13. The Teacher Pay Mess: An Interview with Dr. Paul Bruno

This episode centers on a discussion about teacher pay, featuring Trina and Dr. Paul Bruno from the University of Illinois. The conversation highlights the complexity and inadequacies of teacher compensation systems, particularly focusing on the disparity in pay between veteran and novice teachers, the rigidity of step and column salary schedules, and the broader socio-economic challenges impacting education funding and teacher retention. 

Trina emphasizes issues such as the historical underpayment of teachers due to structural sexism, while both underscore the significant differences in teaching conditions and pay across districts and states, and the lack of effective support for teachers in high-cost urban areas. 

They call for a reevaluation of teacher pay structures, better support systems, and broader socio-economic reforms to address these issues. 

00:00 Introduction: The Future of Education

00:18 The Teacher Shortage Crisis

00:57 Teacher Pay: A Complex Issue

01:57 Insights from Dr. Paul Bruno

03:34 Challenges in Teacher Compensation

05:31 The Importance of Differential Pay

13:43 Veteran Teachers and Systemic Inequities

29:32 The Role of School Districts and Administrators

46:21 The Impact of Housing Costs

53:45 Conclusion: A Call to Action

Visit teachershortagecrisis.com to join the movement of teachers speaking up about the mess in K-12 Education in the United States. 

www.teachershortagecrisis.com
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Transcript

Today we're talking about teacher pay, yet again. And if you haven't listened to those original episodes, Please do so. Amanda provided a fantastic introduction to the original episode that we recorded over a year ago now. And I got deep in the weeds in like several major themes of a robust conversation about the weird world of teacher pay.

And since then we've even recorded more with Jess and we've just been digging and thinking and reading more about the topic. And while I've unearthed other angles to the problem that have helped me understand it more clearly, I can safely say that even a year later, I still think this is a bizarre problem that is poorly understood that really keeps the public from understanding some of these issues and from engaging meaningfully in a conversation with teachers and people in K 12 governance to try to fix it. 

Today, we're joined again by Dr. Paul Bruno, who is a fantastic PhD in education, who is at the University of Illinois, who wrote with several co authors, the only scholarly article which quantified the teacher shortage across the nation. And of course, as I said before, the major finding there is it's really hard to talk about anything in K 12 education on a national level because there's just a lack of consistency and a lack of cohesiveness in the way we do anything and talk together  even district to district, much less state to state.

My school finance professor who I had when I was getting my admin credential and master's of ed leadership advocated for a concerted effort amongst K 12 leaders and teachers at a state level to advocate for changes at that, um, per pupil allotment. The amount of money Each LEA gets, each district gets per student every year.

That is a fixed number that school districts don't have a lot of wiggle room to change. They have no wiggle room to change. So in a lot of ways they're School budgets are very much tied to that number. Um, but we're going to talk about more nuanced perspectives, more nuanced angles. This conversation is very robust and I'm so excited to have Dr.

Paul Bruno back on. Take it away, Dr. Bruno.  

Yeah. Thank you for having me back. Um, I think, you know, I'll just say a few things that I think are sort of,  uh, sort of stylized points that I think are sort of key things to keep in mind about teacher compensation. Um, from my point of view, um, and then we'll sort of go from there. 

So I think, uh, you know, a couple of things, one thing to bear in mind, I think is very similar to when we talked about like teacher shortages, which is that it's very hard to generalize, um, about anything in education and that includes teacher compensation. Uh, anything we say about teacher compensation is going to be true in some places and not true in other places.

And that's. That's always something to keep in mind here. Um, the, a couple of other things I'll say, one is, um, something that I think gets lost a little bit in the rhetoric is that I think we have pretty good evidence that,  um, teachers respond to pay that I think, uh, and I'm, I say this because I think there's, there's sometimes some rhetoric along the lines of like, teachers don't go into teaching for the money or something like that.

Or, you know, so it's a calling something like that. Um, and without. Evaluating any of those claims about why teachers go into teaching per se, I think the  rigorous empirical evidence on this makes it pretty clear that, um, uh, higher salaries, especially, uh, make a difference for who is willing to teach, whether they're willing to stay in the job, where they're willing to teach, and what.

They're willing to teach. I think the evidence on that is pretty clear. And I think that is sometimes lost when we sort of get into a shuffle about whether you know why teachers are really in it. And I'm not sure that it's totally fair to teachers to demand that they be in it for something other than the money that they not be in it for the money  is, I think, putting a lot of expectations on teachers to not earn a lot of money and be happy with that lot.

