Salaries, Sorting, and Discrimination: Educator Compensation and Workforce Dynamics

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Inadequate compensation deters individuals from entering or remaining in the teaching profession (Croft et al., 2018; Hendricks, 2014). Teachers are not only dissatisfied with the low levels of compensation, but with limited wage growth and few opportunities for advancement or additional pay (Steiner et al., 2024). However, the majority of teacher compensation reform and research has focused on base pay. The papers in this panel add to the teacher compensation literature by examining how educators respond to changes in pay structures or perceived discrimination in compensation and employment across four states. The first two papers examine two very different compensation policies that aim to improve the equitable distribution of effective teachers: salary increases within the existing salary schedule and performance pay. The latter two papers investigate the potential consequences of discrimination in compensation and employment for educator retention. 

The first paper describes how Maryland's Blueprint for Maryland's Future, a set of reforms that included across-the-board salary increases and a minimum salary floor, changed the salary distribution. Findings suggest that, while the policy has increased teacher salaries, it has done little to change current compensation structures or better align them with student outcomes. 

In contrast, the second paper examines the effects of the Texas Teacher Incentive Allotment, a performance-based compensation program that incentivizes top-performing teachers to teach in schools serving disadvantaged students, on teacher mobility. Although the bonus program induced high-performing teachers to move to schools with relatively more low-income students, they avoided the most disadvantaged schools, only redistributing teachers marginally. 

In the third paper, the authors apply a relative-pay framework to the study of gender salary gaps and their relationship to principal retention, a novel contribution to the education literature. They establish the existence of relative pay gaps by gender for principals in Pennsylvania, show that they cannot be fully explained by gender differences in principal supply, and examine differential responses to wage unfairness by gender. Their findings suggest that female principals do experience some level of pay discrimination but respond to it no differently than their male counterparts. 

Finally, the fourth paper provides some of the first evidence of the effects of seeking recourse for employment discrimination in the education sector. The authors estimate the effects of employment litigation cases on teacher recruitment and retention outcomes in California. Findings suggest that the presence of these cases in a district negatively affects the size and quality of the teacher workforce by increasing turnover and reducing recruitment of fully certified teachers. 

Taken together, these papers show that current compensation and employment practices, as well as recent attempts to reform them, have done little to improve equity in salaries or the distribution of teachers. They provide important implications for the design of future compensation reforms that aim to increase educator retention, improve equitable access to effective teachers, and reduce pay discrimination.

Policy Area

• Education

Chair

• J. Cameron Anglum, Lehigh University

Discussants

• Andrew Mitchell Camp, Brown University

• Melissa Arnold Lyon, University at Albany

Organizer

• Danielle Sanderson Edwards, Old Dominion University

Individual Presentations

• Teacher Salary Distribution and Sources of Variation: Pay Reforms Under Maryland's Blueprint - Presenting Author: Wesley Morris, University of Memphis

• Teacher Sorting and Preferences over School Disadvantage: Evidence from Performance Pay in Texas - Presenting Author: Patrick Massey, Michigan State University

• Gender, Relative Salary Gaps, and Principal Turnover - Presenting Author: Danielle Sanderson Edwards, Old Dominion University

• Employment Discrimination Lawsuits and School District Employment - Presenting Author: Emily Dieckmann, University of California, Merced; Non-Presenting Co-Author: Reanna Lauren Bromley, University of California, Merced