Should states invest new money in teacher compensation instead of school funding reform?
Happy Election Day, ed-policy peeps. Today we tackle a question I’ve long been obsessed with: why the big increases in education funding over the past few decades haven’t translated into higher teacher pay, and (assuming it would be good to do) how we might change that. Plus, recent takes from Margaret Spellings, Liz Cohen, Matt Kraft, Marty Lueken, Matt Gandal, Rick Hess, Jed Wallace, Marc Porter Magee, Bruno Manno, Pat Wolf, Doug Harris, and Karen Vaites. And Jorge Elorza gets Arne Duncan to support private school choice!
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One of the attacks on education reformers that always stuck in my craw is that we’re stingy about teacher pay. I remember someone—maybe Diane Ravitch?—saying that we reform types love applying economics to education except when it comes to labor economics, which clearly shows that, if we want higher-quality teachers, we need to offer higher pay.
Which is true!
But if that was a fair criticism of reformers once upon a time, it’s not anymore. Lots of us are worried about the mediocre salaries available to most teachers. Marguerite Roza, for instance, recently called for a Star Teacher bill to send $10,000–20,000 in state funds to highly effective teachers. “The next few years offer an important opportunity for school systems to refocus around the silver bullet of teacher quality,” writes Marguerite. “Doing so will mean putting money where your mouth is teacher quality is.”
And then there’s this interactive analysis from Chad Aldeman, in partnership with The 74, which produced one of the most depressing charts in education:
As a country, we’ve succeeded at boosting spending but failed miserably at boosting pay.
As Mike McShane explains in this vertical video, the average classroom of students brings in hundreds of thousands of dollars in public funding. Teachers only get a tiny slice of that. Where the heck is the money going?
That’s actually not such a mystery. We know that the number of non-teachers working in our school systems has risen dramatically—what Ben Scafidi named “the staffing surge.” Every few years it feels like we’re inventing new types of jobs to fill with public school spending, from literacy coaches to tutors to mental health workers to OG roles like aides and administrators. And of course there’s our obsession with small class sizes. As Checker Finn, among others, has long argued, we keep choosing quantity over quality. And don’t forget the growing expense of health care benefits and pension costs.
It’s not just traditional public schools. There’s little reason to think that charter schools are bucking these trends, save for a few outliers like New York City’s The Equity Project School.
What’s clear is that all over the country—in both traditional public school and charters—education leaders keep choosing to syphon off money for new staff, new programs, small classes, and benefits rather than paying teachers more, especially those who are highly effective or serving in high-need schools or shortage areas. Is that the right choice? And if not, is there anything policy might do to change it?
This week, I’d like to debate these key questions. More specifically:
What’s the argument that districts and charter schools should be prioritizing higher pay for their teachers? To my mind, the case for higher teacher pay is a slam dunk. After all, as Marguerite and others often remind folks, teacher effectiveness is the number one driver of student achievement that’s within schools’ control. Higher salaries are especially important in high-need schools, where we know that salaries must be significantly higher in order to draw great educators there.
But there must be a counterargument. Lots of charter people, for example, talk about the importance of surrounding teachers with support, which means staff, so as to improve their instructional practices. Or that we need to invest in tutoring, counseling, and other student supports. Is that true? Or would we get better results with higher-quality teachers, even if they had to work without as much of a safety net? Except in the highest-spending locales, leaders need to choose!If we do think we’d get better results by translating more of our investments into higher salaries, how might states go about that? Should we stop focusing so much on reforming state funding formulas—by making them more progressive—and instead invest state dollars directly into teacher compensation? Should all states follow Texas’s lead and replicate its billion-dollar Teacher Incentive Allotment or something like it to promote higher (and differential) pay? Mandate teacher pay reforms like those that have stood the test of time in Washington, D.C., and that are starting to bubble up again? Or should reformers stick with the old playbook of driving more money to our neediest schools, and then let those schools figure out what to spend the dollars on (within the limits of union contracts, uniform salary schedules, etc.)?
These are big, meaty questions. Please wonk out and weigh in!
Matt Gandal takes to his Forbes column to continue the conversation around high school graduation requirements rebooted here at SCHOOLED. “States should move away from the one-size-fits-all high school exit requirements,” Matt writes, “to a more multi-faceted system of expectations that sets a firm floor but also raises the ceiling and more clearly aligns with the postsecondary and workforce demands.” He hopes states like Massachusetts and New York will follow the lead of Indiana and Rhode Island, which have already moved in this direction.
Speaking of conversations, Pat Wolf and Doug Harris engage in a polite but fierce debate around private school choice in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. Read Doug’s initial argument, and Pat’s, and then Doug’s response, and then Pat’s.