And so I don't know that I think that rhetoric can sometimes be a little misleading. And just and just to reiterate, I think the evidence is pretty clear that Um, paying teachers more matters for their recruitment and retention.  Um,  a couple of other things I'll say is one, uh, I think there are some interesting, there's a lot of interesting questions about  When we say when we're talking about teacher compensation, thinking about different tradeoffs between  how much we spend on compensation for teachers overall,  like what percentage of the budget I was going to teacher compensation, for example, uh, and whether we're allocating that compensation to hiring more people or paying individual people more. 

Uh, I think that's something where people kind of gloss over a little bit, uh, some of the distinctions there. Um, and because in general, there'll be trade offs between hiring more people and how much you can pay the people that you have hired. Um, I think that's particularly relevant if we're drawing connections to, uh, teacher shortages.

Um, which, uh, have to do with the number of people you're trying to hire, uh, the extent to which you have vacant positions, um, is going to in part reflect the choices, uh, that communities have made about how many people they want to hire and therefore how much they're willing to offer people to take those positions. 

Um, and then for individual people, I think there's interesting choices between how you compensate them for any given amount that you want to pay, uh, a teacher. Um, how quickly do you allow them to earn higher salaries? Uh, to what extent is there compensation in the form of salary versus benefits? To what extent is it deferred into retirement in the form of insurance or pension benefits?

Uh, all of those are part of the compensation costs. And even if we're talking about the same total amount of compensation. It can look very different from place to place in terms of how much they're paying individual people versus hiring more people and how much they're allocating compensation towards different types of compensation.

And I think all of those decisions can be, can be really important. Um, so those are some of the things I usually start with as sort of key points about teacher compensation, I think worth are worth keeping in mind. Um, what, what are your thoughts?  

I think more than anything, one of the main things I got out of our earlier conversation and really reading your scholarly article in the teacher shortage was really crystallizing  something that was kind of vague in my mind up until that point, which is that it's impossible to generalize about our profession because we are siloed.

And it is so different in different places. And even like within a district from site to site, but to state to state too, it's almost impossible to characterize what's going on. Um, which leaves us sort of helpless and powerless to begin to speak about it, much less fix any of it.  And, um, I think it's incredibly salient to bring this point up because it's so different.

And we got that kind of feedback from other teachers when we originally aired our TeacherPay episode. Um, like they were saying, what you're saying doesn't make any sense to me. I, we got that feedback from a teacher in Texas. And, yeah, it's just really, really difficult to generalize. And that's why I really valued this.

your preface to this conversation.  

And sorry, just to interrupt, but I think just to reiterate the point you're making, which I think is a key one is I think even a lot of people in the profession don't know exactly how much variation there is. One of the, I think most interesting exercises we do in, I teach school finance to aspiring school administrators.

So they're mostly practicing teachers and we go through exercises of looking at how different school districts use their budgets in general and specifically how they pay their teachers. And I think it's striking how often even. Working teachers are unaware of how different their compensation might be going.

Not that far away. Um, and, uh, and I think, uh, it's so I think that's a  very relevant point here is I think people, including people who are working in the system, don't always realize what kinds of different choices, different school districts are making about that compensation. Yeah, 

yeah, yeah. I completely agree.

I certainly think that maybe even site level administrators aren't aware of the variability from LEA to LEA. From state to state and it just baffles my mind how we're all just sort of grasping at straws here and it feels nuts. It honestly feels nuts and in the case of California, understanding what we're spending per pupil and how it's like super close to what Nebraska is spending despite our radically higher cost of living.

It's just insane to me. It's insane. Um, and the other thing that you brought up. Which was this idea that teachers do need to be compensated and we're not just, uh, here to fill our cups of joy of the satisfaction of teaching kids. I mean, that's true. That's a part of the compensation in our heart. Like, we do enjoy this work and we understand that we're not going to be rich.

Um, but there's a social contract here. And when I got my credential, my very first professor was a boomer who had just retired from the profession and now was training future teachers. She was my history of teaching professor. She said, Look, you're never going to be rich, but you will be comfortable.

You'll be able to put your kids through college, take moderate vacations, own a home, retire comfortably. And that just isn't the case anymore. Um, that social contract has been broken. And part of the reason for that is we are contextualized in a larger culture where education, healthcare, and housing prices have ballooned.

But there's also the esoteric issues, the specific things going on just in education for teachers,  um, that are specific to our teacher pay. And I think you were sort of dancing around it just now, the idea of differential teacher pay too. Um, that some teachers should make more money than others. And it is a really unpopular belief inside of education, isn't it?

So, um, I'm just going to continue to flesh out my thinking and continue to try to pitch it as a concept to other teachers. Because I do think it's important. Yeah, so those are my thoughts about what you said.  

