ERS’ Teacher Compensation Workshop

Education Resource Strategies, April, 2013

School districts have the responsibility to design a compensation structure that meets teacher recruitment and retention goals within the context of long-term fiscal sustainability. We have created this Teacher Compensation Workshop to help leaders bring together practitioners and policymakers in a district to explore the costs and implications of different compensation structures. This package includes materials and instructions for a productive and informative meeting.

The workshop includes pre-reading materials, a narrated PowerPoint presentation, and all the materials needed to play the interactive exercise “What Price is Right?”

This workshop is now available including:

• One facilitator’s guide
• One workbook for every participant
• One deck of cards for every team (we recommend teams of 4-8)

Pleasecontact us for more information. ERS would like to thank the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for providing funding for this project, and TeachPlus for running the pilot workshop.

Workshop Goals

• Deepen understanding of how salary structures affect a district’s ability to achieve compensation goals.
• Build understanding about the fiscal impact associated with various salary structures.
• Approach compensation redesign as a series of trade-offs required to maximize compensation goals within the context of long-term fiscal sustainability.

Watch a portion of the presentation:

This workshop is part of a series of publications and tools devoted to Teacher Compensation and Career Path. The rest include:

• Do More, Add More, Earn More:Teacher Salary Redesign Lessons from 10 First-Mover Districts
• Misfit Structures and Lost Opportunities: The Urgent Case for Restructuring Teacher Compensation and Career Path:This white paper focuses specifically on teacher salaries and details two urgent reasons for reform: misfit structures of current teacher salary schedules and lost opportunities to impact student achievement.
• Rethinking the Value Proposition to Improve Teaching Effectiveness:This white paper looks at the whole package of what school systems offer teachers and examines how these offerings influence the attraction, development, retention, and motivation of a high-performing teaching force.
• Strategic Design of Teacher Compensation:This series of memos explores typical goals of compensation redesign and implications for five main design considerations: base salary, district priority incentives, school role, rewards and responsibilities, and fiscal sustainability.
• First Steps: What School Systems Can Do to Reform Teacher Compensation and Career Path Right Now:This action-oriented brief outlines four key steps districts can take this year to move toward a future vision of the teaching job. Backed by ERS research and experience, these steps will have a positive impact on student outcomes, require little or no new investment, and lay the foundation for building a highly effective teaching force.