Teacher and Staff Challenges

The average public school teacher salary reached $66,745 in the 2021-22 school year — a 2% jump from the year before, according to a report released April 24 by the National Education Association. Salaries are expected to grow by another 2.6% in 2022-23, according to NEA.

However, when inflation is factored in, the average teacher salary actually dropped an estimated 6.4% — or $3,644 — in the past decade, NEA said.

The report from the nation's largest teachers union also said teachers earn 25% more on average when they work in a state that permits collective bargaining. In 2021-22, the average salary for teachers covered by bargaining laws hit $71,966, compared to $57,558 in states without bargaining laws. 

“A perfect storm is brewing in public schools,” NEA President Becky Pringle said in a statement, as signs suggest the teacher shortage may be worsening. 

“Low wages and a lack of professional respect are leaving too many classrooms without teachers,” Pringle said.

Debates have continued over how to approach improving teacher pay as staff shortages persist and schools work to recover from pandemic-related learning losses.

Several cases suggest performance-based incentive programs can help boost student achievement, particularly in more disadvantaged schools. Such was the case for a Dallas Independent School District program that increased base salaries of effective teachers by up to $10,000 per year if they worked in a low-achieving school. 

A study published Tuesday by the Harvard journal Education Next analyzed how Wisconsin’s 2011 passage of Act 10 impacted student performance and salaries. The state law weakened unions’ roles in negotiating teacher salaries while allowing districts to offer more flexible pay based on a teacher’s effectiveness in the classroom, which essentially gave district leaders the ability to detach compensation from seniority and credentials. 

The study found districts that implemented flexible pay models attracted more effective teachers, but consequently, the policy reform sparked the emergence of a gender pay gap effectively penalizing women teaching in Wisconsin. Before Act 10, no gender wage gap existed under the district implementation of seniority-based salary schedules, the study said. 

“The emergence of a gender wage gap following the introduction of flexible pay suggests that gender differences in teachers’ willingness to bargain or their bargaining ability could be driving part or all of it,” the study said. The gap is also more substantial in schools and districts run by men, according to the study.

Meanwhile, some members of Congress are proposing sweeping reforms to raise teachers’ base salaries nationwide. In March, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., introduced the Pay Teachers Act of 2023, which would require states to have a minimum $60,000 starting salary for teachers. A similar bill, the American Teacher Act, was proposed earlier this year in the House by Rep. Frederica Wilson, D-Fla., and Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y.. 

President Joe Biden also called attention to teacher pay during his State of the Union address in February, when he said, “Let’s give public schools teachers a raise.”

Los Angeles Unified School District and United Teachers Los Angeles announced April 18 that a tentative agreement had been reached on a new contract for teachers in the nation’s second-largest school system.

According to announcements from both the district and the union, the agreement would provide: 

• A 21% total teacher wage increase for 2022-2025. 

• A class size reduction of two students per class across all grade levels.

• First-ever enforceable special education caseload caps and reductions.

• An investment in creating, expanding and maintaining green spaces, including for outdoor class space and programs.

• An additional counselor for college counseling in all high schools with 900 or more students.

• Additional ​​psychiatric social workers, pupil services and attendance counselors, academic counselors, and school psychologists.

• Extra professional development on “Banked Time Tuesdays” every week in every school.

• An additional $5,400 per year for dual language program teachers, including those teaching in American Sign Language.

• An additional $1,000 per year for dual language program teachers providing content instruction in English.

The agreement also includes salary increases for school nurses, psychologists, pupil services and attendance counselors, audiologists, optometrists, social workers, and speech and language pathologists.

“This agreement with UTLA is a necessary step not only to make Los Angeles Unified the district of choice for families but also the district of choice for teachers and employees," Superintendent Alberto M. Carvalho said in a statement. The agreement, he added, reflects the work of the district’s employees, improves the academic experience for students and raises compensation standards in Los Angeles and nationally.

The tentative agreement caps 11 months of bargaining and comes just weeks after UTLA joined school employees represented by Service Employees International Union Local 99 in a three-day, 60,000-member joint solidarity strike. A resulting agreement between the district and school employees has since been approved by SEIU members.

In UTLA’s statement, union President Cecily Myart-Cruz said, “With this tentative agreement, LAUSD now has an opportunity to become one of the most successful school districts in the country. We held the line during bargaining on a number of initiatives because educators are the experts on what has the ability to transform LAUSD into a more equitable environment that not only improves students’ learning, but also the quality of life for LA families.”