Yeah, and I, and I, and I, I didn't mean to dance around it so much as I wasn't sure it was quite the right time to, to make the point, but I do think, um, that the evidence in favor of differential pay in part comes from, uh, sort of natural experiments where other communities, other states, other school systems have tried differentiating compensation for certain types of teachers, differentiated in lots of ways, whether that's for national board certification, whether that's for teaching certain types of subjects.

that are harder to staff, whether it's for teaching in certain classrooms or communities where the teachers generally are less willing to work in. And I think pretty consistently in all of those cases, there's pretty good evidence that  it just offering teachers more money makes them more willing to do it.

Sometimes it's a big chunk of money. Uh, but that's, those are all examples of differential pay. And that can be important because. Something, um, I sort of glossed over before that I think, but I think is relevant is in practice school, uh, compensation is typically not differentiated within a school district.

It might be different from district to district. That's, that's pretty common, but within a school district, in most places, there isn't that much difference in how much you get paid to work in a different school or to take a different teaching position in the district. But what that means is you see some of the same inequities and access to teachers within school districts.

Particularly bigger school districts as you do between school districts. I've done some of this work looking at large school districts, for example, in places like Los Angeles. Um, and what you see is that the inequities in access to teachers are about the same between schools as they are within schools.

So even if you're just comparing, uh, like where do teachers Work within a school.  Uh, it varies a lot, particularly based on teacher experience and things like that. So giving teachers, I think, incentives to work in the positions we want them to work, I think, makes sense. And I think realistically If everyone is getting paid the same amount, no matter what their assignment is and no matter what their effective workload is, then naturally teachers are going to prefer some positions over others.

Um, and that's going to create inequities and who has access to teachers.  

I mean, exactly, exactly. And that's kind of getting to the point of something we haven't really talked about, which is that veteran teachers are not really valued in this system. And so when you don't put an emphasis on the expert knowledge that a teacher builds over the, um, you know, first decade or so of their career, then you don't prioritize that person's contribution, and then you wind up forwarding and furthering inequities in our educational system.

So like, what I mean, for example,  is that Um, you know, in the beginning of our career, we sort of have this idea that we're all going to have really hard placements, and then over time, you sort of earn your,  you earn your right to have an easier, cushier job, and so you are for the most part messing up in that really hard placement in the beginning, because no one wants it, and you're having to do it under extreme dress and we're not offering differential pay for the harder position.

So you got to do them when you're green. And these are in settings with historically marginalized kids. This is how the learning opportunity gap grows, right? So we really need to disrupt this idea that over time you earn the right for an easier job, whatever you want that to be, you know, in an easier, less climate and culture impacted site with all AP kids, whatever, but we need to flip that.

Completely on its side and disrupt that so that we're able to give brand new teachers the easier jobs to get good at their practice and then if they're able, if they've shown they have the right skill set and the right dispositions, they can graduate up to the harder jobs that pay more. 

Yeah, and I think that's exactly right.

I alluded to work I did in Los Angeles. I should say I did that with, um, my colleagues, Sarah Robofsky and Catherine Strunk. And we looked in Los Angeles at exactly this question. We were really looking at it from the teacher point of view is what kinds of assignments do new teachers have in the district compared to folks.

More veteran teachers. And it's exactly like you're describing. That means the newer teachers are both at a disadvantage in terms of almost anything we look, tried to look at as many aspects of their positions as we could find, and we found pretty consistently that newer teachers had less desirable working conditions, things that were plausibly harder.

And that was again, partially because they were working in different schools than the veterans. Um, but also within schools, they were being assigned to different classrooms, uh, where students might have more diverse learning needs, for example, lower prior achievement, things like that. Um, and I think it's important to think about that creates inequities, both for the teachers, the newer teachers who, as you're saying, maybe, you know, that's not the best place to get them started potentially.

And I think we find some evidence of that as well, but also thinking about from the students point of view, the flip side of that same coin is those are exactly the students who are being assigned the novice teachers. And you talked about. You know, teachers acquiring, you know, being more having more experience and that being valuable.

And I think, uh, you know, as a, as a researcher, I feel obligated to say, there's always lots of variation between teachers, no matter their experience level. But it's also true that if you compare more experienced teachers to less experienced teachers, they tend to be more effective. However, you want to measure that.

And that seems to reflect both the fact that people get better at their jobs over time, uh, and people who are less effective, maybe don't persist as long either. So, uh, you're often seeing some of the less effective people.  Leave out of the profession. So it's, but it's the same pattern either way. As you've got these veterans, they have valuable expertise and experience.

What can we do to make them want to use that expertise and experience, uh, to support the students that we want them to support  

a hundred percent. And I'm going to go so far as to say without having done the research. Um, and what my gut is telling me is that the veteran teacher status. Um, and I think that this is probably more important to the efficacy of the education we provide at the elementary school level more.

