Teacher

Vanderbilt University’s National Center on Performance Initiatives provides studies that evaluate how pay-for-performance initiatives impact the quality of schools and districts. This resource is a scholarly assessment of education initiatives that use pay for performance, including randomized field trials of teacher-specific and schoolwide bonuses across the country.

This Public Impact webpage contains links to financial analyses of three of the 20+ Opportunity Culture school models. Savings and cost calculations of the models—Elementary Subject Specialization, Multi-Classroom Leadership, and Time-Technology Swap Rotation—illustrate that schools could increase excellent teachers’ pay up to approximately 130 percent, without increasing class sizes and within available budgets. In some variations, schools may pay all teachers more, sustainably.

To address the shortage of excellent teachers in the United States, the System for Teacher and Student Advancement (TAP) has created a multipronged incentive structure to recruit more of America’s best candidates into the classroom. These include multiple career paths, professional development, collaboration, and performance-based compensation. TAP has been implemented in several states with some success.

Teachers in the United States have historically had lower average salaries than their peers with similar educational backgrounds, with 62 percent of teachers requiring a second job outside of the classroom—such as tutoring, mowing lawns, selling stereos, or bartending—to be able to afford to teach. The Teacher Salary Project aims to raise awareness about the need to provide more attractive compensation to attract and retain effective teachers.

Education Resource Strategies (ERS) is an organization that provides resources and tools that aim to change the way people, time, and money are used in urban education to dramatically improve student learning. Resources on their webpage on teaching innovation include publications and case studies that focus on rethinking and redesigning teacher compensation systems to attract, reward, and retain talent and ideas on how to restructure the teaching job to emphasize teacher teams, differentiated roles, and opportunities to develop and increase impact.

Education Resource Strategies (ERS) is an organization that provides resources and tools that aim to change the way people, time, and money are used in urban education to dramatically improve student learning. Resources on ERS’s webpage on teaching innovation include publications and case studies that focus on rethinking and redesigning teacher compensation systems to attract, reward, and retain talent and ideas on how to restructure the teaching job to emphasize teacher teams, differentiated roles, and opportunities to develop and increase impact.

Education Resource Strategies (ERS) is an organization that provides resources and tools that aim to change the way people, time, and money are used in urban education to dramatically improve student learning. Resources on ERS’s webpage on teaching innovation include publications and case studies that focus on rethinking and redesigning teacher compensation systems to attract, reward, and retain talent and ideas on how to restructure the teaching job to emphasize teacher teams, differentiated roles, and opportunities to develop and increase impact.

With national focus on reforming teacher evaluation and development, school districts are finding themselves in need of rethinking how teachers are compensated and how to tie this compensation to attracting and keeping high-quality teachers, all while making the new system sustainable. This report by Education Resource Strategies combines a series of memos and explores standard goals of redesigning compensation and its implications for base salary, district priority incentives, school roles, rewards, and fiscal sustainability. This resource seeks to provide a starting point. 

This report is one in a series of four on rethinking teacher compensation. It examines the experiences and offerings given to a teacher by the school system. Education Resource Strategies examines how this value proposition is structure and how it can be leveraged into a strong management tool for attracting and retaining high-performing teachers.