Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of school districts have broken from tradition to offer pay outside of the rigid step-and-lane salary schedules. In particular, many districts are now offering flat-dollar raises or non-recurring bonuses, incentives to address long-standing recruitment and retention issues, or compensation to shape teacher…

In 2013 California adopted a new watershed state finance policy, the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) to drive more resources to students with higher needs, create more spending flexibility, and let districts decide how to spend substantial new dollars. Our analysis examines financial data from nearly all California school systems to clarify…

Teacher salary decisions are often made with little connection to the pension obligations they entail. In this paper, authors Marguerite Roza and Jessica Jonovski model the impacts of late-term raises on teacher pension obligations showing that on average each dollar raise triggers $10 to $16 in new taxpayer obligations. The authors provide…

On top of many policymakers' wish lists is increased teacher pay. Particular attention also has focused on mechanisms such as merit pay to target rewards to the most effective teachers and keep them in the classroom. Yet resources are constrained. Raising pay for some or all teachers inevitably takes funds away from some other element of…

Teacher compensation is driven largely by teacher longevity. While it's true that wages in many fields generally increase with experience, what differs in teaching is the degree to which pay is linked to seniority. And compared to other professions, teaching has more heavily back-loaded pay -- meaning a disproportionate share of earnings comes…

Labor, in the form of wages and benefits, makes up most of the costs of schooling. Much has been written about wages--especially the idea that we need to make salaries more competitive to attract a stronger labor pool. Analysts pay less attention to benefits, except to bemoan the rising cost of them. But as a portion of labor compensation, we…