NEA Enables Exciting Changes to the Teaching Profession

The National Education Association just released their new Principles for a Professional Growth Salary Schedule. Their goal, like ours, is to attract top college graduates into teaching and keep them teaching. The bold changes they highlight, including moving away from traditional step-and-lane structures, free significant resources to invest more effectively in teachers and the teaching job.

ERS’ work with states and districts to redesign teacher compensation and career path demonstrates the importance of restructuring teaching jobs to have doable loads, responsibilities that match the teacher's desires and skills, as well as structures that enable teacher teams to work together. We believe it is crucial to get teaching salaries to professional levels earlier for effective teachers. If you’re in a district that wants to move forward and change the salary structure, these tools can help you get started:

• Rethinking the Value Proposition to Improve Teaching Effectiveness reveals the value proposition and how it can be transformed into an effective management tool to attract, retain, and motivate high-performing teachers.
• Strategic Design of Teacher Compensation explores the typical goals of compensation redesign and the resource implications. 
• The Teacher Compensation Workshop is a comprehensive and engaging new tool provides a powerful experience that shows the cost implications of different choices.  Complete with a unique game, a facilitator's guide, and audio presentations, the game asks users to choose different options for structuring compensation.
• First Steps: What School Systems Can Do Right Now to Improve Teacher Compensation and Career Path is a new, action-oriented brief that outlines four key steps districts can take this year to move toward a future vision of the teaching job. Backed by research and our extensive experience, these steps will have a positive impact on student outcomes, require little or no new investment, and lay the foundations for building a highly effective teaching force.

The NEA’s Principles for a Professional Growth Salary Schedule touch on many of the same areas that the above resources do, such as providing teachers with quality professional development, and having the salary schedule be flexible and transparent, among others.

The new NEA principles:

• Provide an outline for a career path for teachers who want to seek additional responsibility without altogether leaving the classroom;
• Recognize and reward teachers who attain and can demonstrate knowledge and skills that improve professional teaching;
• Recognize and reward improved teacher practice that is a factor in student learning and other student outcomes, based on evidence of student progress drawn from teacher documentation, student work samples, and classroom assessments;
• Provide guidance for how to recognize and compensate teachers for the myriad duties that their daily work entails outside of direct classroom teaching; and
• Position teachers on par with the salary, professional growth opportunities, and career earnings of comparably prepared professionals.