I mean, I've never taught there. I teach sixth grade, so I'm kind of at the cusp of those two worlds, elementary and secondary.  It's more essential there because there's also reading instruction, which is super esoteric, and you can only learn on the job. And there's nothing intuitive about teaching reading, um, our English language and reading.

And those teachers are like first and second grade teachers. They're not valued. And also classroom management is much more difficult to navigate in those years too. And that also has to be learned on the job. But like, if you don't,  Put a highly veteran higher paid teachers in these incredibly important  foundational reading years.

A, you're going to forward the reading opportunity gap because you're going to have the newest teachers in the historically marginalized communities, which we desperately see in our reading data. Um, And B, you're not allowing our sage wise reading instructors the opportunity to earn more for their very highly specialized knowledge. 

Um, and it just compromises everything that we're doing, but that's kind of a tangent, I'm sorry. 

I taught middle school. I, I, I acutely feel at a very visceral level, a lot of the research on this, talking about how, how much growth teachers make, especially in the first few years and thinking about my own experience where the first year was arguably a bit of a debacle, um, and feeling really a lot more effective, uh, uh, after that.

Um, the other thing I'll, I'll just say, and I don't know, maybe this will be helpful for, um, uh, listeners or not is also thinking about like actually. You've mentioned disrupting the pattern of sort of more veteran teachers having what are generally considered the more desirable positions and you know, I don't know that we have necessarily a systematic explanation of why. 

A systematic explanation of exactly why that happens. But I mean, there's all kinds of reasons why veteran teachers are well positioned to get the most desirable placement. Sometimes that's written directly into teacher contracts,  which is that the more experience you have, the first dibs often explicitly, You have for open positions.

Um, and I can actually one of my teaching positions. Um, I was essentially bumped from a position by, you know, a veteran who wanted my position. Another case is, I think it's not that formal at all. It's just like, who knows what the options are and has the social connections to the administrators to get the things that they want. 

And so you really do need to think about it as disruption, as you put it, because there are a lot of institutional reasons to think that the most experienced veteran teachers are going to tend to sort into the cushiest jobs, to put it crudely, which is maybe not the outcome that we want. 

No, and then of course the problems that are manifesting in these less desirable assignments are not well understood because they don't have a champion.

No one listens to the brand new teacher, the teacher that doesn't have the self possession or ability to truly reflect and apply it, and they are not able to discern. still their observations in the same way a veteran teacher would. It takes years of knowledge to begin to be able to explain these and contextualize them.

So we really need teachers on the ground floor in places that are really difficult. Need veteran teachers in these places to help us understand what the heck is going on in these places. It really is.  But I want to move on because gosh, this is such a great conversation, um, but I would like for you to sort of talk about your thoughts around baseline teacher pay and maybe even step and column a little bit and how you would think about and discuss that as a mitigating or let's say contributing factor. 

To the teacher shortage.  

Yeah. So, and maybe again, and I don't know exactly what would be helpful for your listeners, but sort of for context, I think, you know, just as background, the, the typical way that teachers get paid in the U S not everywhere, um, but in general, as a step in lane salary schedule, as you're describing, which basically places every. 

Teacher somewhere on a table based on their experience and based on their level of education and the specifics of exactly what levels of experience matter and what types of education matter vary from place to place. But for every combination of experience and education, there'll be a salary. That's the salary that everyone gets.

And usually the district gets for having that combination of experience and education, and I'll say something that's striking about that is you see that even very commonly in places where there's not like a teacher's union.  So for example, like a charter school, for example, I've worked in charter schools and looked at other charter schools they'll often use a salary schedule, even though they're not collectively bargaining. 

They'll just do that because it's convenient in a variety of ways and it can map. Easily to the local school districts or something like that. Um, so I think that's worth sort of mentioning here. It's not this isn't just the thing that unions, uh, that do. They're surprisingly common, at least to me, even in places where collective bargaining for teachers is not is not the norm.

Um, so I think there's a lot to say about, um, salary schedules. I think one of the  most important connections if we're making connections to teacher shortages is that salary schedules.  They have a lot of advantages. I think it's important to emphasize. Part of the rationale for salary schedules and why they remain popular in a lot of places is that they are transparent.

In a way that I think is genuinely productive. I think salary transparency, um, is actually really important, not just in teaching, but in the economy as a whole,  um, and they prevent in a lot of ways, various sorts of discrimination that might arise, particularly if it's not clear how much other people are making.

So they sort of standardize pay in a way that's their goal. Um, the disadvantage of that is the other side of that coin is that, um, they don't leave usually much room for the kind of differentiated compensation that we're talking about. I think, you know, for some people, I think they, um, are get particularly annoyed that salary schedules don't reflect any specific measure of income.