Now let’s turn to a duo that agrees about private school choice: Arne Duncan and Jorge Elorza, who argue in the pages of the Washington Post for all states—even blue ones—to opt into the One Big Beautiful Bill’s education tax credit initiative. That’s not a new position for Jorge, but I’m pretty sure this serves as Arne’s coming-out party on private school choice. “This is Democrats’ chance to regain the educational and moral high ground,” they write. “To remind the country that Democrats fight to give every child a fair shot and that we’ll do whatever it takes to help kids catch up, especially those left behind for too long.” Wow!
One more duo for today: Liz Cohen interviews Matt Kraft about which one of them loves tutoring more. It’s a toss-up! They also agree that more research is needed, that AI holds promise, and that it would be great for tutoring to be “part of the fabric of our education system,” as Matt puts it.
Last week in SCHOOLED, I flagged John McWhorter’s essay on AI as “required reading”—but I probably should have given it a big ole’ F. Rick Hess is unafraid to do so, even though, like me, he admires McWhorter and most of his writing. But McWhorter’s “shrug” regarding AI’s impact on learning was misguided, Rick rightly argues. “I’m convinced that youth are better served when they spend more time reading books,” Rick writes, “less time watching TikToks, and have those expectations reinforced by parents and educators who act accordingly.” Yup!
Which is not to say that we can ignore AI’s impact on the economy, certain to be big whether we like it or not. Work-based learning is the key to preparing students for this future, convincingly argues Bruno Manno in a new SSIR article.
All eyes are on Arizona’s ESA program, given its first-in-the nation status and its libertarian design. One argument from detractors is that the initiative is blowing a hole in the Grand Canyon State’s budget, but Marty Lueken brings the receipts to rebut that claim. Many of the new participants in the expanded ESA program were previously tapping Arizona’s education tax credit initiative, so their expenses are not new. And when families move from public schools to the private sector, that saves the state money, too. Marty writes, “These net costs of $178 million in year one and $118 million in year two represent just 1.1 percent and 0.7 percent of total K–12 funding from all sources (local, state, and federal) for Arizona public schools, respectively.”
Marc Porter Magee finds some education nuggets in Deciding to Win, the new election analysis by center-left organization Welcome. See especially this chart showing how a baker’s dozen of education issues poll with the public. Lots of Republican-coded ideas are underwater (including eliminating the Department of Education and zeroing-out Title I), but the least popular idea by far is left-coded: getting rid of tracking. Instead, we should depolarize gifted education!
Speaking of the Department of Ed, Matt Barnum interviews Margaret Spellings about whether it should be abolished (no), why NCLB-style accountability grew unpopular (because of the teachers and other adults), and whether there’s still an appetite for bipartisan education reform (yes).
Over at CharterFolk, Jed Wallace tees off from Fordham’s recent study on school boards and its findings that those boards tend to be anti-charter. Which is a problem, given that so many school boards authorize charter schools! Also, it’s not a good sign that the Council of Great City Schools gave its annual award to one of the most-anti-charter leaders in the country. Ugh.
Finally, curriculum maven Karen Vaites digs deep into Massachusetts’s science of reading bill, which sailed through the House and is now before the Senate. She makes a strong case for why it’s desperately needed in the Bay State.
“The Piney Woods experience upends much of the conventional wisdom on what’s needed to educate low-income Black students. It has succeeded without fancy amenities, without large government subsidies, and without a ‘critical mass’ of nonblack students to provide ‘diversity’ in the classroom. It’s a model that should be replicated. Unfortunately, it’s mostly been ignored.” —Jason L. Riley, The Wall Street Journal
Graduation rates rise in Illinois despite declining test scores and increasing student absenteeism. We can debate the solutions, but it’s hard to deny that high school graduation standards are too low. —Becky Vevea, Chalkbeat
“As governments hunt for ways to close budget gaps, unions may find dumping retirees on Obamacare more palatable than layoffs or other benefit cuts. It could also free up revenue for expanding government programs,” says Allysia Finley. Fair point, but don’t we want districts to wind down their retiree healthcare systems and use that money to serve students instead? —The Wall Street Journal
Alpha School claims its AI-tutoring-based method lets kids excel in two hours a day, but its expansion to Brownsville, Texas reveals shortcomings—especially when the model extends beyond wealthy, highly educated communities. —Todd Feathers, Wired
National trends in funding and salaries mask a lot of variability at the state local levels. Just comparing districts within the same state can produce wildly different relationships between spending and average salaries. In WA, compare Highline SD with Shoreline SD, for example. That's natural given a context where the state delivers total funds and sets requirements, and locals are left to do the actual bargaining. If states truly want to increase teacher salaries, they need to do that directly instead of hiding behind local bargaining.
Staff mix plays a role, too. Locals with higher turnover in the last twenty years can have big swings in the average experience of their teaching staff. Increasing numbers of non-teachers are added to locals as legislation changes and bargaining - with labor or the community at large. That's not necessarily going to help the spending to salary ratio in cases where paraeducators or clerical staff are added.