Teacher Pay

Recently, my Education Senior seminar has been discussing teacher salaries in the United States.  My classmates and I are keenly aware that primary and secondary school teachers don’t get paid very much for all the work they do.

Unfortunately, these low salaries are discouraging many highly-educated students from becoming teachers.  While Teach for America has had success recruiting highly-educated college and universtiy graduates to teach for two years, low salaries are making it difficult for schools to attract and retain them for longer than that.

Other educational systems around the world are also experiencing difficulty recruiting quality students to become teachers, as well as retaining them for extended periods of time.  While a number of unique factors hinder each education system’s ability to recruit and train highly qualified students to become teachers, the two most common factors appear to be low teacher salaries relative to other occupations in the country, as well as the teaching profession’s low standing among other occupations within the professional hierarchy.

For example, while India has a well-established system for training teachers, it has trouble recruiting promising students to the profession.  This is because of the profession’s ‘meager’ salary.  Careers in medicine, law, and engineering carry more prestige, respect and higher salaries relative to teaching.  As a result, few promising students in India pursue teaching careers.  More information on the Indian education system, as well as on other education systems around the world, can be found here.

Since teacher pay was at the forefront of my mind when I began perusing the Croft School’s website, I immediately latched on to a section which discussed teachers at the elite institution. I am fascinated by the payment scheme the school uses to attract and hire teachers. The school recruits and hires both Chilean and international teachers, and uses a scale to pay salaries that include accommodation, pension, taxation, health insurance, and more. The school claims to pay teachers much more favorably than other schools in the immediate area, as well as the city it is located in. This school also says its international teachers enjoy a much higher standard of living than when they taught in their home country.

That line hit me like a ton of bricks.  Did they REALLY just say that?

The description of their pay scale is fascinating to me for two reasons:

1. By comparing their teacher salaries to those in other countries, the school acknowledges that teachers in other parts of the world are not being paid a lot for their work.
2. This school is clearly proud of its long-standing ability to provide a well-rounded education. I believe the extent to which the school values high-quality teachers is seen in its favorable pay structure. The school pays its teachers high salaries because it knows it needs high quality teachers to effectively teach and carry out their curricular objectives.

Since the Croft School has a strong reputation for preparing students to achieve social and monetary success, their pay scale leads me to ask: What if schools in the US paid teachers these types of salaries? Would this change the teaching profession for the better (i.e. attract more highly-educated candidates who have potential to be great teachers ), or worse (i.e. recruit candidates who are more interested in the profession’s money than actually helping children learn and grow)?  Would teacher quality improve as a whole, and would student performance improve, if US schools had the resources to pay teachers higher salaries?

It seems to be working at the Croft School, and I believe if the resources were there, paying teachers higher salaries would improve teacher quality, and thus the academic performance of schools, in the US as well.