Of teacher quality that they don't involve any, you know, unless you they have some indirect measures, right as we discuss things like experience, um, do tell us something about teacher effectiveness, but there's that's all implicit in the salary schedule, and there's nothing direct that says usually that says something like, Oh, and if your evaluation ratings are good or your student test score growth is good, or you show up to work consistently, there's nothing inherently related to quality there.

The other thing that's. salary schedules can make hard is the kind of differentiation we were talking about where you can get additional pay for something like  working in a harder to staff school or with lower achieving students or for teaching a subject that's harder to staff for like special education for example.

Now it doesn't mean that there's no way to do that. In fact, it's not unusual where school districts will write some language into their contracts about offering bonuses to people on top of the salary schedule or something like taking a special education position or something. In general, as someone who's looked at a grotesque number of teacher contracts in my life, I will say that those are not super common.

And when they exist, they tend to be Pretty modest in terms of bonuses. They're sort of token amounts, maybe somewhere in the 500 to 1500 range for a teacher to take a position that is potentially an order of magnitude harder to staff and maybe substantially harder as well. Um,  so they tend to be more token.

amounts that I doubt are doing a whole lot to get people into the positions that you want. So I, I think there's an extent to which, um, that salary schedules can contribute to shortages because they probably are doing something to,  potentially they might be doing things to increase compensation for some types of position that might otherwise be lower.

I'm thinking, especially of some types of elementary school positions, for example, that might might, they might be having their salaries increased, but the flip side is other people are having their salaries reduced relative to what might be required, uh, to get people to fill other types of positions, like special education, for example.

So salary schedules just introduce a lot of rigidity into teacher compensation, and that makes it hard to adapt to what we've talked about as a highly variable, you know, Teacher labor market, um, where there's shortages of some types of positions and within a school district or even within a school might be some classrooms that are much harder to staff than others and not they're not being really a an easy way to deal with that in a salary schedule context. 

Yeah, that rigidity is an excellent point.  And I do think maybe privately superintendents might lament about the rigidity of the step and column schedules because it does sort of tie their hands.  And I see too that superintendents don't have a lot of leeway around the issue because they are tied to that per pupil spending which is allocated at the same time.

State legislature level, and it's an issue that people don't really understand, and I think one of the most important foundational considerations of, um, step and column is, though, because we've we haven't hit on this one of one of these major issues of step and column is why it was introduced and what it was meant to ameliorate, which is that structural sexism that was baked into our profession from the beginning because Horace Mann, who I love, great guy,  he wanted to create a k 12 secular free schooling option for Everyone he envisioned women in there.

He was an abolitionist It was great. It was a utopian Dream, but the problem was in order to pay for all these positions. They created sort of all of a sudden  He said let's just hire women because we can pay them a third of the salary as we would what we would pay a man And from there flows the original sin of why we needed the petition that I put on our website Um, it wasn't he what he was doing wasn't considered sexist at the time.

It was sort of a great opportunity to give women a foot in the door into the professional world. So like I said, I don't hate Horace Mann, but we have to fix that structural problem that we created from the very beginning. And so in order to bring up the salaries of women who were earning a third of similarly qualified men at some point in the past, Somebody please tell me when this happened, but at some point in the past, they said, okay, we'll give you a quote unquote full salary, but we're going to make it take 25 years and tons of additional graduate units that you have to pay for to get it.

And so, what I see from looking at step and column schedules here and there, Um, because it's impossible, like you say, to characterize what's going on across the nation.  From what I've seen, it's not really like you're starting at a third of your salary. If you look at the very last step and last column, it's more like half.

Um, and so you wind up having a bunch of teachers who are earning, um, Half of what your more veteran teachers are, um, and even that full salary, especially now, especially since the Great Recession, um, is not in keeping with the quality of life, that social contract I mentioned. It's, it's not kept up with it.

So even if you get all the way across those columns and down those steps, you're still not making the bottom threshold of a middle class. you know, lifestyle. So I'm just going to let you comment on that. 

Yeah, I think, um, so I'm not a, I'm not a historian and I wouldn't claim to know the history here. I have, I have colleagues who handle that, uh, for me, but, um, I, you know, I'll say, so I'll say, um,  Let me say one thing.

I think there's one place where I would push back a little bit, which is about the state allocation and how much school districts are tied to state allocations. It's 100 percent true that school districts are often constrained to a substantial degree by how much they're getting from the state, and there's 100 percent a role for state responsibility in making sure schools are adequately funded.