A ratification vote is expected to be scheduled in the coming weeks.

Changes in leadership are potentially fraught times for school districts, and having a succession plan can ensure smooth transitions with an eye toward organizational growth, experts say.

“From a leadership perspective — the board of education and superintendent and executive team — succession planning should be on your agenda throughout the year,” said John Kellogg, superintendent of Westerville City School District in Ohio, which has been focusing on succession planning for nearly a decade.

School districts typically address succession planning for superintendents, but it should be done for all levels of staffing, Kellogg said. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated turnover rates among educators. About 300,000 public school teachers and other staff left the field between February 2020 and May 2022, a nearly 3% drop in that workforce, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data cited by The Wall Street Journal. And 1 in 2 school principals, assistant and vice principals considered a career change or retirement due to high stress levels, according to a 2022 survey by the National Association of Secondary School Principals. 

“Schools are these slow-to-change organizations, and there’s been reason for that,” Kellogg said. “But we are in an environment where the world around us is just changing rapidly, so you have to keep your eye on the horizon and be flexible, and maximize the talent you have.”

For districts exploring or building out succession plans, here are five strategies to keep in mind.

Consider your district’s needs and plan accordingly

Several years ago, Westerville City School District identified student equity, safety and social-emotional learning as strategic areas of need. It has been addressing those goals through administrative realignments and succession planning, Kellogg said.

The process started with a close examination of the district’s leadership team, including individual skills and shortcomings, the timeline of upcoming retirements, and an analysis of ways to maximize talent already in the pipeline, Kellogg said. 

“We also looked for better alignment of certain operational parts of the organization, such as whose roles we were going to expand,” he said. “We looked at who was already in the district and how to start growing their capacity, and also where to bring in new blood and fresh perspectives.”

The district’s organizational structure should give employees the time and opportunity to move up the ranks, Kellogg said. For example, in 2014-15 the district created a position for “coordinator of minority student achievement,” later renamed “coordinator for equity education.” Over time, the district added an equity specialist and equity team, along with funding, at each school building. 

“All the other pieces we put into it were to make sure we had that as an anchored part of the organization,” Kellogg said.

Know current employees’ skills and interests

It’s “absolutely critical” that the district leadership team have a good understanding of employees’ skills, including underutilized ones, by going into school buildings, talking to supervisors, and getting to know staff members and their interests, Kellogg said. 

School districts should nurture a culture of lifting up employees and encouraging their professional development, Kellogg said. For example, the district’s newest business manager started as food service supervisor and later advanced to HR director and, after that, HR executive director, he said.

Giving existing staff expanded roles and responsibilities — with a title change and a salary increase — can be very revitalizing for them and the organization as a whole, he said. “Ultimately, it’s all for the benefit of the students.”

When hiring new staff, district leaders should ensure candidates are interested in professional growth and can be flexible and adaptable, Kellogg said. It’s also key to find out if candidates have any additional skills that might benefit the district.

Once hired, new staff should be empowered to offer suggestions for improvement based on their prior experience, Kellogg added. “People might get a little bit bristled by that, but we need to do that… It doesn’t mean you always follow the suggestion, but you need those questions to make you better.”

Ensure smooth leadership transitions

Succession planning must include transition planning, and there are several ways to make that as smooth as possible, said Brian Harris, who retired in 2021 as superintendent of Barrington Community Unit School District 220 in Illinois. He is now senior associate at the educational consulting firm Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates.

Aside from updating the incoming superintendent on all current and future projects, it’s beneficial for the incoming leader to have one-on-one conversations with staff before they start the job, Harris said. 

It’s useful for new superintendents to have frank conversations with their predecessors whenever possible about internal politics and board relations, Harris said. The latter is paramount when the incoming superintendent is new to the role, he added. 

“In terms of managing and running the district, as an assistant superintendent, you do a lot of that,” he said. “The difference is having that face-forward responsibility with the media, the public, the community leaders — mayors, village presidents and other elected officials — and working with the board.

Include incoming supervisors in other hiring decisions

If possible, new high-ranking staff hires should include the input of the incoming superintendent, said Harris, whose successor took part in interviews for principal and assistant superintendent positions. 

“We agreed on the final selection, but ultimately, he would have had the call,” Harris said. “I would have deferred, because he was going to be the one inheriting the decision.”

