What if all teachers could achieve excellent student learning results by getting the right leadership and support? This guide presents examples of career paths that make this possible—using multi-school leaders, multi-classroom leaders, and other roles for teachers, who can collaborate, improve, and excel on teams led by multi-classroom leaders. Teachers and principals in all these paths reach more students with excellent teaching and earn more for it, within schools’ budgets.
Teacher and Leader Compensation
Lacking Leaders: The Challenges of Principal Recruitment, Selection, and Placement
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In this report for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Public Impact takes an in-depth look at principal hiring practices in five urban districts. Despite making improvements, our primary finding is that principal hiring practices continue to fall short of what is needed, effectively causing needy schools to lose out on leaders with the potential to be great. So what to do? Districts must improve their hiring practices to take a more active approach to principal recruitment, evaluate candidates against the competencies and skills that successful principals are known to possess, carefully design a placement process that matches schools’ needs with candidates’ strengths, and continually evaluate hiring efforts to ensure that they are effectively recruiting, selecting, and placing the leaders that schools depend on for success. Our research also suggests that better hiring practices alone are only part of the solution; districts must also re-imagine the principal’s role so that it is a job that talented leaders want and are equipped to execute successfully. See the companion infographic for a quick summary.
Teacher Compensation in Charter and Private Schools: Snapshots and Lessons for District Public Schools
In this report for the Center for American Progress, Julie Kowal, Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan C. Hassel examine teacher compensation policies in charter and private schools for lessons to help traditional public schools more effectively draw and keep high-quality teachers. The authors looked to national surveys of charter and private schools and interviews with leading charter and private school networks for their answers to major questions that animate the current debates over teacher pay in public schools. Their findings, presented at CAP in February 2007, offer a picture of what school and district leaders can do with pay when they are free to use compensation as a tool to meet their goals.
Financial Incentives for Hard-to-Staff Positions, Cross-Sector Lessons for Public Education
Debate rages in education over whether to provide teachers with financial incentives in order to improve recruitment and retention in “hard-to-staff” schools and subject areas. In other public sectors—the civil service, military, and medicine—organizations take for granted that compensation is a powerful tool; they have moved from this debate about “whether” to a discussion of “how.” Experience from these domains suggests that a “portfolio” of incentives (including performance bonuses, loan repayment or scholarship programs, and other forms) may be most effective. As a component of this portfolio, performance-based incentives can boost both the recruitment and retention power of hard-to-staff pay—particularly for the high-potential candidates that we need most in hard-to-staff schools. [Read more…]
Improving Teaching Through Pay for Contribution
Despite proliferating chatter about the need to reform teacher compensation, the bulk of teacher pay remains fundamentally unchanged. This report by Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan C. Hassel, with research assistance from Julie Kowal and published by the NGA Center for Best Practices, sets forth a guiding principle for moving from talk to action—“pay for contribution.” Pay for contribution means investing more in teachers and teaching roles that contribute measurably more to student learning. Pay for contribution is particularly attractive to higher contributors. For this reason, it can help shape not only the performance of current teachers, but also the quality of the future teaching workforce by shifting who enters and stays in the profession. The report explains several approaches to pay for contribution and explores the research on how to design these strategies to get the best results. In addition, it explores related policy initiatives, such as data systems with teacher-level student learning results, that would help make pay for contribution happen.