The one thing I would say is that a lot of the things we're talking about here, There is still a lot of control in most places at the school district level for how they bargain their contracts, how they establish their salary schedules. And I think one thing I'll, you know, I'll say is that I think, um, like the, uh, whether we're talking about salary levels or how quickly teachers earn salary levels or how much they're getting in terms of, um, benefits versus salary, those are things that school districts really are making very different choices about.

And school districts are increasingly, even as school districts are increasingly getting more funding, they're not necessarily increasing teacher salaries. And I think this is where a lot of the dissatisfaction comes from is because school districts genuinely are getting more and more money. And I think state policymakers look out at the world in many places, I won't say everywhere, but.

I think it's true in California. In my experience, they're looking out and saying, look, we keep shoveling more and more money into the funding formula. We can put it on a graph how much more money you are getting per student. And yet you are coming back and you are saying you don't your salaries aren't good enough.

What I think there is a genuine disconnect there. And I think a lot of that disconnect comes from the fact that That different school districts are making different choices about what to do with those extra dollars, and they're generally not translating those extra dollars into salary, and I, um, there's a lot of reasons for that, um, that I alluded to briefly before, but I think this is a good example of where they come from.

So one thing is that school districts are Taking a lot of that money and putting it into compensation, but they're putting it into the compensating compensation in the form of new people,  which might be justified, but it's a choice. And I think it's a choice. It's important to be explicit about,  um, because they're when they hire a new person, they are making a choice not to give a raise.

To the other people that they employ, and they're putting more and more of that revenue into compensation that teachers don't feel like they are getting or that's not making its way into classrooms at all, because, for example, they're paying more and more for the costs of health and welfare benefits  school districts are, uh, or they're paying more and more for the cost of retiree benefits.

Benefits for people who might not even be in the classroom anymore. But there's, uh, there are liabilities for things like teachers who have retired and are entitled now to medical benefits until they're eligible for Medicare. They're entitled to pension benefits. Um, and those obligations are important to meet, but it means a lot of the new money is coming in and it is not going into teacher salaries.

And in fact, a lot of it is not going into teacher compensate individual existing teachers compensation. At all. And I do think, you know, as important as I think the state role is here. I do want to make sure we don't let school administrators too much off the hook  and saying you might be making they might be making justifiable choices here.

But I am often also often struck by the extent to which  there is a disconnect between how much new money Is coming into school districts and how much the existing workers feel like they are benefiting from that and I think that in part reflects the fact that there's not always good transparency at school districts about what they're choosing to do with new dollars, if that makes sense.

Oh yeah, that makes perfect sense. I want to say thank you for not letting them off the hook because I don't either. And in some of the notes I sent you.  It sort of revealed before this before we record it today I was revealing. Um, I was just reading some of my reflections about being a site rep during a strike, like being in low level union leadership.

And, um, I learned that like striking against a A school district is really very different than other labor unions who strike against a private corporation because they do have a finite amount of money.  And it's not like districts are running a for profit industry here.  I mean, they're not. I mean, there are a whole bunch of money.

There's a whole bunch of people with hands in the K 12 funding monies.  That are for profit because we have taken everything that is creative and innovative and given it to the for profit sector, but the LEAs themselves are not a for profit industry. And so there isn't a lot of wiggle room here, right?

But what I do want to say is that I've heard over the years, Paul, that a lot of local superintendents are sort of conferring with their neighboring districts and forming sort of like alliances with each other. And so what you'll notice a little bit is a cluster of highly similar practices. In a local area from district to district in particular around contract negotiations with their teacher unions, right?

So they get together socially and formally and convene with one another and sort of trade notes. And it really is like there's a really concerted effort. It's highly organized and it's antagonistic.  They have tactics to stymie what is going on between the teacher, uh, bargaining team negotiations. Um, and the superintendents like they show up the school districts do the superintendents do with their high paid lawyer And then our bargaining team show up stressed out and exhausted like it's not a fair fight at all And then there begins the micro and macro aggressions of a contract negotiation But I do think that there's antist and antagonistic hiding of the money gaslighting teacher bargaining and lying about the money.

And I'm just gonna go on the attack here and say that there's some really unattractive and downright abusive practices I think that are happening at the superintendent level. So I'm gonna let you respond and I just want you to know I'm not blaming you.  

I, um, so I, I'm, I, I'm not in any position to speak about any specific bargaining.

Um, situation. I will say that I think the evidence suggests that there really are big differences in terms of the relationship between districts and their workers unions in different places and that different actually true. Both unions and different administrations take very different approaches to the bargaining process, and part of what that means is in some places.