New leadership changes can create anxiety among subordinates, but that can be eased when incoming leaders are people who’ve built trust and solid relationships within the district, Kellogg said.  

Embrace succession planning as ongoing work

Though the Westerville City School District launched its latest round of administrative realignments in 2021 in light of expected high-ranking retirements, overall succession planning should be ongoing, Kellogg said.  

“Once you begin it, I don’t think there should be an endpoint,” he said. 

School district leaders should be aware of when employees, particularly those in critical roles, will be eligible for retirement and might choose to leave, and there should be an ongoing pipeline of employees who can take on those jobs, Kellogg said.

Still, those who’ve been eyed for advancement might not feel ready to take on additional responsibilities and might turn down promotion offers, he added. Typically that happens due to employees’ concerns about work-life balance, and those decisions should also be respected, Kellogg said.

Dallas Independent School District’s performance-based incentive program for teachers helped immediately to improve and sustain student achievement in the district’s most disadvantaged schools, according to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The Accelerating Campus Excellence program, or ACE, increased the base salaries of effective teachers by up to $10,000 per year if they worked in the district’s lowest-achieving schools. These interventions led to “dramatic growth in math and reading achievement,” researchers wrote. 

Once the incentives from the ACE program were all nearly eliminated, a mass exodus of highly effective teachers followed alongside a reversal of the student achievement gains from ACE, the study found. 

Districts have often been hesitant to implement similar models with significant performance-based incentive programs for placing teachers in hard-to-staff schools, the researchers wrote. Reasons cited include “lack of performance measures, an unwillingness to differentiate pay by teacher effectiveness, and an unwillingness to increase compensation enough to offset labor-market disadvantages of low achieving, high-poverty schools.”

However, students attending the ACE elementary schools for two or more years saw large increases in achievement as they headed into 6th grade, and the program appears to be scalable, the study found. “The existence of large long-term effects suggest that the program produces lasting improvements in cognitive skills,” researchers wrote. 

The program began in 2016 with four elementary schools and then added five more schools in 2018. All but one of the original schools participating in the 2016 ACE cohort were pulled out in 2019 because their achievement growth pushed them out of eligibility for the program. 

The National Center for Education Statistics found in a survey of school leaders that high-poverty schools, schools with 75% or more minority students and city schools all expected a higher number of teaching vacancies than other schools heading into the 2022-23 school year.

Similar approaches to Dallas ISD’s ACE program are also known as strategic pay, which compensates teachers differently depending on what or where they teach. 

The National Bureau of Economic Research study backs up other examples that have found strategic pay helps fill crucial positions for hard-to-staff subjects and schools. For instance, Detroit Public Schools Community District announced an annual $15,000 stipend for certain special education teachers in spring 2021 to address those positions accounting for the majority of the district’s vacancies. By December, the district only had three vacancies in that area — a noticeable decrease from 60 vacancies in those positions five years earlier.

As of December, 23 states had incentive policies for hard-to-staff subject areas, according to Heather Peske, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality. 

Six years ago, Sabrina Doublin had her doubts about working as a principal during her first year on the job at a rural Missouri school district. But when she joined the Missouri Leadership Development System a year later, those questions about staying in the profession faded.

“I realized I can do this,” Doublin said. “I’m not by myself. I have help.”

Working as a principal can be a lonely job.

“Any time you have a title that no one else has, it’s kind of an isolated position to be in, and especially if you’re a school principal, you’re kind of middle management,” said Paul Katnik, assistant commissioner of the Office of Educator Quality at the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. 

As such, it's crucial that there are professional networks like the Missouri Leadership Development System, or MLDS, which provides training and support to anyone aspiring to be a principal or to those who are well into their school leadership careers, he said. MLDS operates through the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and began seven years ago.

MLDS has helped to alleviate that feeling of isolation for Doublin, middle and high school principal at the Marquand-Zion District R-VI School District. Under the statewide program, Doublin said she always feels like she has someone to lean on.

Through MLDS, Doublin also mentors two other early career principals, and she always reminds them of this same lesson. “I think that’s the best thing about MLDS is that you really are never alone, so it’s not as scary as maybe it once was.”

What’s behind principal turnover?

Researchers have found when principal turnover takes place, it has tangible negative effects on schools that include lowered student achievement and more teachers leaving the classroom.

