First Steps
What School Systems Can Do Right Now to Improve Teacher Compensation and Career Path
Stephen Frank, Karen Baroody, and Jeff Gordon, July 2013
This paper explores four steps districts can take now for sustained impact on teacher effectiveness. We define First Steps as actions which:
- Have a positive impact on student outcomes
- Can be implemented within a year
- Can be implemented within existing collective bargaining agreements or are likely to have broad support
- Require little or no new investment, or are budget neutral when implemented in combination
- Build toward a new vision of a teacher compensation and career path system that can attract, retain, and leverage the skills of a highly effective teaching force
- Read about First Steps (PDF)
This brief is part of a series of publications and tools devoted to Teacher Compensation and Career Path. The rest include:
- 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.
- Teacher Compensation Workshop: This “do-it-yourself” workshop brings stakeholders together to explore the costs and implications of different compensation structures. The workshop includes pre-reading materials, a narrated Powerpoint presentation, and all the items needed to play the interactive exercise “What Price is Right?”
- 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.