I think it's quite antagonistic and not as transparent. Um, I think, um, Well, in terms of, um, uh, superintendents sort of getting together sort of regionally, um, I think that is, uh, there's definitely a lot of regional aspects here. I don't think it's entirely limited to superintendents. For one thing, a lot of contracts explicitly include language, uh, about, uh, Um, looking at nearby districts, usually on the compensation side, they have, um, they call salad usually come something like a salary parity study.

Um, and those are not super uncommon, uh, as being explicitly part of the contract is to say, Oh, and we will form a salary parity committee to study nearby district salaries to establish what would be some, I don't know, some, um you know, boilerplate language there that is explicitly aimed around that type of activity for the district.

And  the unions themselves often operate, in fact, in most states that I'm aware of, operate also sort of regional service centers for the unions to also do some of that, what  In the, in the research community, we call pattern bargaining, uh, which is sort of, um, helping, uh, ideas disseminate between, um, unions that are sort of geographically.

Yeah, absolutely. In California, it's at the state level. We have the California Teachers Association, and then they send reps to come down and help local, um, teacher unions as they ramp up their actions and get, um, ready to go on strike. So they help us. and provide some resources and assistance. 

Yeah. And I will say, um, I found some, um, in California, the state union, um, also as because California is so large, um, has actually has sort of sub regions that they sort of farm out those support staff too.

And I actually have found empirically some evidence of stronger relationships. within those regional unions in terms of what happens to salaries. If, if your neighbor's salaries go up and they're in the same, uh, service center as you are with the union, uh, that you're sort of your own salaries are more sensitive to your neighbors.

If they're in the same service center versus they're close, but they're in a different service center. Um, So that, that, that sort of activity seems to be, uh, to be happening there. But I can't speak to the, to the details and I bet it varies a lot from, from place to place. 

Yeah. And just one anecdotal example of how complicated and nuanced teacher pay is, and this sort of lack of alignment across nearby district is an example of what recently happened to me in my district.

So we were in contract negotiations and we were on, we were only one day away from a strike and we'd already authorized our strike and our bargaining team was. Just exhausted from all of this stuff. I've been explaining about what they put them through. They've been put through the ringer and what was going on was not only, um,  So our step and column was not going to keep up with the neighboring district.

And we're all in high performing districts where I am right now. Um, so not only did this neighboring district recently get improvement on Um, on every step of their step and column and salary benefits package, they opted to now accept all years of service. And so being able to explain to like the parents quickly enough what that meant, it was lost on them. 

From their perspective, our step and column was only slightly less than the one next door. So what? Go back to work, teachers, you know? Um, and they were like, wait, what are years of service? And it's so strange and weird the way we are paid. I don't blame them for not understanding.  So basically, I mean, if you look at the step and column, it is slightly higher in this nearby district, but we are living on the margins.

Teachers really are. And so if there's a nearby district that's going to take all years of service, I'm going, because even if it's just a little bit more, um, but these things are difficult to impress upon an ignorant population that doesn't understand our bizarre pay system because it's so weird because it's so weird.

And it doesn't exist anywhere else.  

Yeah, I wouldn't blame anyone for not understanding that you might, uh, if as a teacher, you might, it's possible for you to move to a school, uh, a mile away that happens to be in a different school district and not get credit. or experience for them to treat you as if you had not ever earned that experience, because they'll only accept, say, five years of experience in another district.

I, I can't blame anyone else for finding that surprising, um, although they might find it surprising how rigid the salary schedule is in the first place, and then you have to explain that to them, and then you've got a whole nother, uh, sort of conversation, uh, there. So it's a, it's, it's multiple cans of beans. 

Yeah, I got to say again. It's so weird. There are no other professions that pay out their professional credentialed staff in this way. And the other angle I came to terms with, with the district I used to teach in was, um, cause it was a district that was. A struggling with a high of vacancies, and so when you're in that sort of survival mode, you're constantly putting in like reactionary mitigation practices to deal with the fact that you don't have veteran teachers or even credentialed teachers, right? 

tactics is the use of very dense canned curriculums. And then you can sort of tell yourself, oh, okay, so the teachers don't know what they're doing, but we have this thing, this turn a page and teach a lesson. And so once you start developing a narrative, a cultural practice within, within a district of buying into this baloney, that this works, um, what winds up happening is you no longer value the veteran teachers that, that you have.

And so site based leaders start to see that they can save a lot of money hiring brand new teachers because they don't have a lot of times full families on their benefits packages and only make half of what veteran teachers make. And so we are seriously creating a system. That in some of the most oppressed districts, the United States are privileging brand new teachers and letting go of veteran ones.

And so where do these veterans go? I mean, they leave when they know that they've got a better gig somewhere else. So they go to high performing districts where they're less needed.  They take their knowledge and wisdom and great evaluations and leave and go to places that are already high performing.

This is what we've created. This is, this system is so bizarre.  