By the end of the 2021-22 school year, principal turnover hit 16% nationally — rising 13 percentage points from pre-pandemic levels, a February RAND Corp. report found in its survey of district leaders. A different survey by the National Association of Secondary School Principals also showed in 2022 that half of school leaders’ said their stress levels were so high, they were considering a career change or early retirement. 

COVID-19 alone isn’t to blame for recent findings that principal turnover could be increasing since the pandemic, Doublin said.

With public trust declining in education and politicization rising in school communities, pressure is mounting for some principals to the point where it may be driving them away. In January 2022, 48% of surveyed principals said the “intrusion of political issues and opinions into their profession was a job-related stressor,” according to a RAND Corp. report.

“The way that society has changed its opinion of the public school system really has caused more stress on the administrators than anything else,” Doublin said. 

Missouri principal retention improves

Even amid all this commotion of principal turnover and politically-related stress, there are state-backed programs like the Missouri Leadership Development System that show principal retention can still improve with the right supports in place. 

Between the 2016-17 and 2022-23 school years, the number of principals participating in MLDS jumped from 137 to 1,600, according to the department. Overall, there are 2,200 principals in Missouri. 

The retention rate of MLDS principals has consistently exceeded the state average between 9 to 14 percentage points for the last five years, Katnik said. When comparing MLDS principals to non-MLDS principals, that gap grows wider to roughly 20 percentage points, he added.

As MLDS participation rose to 1,600 principals over the last four years, the state average for principal retention has also increased, Katnik said.

There are nine regional centers with a total of 30 specialists throughout Missouri to support MLDS principals across the state, he said. The program also offers microcredentials for allowing principals to upgrade their certificates without having to get another degree.

Keeping MLDS financially sustainable

It costs about $4 million per year to run MLDS, according to Katnik. The funding comes from federal and state dollars, such as Title I, Title II A, an early childhood grant, federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief money and a federal grant known as the Supporting Effective Educator Development grant program.

For the SEED program, the U.S. Department of Education recently awarded a 3-year $10 million grant to MLDS to help boost training for principals in accelerated student learning, social-emotional learning and staffing classrooms, Katnik said. The Title II A funding allows the state to take 3% of those district funds to support leadership development, but before the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education decided to use those district dollars to create MLDS, state officials asked superintendents if the state should do so. 

“We wanted to use it to build MLDS, and we said, ‘Tell us now if you don’t want us to do that.’ And not one superintendent said, ‘Don’t do it,’” Katnik said. “So I feel like the clientele I serve are all of those folks whose money I’m keeping.”

For Katnik, it’s important that MLDS “outlive all of us that are in it today.” A key ingredient to prolonging the program is the blended funding streams, he said. So even when the ESSER spending deadlines expire in fall 2024, Katnik said, there’s still sustainable funding from different avenues that will pay for ongoing MLDS initiatives.

“We were doing MLDS before ESSER, and we’re going to do it after,” Katnik said. “We don’t fund it with any one source. It’s spread out.”

What can other states do?

Statewide efforts to address principal turnover should be approached in a “more surgical than brute force” manner, because the problem may not look the same in every school or district, said Paul Manna, the Isabelle and Jerome E. Hyman Distinguished University Professor of Government at the College of William & Mary. 

Manna also wrote a 2015 report published by The Wallace Foundation that recommends several policy levers to improve state policy on school leadership. Some of the policy avenues states can pursue include defining the scope and standards for a principal’s job, working with districts and preparation programs to recruit aspiring principals, overseeing principal preparation programs, adjusting the licensing requirements for new and veteran principals, and providing principals with professional development. 

“It doesn’t mean that you have to use every lever,” Manna said. “If you’re bad at some of them but others you are good at, start there.”

States need to consider the best role for them to play in alleviating principal turnover, Manna said. States don’t have to just lead over districts in these initiatives — they can follow or partner with districts, too. But that may also require state officials to have difficult conversations with schools and districts, he said.

Additionally, states “better be prepared to listen to the real answers they’re going to get,” Manna said. “They operate more top-down. They operate bureaucratically. They all say they want to be supportive and partners, but they have to really commit to changing if they really want to operate that way.”

As districts struggle to make the proportion of Black teachers more reflective of student demographics, a report released in February by the National Center for Teacher Residencies offers six recommendations to improve preparation and recruitment of Black educators. The guidance draws from lessons learned from the organization’s Black Educators Initiative, which aims to recruit and retain 750 Black educators between 2019 and 2024.

