Are teachers paid more when they work in more difficult schools?
Generally, there’s an assumption that harder jobs will grant higher pay — that’s why, for example, an underwater welder is paid handsomely. That’s called the theory of “compensating wage differentials.” But does the theory reflect the actual practice of the education system? Do less-desired jobs really have higher salaries attached to them?
While teaching isn’t as physically strenuous as underwater welding, there are still teaching roles that are difficult or undesirable. Research shows that teachers don’t prefer working in schools with a high percentage of low-income students, in schools with a high percentage of students of color, or in rural districts. These types of districts often face high teacher turnover rates because of poor working conditions. Theoretically, then, market forces would dictate that teacher salaries are higher in low-income, high-minority, and rural areas.
But is that truly the case?
A new study from Texas State University examines national teacher compensation trends over the last three decades to determine if teachers are compensated more for working these less than plum positions.
Unfortunately, it seems as if working a high-poverty or rural school job of any type often brought wage penalties to teachers. A Fordham Institute analysis of the study writes,
The researchers found that teaching at high-poverty and at rural schools largely correlated with statistically significant wage penalties, even when controlling for cost of living. (The sole exception to this trend was high-poverty, high-minority schools in non-rural areas.) At high-poverty schools, if the share of minority students was held constant at zero in their statistical model, each percentage-point increase in poverty correlated to an average 0.17 percent wage penalty annually. Teachers at a school with 70 percent of kids qualifying for free lunch, then, would earn an average 3.4 percent less annually compared to their colleagues at a school where 50 percent of kids qualify for free lunch.
However, working at a high-minority school or an urban high-minority, high-poverty school brought a very slight wage increase. From Fordham:
[T]eachers earned a wage premium at high-minority schools and at high-minority, high-poverty schools (as long as the schools were not rural). In high-minority schools with no students receiving free lunch, teachers earned an average 0.07 percent more annually for each percentage-point increase in minority students. In a high-minority and high-poverty school, each additional percentage point of both student poverty and minority was correlated with a 0.04 percent increase in wages. So teachers at a school with 80 percent of kids qualifying for free lunch and 80 percent identifying as students of color would earn an average 1.2 percent more annually compared to their colleagues at a school with 50 percent low-income students and 50 percent students of color.
However, the slight wage increase that comes from working at a high-minority, high-poverty urban school might amount to only a few hundred dollars a year — and that extra yearly car payment hasn’t yet allowed challenged urban districts to retain quality teachers. The Fordham Institute noted that high-minority schools’ teacher turnover rate remains two-and-a-half times higher than that of schools serving fewer students of color.
Competitive, high wages will allow the education sector to attract bright, ambitious candidates. Especially in districts that struggle to maintain consistent staffing numbers, high salaries could make all the difference.
A recent Reason Institute analysis found that Minnesota’s average teacher salary in 2022 ($72,773), had only risen 2.5 percent from Minnesota’s average teacher salary in 2002 (in inflation-adjusted 2022 dollars, $70,965). Meanwhile, per-pupil spending has skyrocketed since 2002. Support staff has grown, too. The Reason Institute found that in 2022, there were 66,578 non-teachers in public schools, up from 51,660 in 2002—an 28.9% increase.
While support staff are invaluable for a teacher’s support, it is possible that many of these positions could be consolidated. As teacher quality and curricula improve, it’s also possible that some of these positions are made superfluous. (For example, it would be a great achievement for a district to only need one intensive reading interventionist tutor rather than three!) It’s also possible that budgets could be re-examined in order to reprioritize money towards teacher’s salaries. Whatever the path forward, it is clear that quality teachers need to be incentivized to enter the workforce. Higher pay is one part of that incentivization structure.
