, let me be clear that I'm speaking strictly for myself, and not on behalf of any other members of the Kentucky Board of Education, or my employer, Western Kentucky University.
Incentive pay for high-need areas
During a recent visit to a career technical school with Commissioner Lewis, we met a welding teacher who had previously been making in excess of $100,000 working in a sector of that industry requiring a high degree of skill. He had given up that large salary to teach his craft to others and spend more time with his family, but his principal speculated that as soon as the teacher's youngest child graduated high school he would leave and return to the industry where he could make far more money.
That teacher's story illustrates one of the key challenges to ensuring every Kentucky student has access to high-quality career and technical education. These fields require teachers who have practical experience working in industries that almost universally pay more than teaching. District and Area Technology Center administrators are perpetually vexed by how to recruit and retain teachers in areas like health care, engineering, information technology, building trades, etc. Simply put, districts should have the ability, if they choose, to offer higher salaries to teachers in these fields in order to strengthen the pool of teaching candidates in these subjects and encourage the best to remain in education.
The same possibility should be available for teachers in other hard-to-hire areas such as special education and secondary science areas like chemistry and physics. Moreover, districts should be encouraged to offer bonus pay for teachers in high-poverty or historically low-achieving schools.
In fact, like 23 other states, Kentucky law does permit districts to do some of these things already through KRS 157.390(6) and (7), but the language of section 6 implies that the state would provide additional funding to support differential teacher pay for hard-to-hire subject areas under this provision, stating "The Kentucky Department of Education shall administer the funds appropriated for these purposes." No such appropriation has been made by the General Assembly since at least 2004, and therefore no districts have participated since then. Section 7 allows districts to offer bonus pay for teachers in struggling schools, and such a program was put in place in the Jefferson County Public Schools starting last school year, with the district using its own general fund to pay for it.
The state legislature should look for statutory changes to give districts more flexibility by reconsidering the required single salary schedule altogether, but also by targeting funding for teacher salary increases in ways that would allow districts to provide these incentives, perhaps through a KDE-administered grant that would direct more resources to the areas of greatest need. Furthermore, the regulations adopted by KBE in the past to implement KRS 157.390(6) seem far more expansive than what is required by the law, and so the state board might consider regulatory changes to 702 KAR 3:310 to give districts more freedom under existing law to experiment with differentiated salaries. Hopefully these will be topics of discussion for both the General Assembly and KBE in coming months.
Even if such changes are possible, it appears that some educators are still opposed to paying teachers differently based on their subject areas or their choice to work in high-needs schools. The most legitimate argument against differentiated pay is that the work of all educators is extremely valuable. All other factors being equal, paying CTE or special education teachers more than others seems to suggest we value their work more. But salaries do not reflect a value judgment about the importance of someone's work; rather, they reflect the forces necessary in a free market (free in the sense that people get to choose the work they want to do), and the way resources have to be allocated to ensure that high-needs positions are filled.
These kinds of differentiation in salary are already well known in the helping sectors of the economy. University professors in education administration (my own academic field) are paid a higher base salary than professors in teacher education, because the professional background and skill needed to teach education administration means those professors could make considerably more money out in K-12 schools actually doing the work of administration rather than sharing that knowledge with others. Business professors make more money than English professors, theoretically for the same reason. In health care, neurosurgeons earn much higher salaries than pediatricians, not because we consider pediatricians less important, but because the training and skills needed to become a neurosurgeon are considerably more complex than those necessary to be a pediatrician, and if we want good neurosurgeons, salaries must reflect the difference.
If we try to shelter K-12 educators from these same economic realities, we don't actually inject greater value into the work teachers do. We actually make it harder for the K-12 system to do its job and provide all students a high-quality, equitable education.
Performance Pay
Far more controversial than differentiating teacher pay based on subject area or for working in high-needs schools is the idea of actually paying teachers based on the quality of their work. Various states have experimented with sometimes complicated schemes whereby teachers can earn additional pay based on the performance of their students on test scores. Such programs are rife with problems, not the least of which is whether a one-time test score is the best measure of a student's performance, let alone of teachers.
To be clear, in his comments to the state board Commissioner Lewis never once endorsed a "merit pay" program based strictly on test scores (nor would I ever support such a plan). But as American Enterprise Institute education scholar Rick Hess wrote several years ago, it's quite possible to recognize all the pitfalls of test-score-based merit pay schemes - and reject them - and still conclude that the way we pay teachers is truly unfair to our highest performing educators. Many teachers new in their career are familiar with the disappointment of knowing they may be teaching circles around their colleague across the hall, but their colleague makes substantially more money based strictly on years of experience and degrees earned (the latter of which has virtually no linkage to actual student learning outcomes).
The only incentive any teacher has for doing a great job is the satisfaction of knowing they have done so. Thank God so many still do. But there's no avoiding the reality that the single salary schedule provides no financial incentives whatsoever for teachers to perform well, and in fact discourages their efforts by ignoring the real differences in teacher quality every student, educator, and parent knows exists and can observe every day.
It doesn't have to be this way. The basic structure of paying teachers based on experience and education can remain while giving individual districts flexibility to also reward teachers for performance based on a wide combination of factors that can be determined at the local level. Districts might utilize peer observation, administrator evaluations, locally-determined student growth or achievement measures, and other variables in combination to provide bonus pay for high performers. And this is essentially what Commissioner Lewis argued for in terms of performance pay. Not a statewide system, but the flexibility for local districts to experiment and innovate as they see fit based on their own local needs.
Again, defenders of the status quo will question such approaches because performance evaluation always has an inherent (and sometimes large) element of subjectivity. But education is not unique in this regard. In virtually every other sector of the economy, employees are subject to salary bonuses or pay raises based, often, entirely on the subjective judgment of managers. Local districts can use multiple measures of performance to mitigate against some of this subjectivity, and theoretically the entire set up would be accountable to the community through the locally-elected school board. What performance pay looks like in one community might differ considerably than in others, and that's a very good thing. High performing teachers might even be able to select jobs in districts that seemed to offer the fairest salary system based on the quality of their work. In fact, a 2017 research study found that performance pay helped districts recruit higher-quality teachers. And, perhaps even more importantly, a 2018 study by the Institutes for Education Science found that performance pay was correlated with significant increases in student reading and math achievement.
Every public policy seeking to answer one set of problems inevitably creates new challenges. The single salary schedule was created with good intentions to help ensure fair pay for women and minority teachers. However, over time, it has not only created new issues in terms of recruiting, retaining, and distributing high-quality teachers to the places they are need most, but also in reflecting and rewarding the actual differences in teacher performance. And given that there is no more powerful influence on student achievement within the control of the education system than the quality of the teacher in the classroom, in this sense existing teacher pay structures are seriously undermining our most important strategy for impacting student learning.
The new challenges of differentiated teacher pay are real, but in comparison with the problems in the status quo, they are absolutely worth the effort to try a new approach, and I hope educators and the general public will welcome the discussion.
Usual disclaimer: Views expressed on this website are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of anyone else affiliated with Western Kentucky University (where I am professor of educational administration, leadership, and research) or the Kentucky Board of Education (where I am a member and chair of the Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment Committee).