The recommendations — focused on teacher preparation programs, school districts and states — call for making teacher preparation financially accessible and prioritizing recruitment strategies focusing on Black educators. Teacher preparation programs should also be culturally sustainable for Black teachers, according to the guidance.

Affinity groups and investments in mentors to support Black educators need to be a key focus of the teacher’s education experience, the report said. Overall, Black educators’ voices must be included in teacher preparation policies, NCTR added.  

The latest data from the National Center for Education Statistics in 2017-18 shows 7% of teachers were Black. Yet in 2020, 15% of students were Black, according to NCES data.

The benefits of hiring teachers who match their students’ race can include less exclusionary discipline for Black and Latinx students in large, diverse and urban districts, according to a 2021 working paper from the Annenberg Institute at Brown University. Black students are also more likely to graduate high school if they had a teacher of the same race in grades K-3, another study found. 

Amplifying educators of color

In addition to the Black Educators Initiative, other efforts are underway to encourage and support more teachers and leaders of color. 

The Surge Institute, a nonprofit that supports increased racial diversity in education leadership, has a mission to elevate 5,000 or more leaders of color by 2030. To do this, the organization is broadening and deepening its established fellowship program, said Carmita Semaan, Surge Institute founder. 

That program brings cohort groups of emerging education leaders together to network and hone skills needed to thrive in top management roles. Since 2015, the program has graduated 300 fellows, Semaan said.

"We believe that the genius within our communities is ubiquitous, and we want people to be in positions to really influence policy, strategy, funding decisions that allow for sustainable outcomes and opportunities for young people no matter where they are," said Semaan, who previously worked as a chemical engineer at a corporation and then as a district administrator for Chicago Public Schools. 

 

As she worked both in the business world and in education, she noticed "the higher up you went in those organizations, the more senior and executive the roles were, the fewer and fewer folks in those positions had shared experience and lived experience with those that they were serving."

Leadership pipelines were also limiting, Semaan said. 

"I want to create space that is unapologetically about investing in Black, brown, Asian leadership with shared experiences with our students to amplify, elevate and support them to prepare them for roles that allow them to be sitting at tables where they are impacting strategy, power, financial decisions, all of those things," she said.

The One Million Teachers of Color campaign, led by a coalition of education organizations, is another initiative supporting progressive pathways to the education profession and inclusive environments for teachers and education leaders of color. Over the next decade, the organizations hope to add 1 million teachers of color and 30,000 leaders of color to the education community. 

"The One Million Teachers of Color (1MToC) coalition’s effort is a critical need given that over the past two decades, the K-12 student population has become much more racially diverse. However, that same trend in diversity is not reflected in teachers and school leaders in public schools," said Javaid Siddiqi, president and CEO of The Hunt Institute, in an email. The Hunt Institute is one of the organizations in the coalition. 

Making teaching pathways accessible

Some states are working to break down barriers Black educators face when pursuing education careers by making teacher preparation and retention programs more financially accessible, said Eric Duncan, director for P-12 policy at The Education Trust, during a virtual panel Wednesday hosted by the National Center for Teacher Residencies. The Education Trust has developed a state-by-state tracker looking at efforts focused on improving teacher diversity and equity.

For more than 25 years, Florida state policy has called for investing in scholarships to prepare thousands of teachers of color to get their teaching certifications, and about 90% of those recipients have taught in Florida public schools, according to Duncan. 

Nevada is among states investing in loan forgiveness programs to encourage teachers of color to stay in the teaching profession, Duncan said. Meanwhile, Connecticut provides mortgage assistance to teachers of color to help them build wealth and mitigate some of the student loan debt teachers of color accrue, he said. 

As these efforts to raise awareness and develop policy solutions to bolster teacher diversity continue, teacher shortages continue to plague states. 

At the same time, teacher layoffs are potentially looming as districts’ last obligation deadlines for federal COVID-19 relief dollars approach in September 2024. The National Council on Teacher Quality recently reported that districts still typically rely on seniority policies when deciding teacher layoffs, which can disproportionately impact newer educators, who are more likely to be teachers of color. 

But other federal investments are still advancing to improve recruitment and retention of teachers of color, as seen through opportunities in apprenticeship model programs and the Hawkins Center for Excellence, Duncan said.