Yeah, and I think, um,  you know, I've, I've grown a little bit jaded about what I feel like are an endless series of surveys asking administrators how hard of a time they have staffing their schools that don't also follow up with the question, well, and what are you doing about it?

Um, just to my previous point about not always wanting to let administrators off the hook, I, I am not in the business of telling administrators, including usually my own students, exactly what they should be doing, but I will say that when administrators come to me or respond on a survey and say, Oh, I'm having a really hard time filling.

I can't get applicants for teaching positions. I have all of these vacant positions at the beginning of the year. I am also inclined to ask, Okay. You know, are you excluding teachers because you will not give them credit for experience they have accumulated in other school districts? Are you  making the choice to defer teachers compensation until they are veterans, either in the form of Uh, you know, family health and welfare benefits or higher salaries, things that might be very important and valuable to veterans that might be worth maintaining.

But if that's coming at the cost of what you are paying a new teacher to come into the district, it's at least a choice. I want to make sure you have thought about, uh, in terms of what, what you're doing to solve these, I think, very real staffing problems that you are having. And that's, that's mostly my concern is not our administrators doing exactly what I would do in any given situation, but are they at least being open and transparent?

about what they're doing to solve their problems and how they're balancing those trade offs.  

That's an excellent point because going back to our original conversation that you and I first had about your scholarly paper that you wrote with your co collaborators, Which, um, was documenting the vacancy problem, it was noted that these vacancies are not evenly distributed, right?

And so, you're making a decision about how much you're going to value your teachers, and how, how much are you going to have ease to find the qualified candidates that you need when you create the parameters around your positions in the first place. And so, when you limit years of service, you're cutting down on your potential qualified pool.

And when you have unaddressed climate and culture problems, which we haven't talked about, um, but, and when we say climate and culture, everyone, that's just coded language in K 12, um, for schools that are unsafe and chaotic. And if you haven't dealt with that, um, well, and I've been in schools that have had a significant  climate and culture problem. 

And what I found is that there, uh, there's a lack of vision, tenacity, bravery, and humility to deal with those problems. And there's a lot of ingrained, um, implicit ideas, um, that are really very racist about what kids are able to do. Um, what their potentials are, not holding them up to high expectations or expecting high, high achievement from them.

And, you know, just, there's no will to try. And. You know, for example, in San Francisco unified unified right now. Yeah, there's problems with families not being able to afford to live in those boundaries, but the bigger issue about why they're closing down a bunch of schools right now, isn't that? And it's I don't hear anyone talking about in the news.

It's the same thing with Oakland unified. It's because the kids in those boundaries Stop going to those schools, especially if they had agency financial resources to do another option, because they're not safe. They were chaotic and hard to be in. And those are the failures of vision and imagination, tenacity, of the leadership Um, at the site base and district levels there. 

And you know, one of the things I'll say just because you mentioned San Francisco and Oakland, um, as a new alluded to this before about cost of living, but we maybe haven't talked about it as much as it deserves. We've talked about state, you know, funding responsibilities and administrator. Resource allocation responsibilities.

But I do also think for a lot of communities, there is a local and state policymaker obligation to keep housing costs in check in a way that in some communities that has not happened. You've mentioned some reasons why, you know, people might be leaving San Francisco and Oakland or other communities like that.

I suspect those are all issues. But I will say this, I think pretty clear evidence that for a lot of these communities, there's also just real issues with exorbitant housing costs. And if you're a family with You know, school aged Children, it is less and less realistic that you can live in those communities in the first place, which means the cost of housing explode that creates financial pressures on the school district as enrollment goes down.

It also means your teachers compensation does not go as far as it otherwise would. Um, and that's particularly true if more and more of their compensation is going into benefits rather than the salary that they would use to pay for their housing costs. And again, maybe it's important that those benefit packages be maintained.

But I think it's not that often where I hear people articulate the trade off, especially in places where the housing costs are growing so much faster than teacher salaries, about whether there's something more that local communities could be doing to  make sure that housing costs are not, uh, so, uh, exploding so quickly.

I agree. I agree. There are just so many ways that urban, high cost settings squeeze teachers even more financially. I mean, we're all squeezed, but certainly in urban settings.  even more so. And at the university level, there's an understanding that, okay, with professors, maybe you don't earn as much as you deserve, but, um, you're doing, you're working for a university and you're doing a public good, so we provide housing to some of the professors if you're tenured, right?

And I don't know how common a practice that is anymore, but that has never been a practice in K 12. Um, because the idea here is very subconscious, is that because we're mostly female. And our income is supposed to be subsidized by a man that we are married to if we're married and we're providing for our family.

We're not doing so without a man in tandem, right? And so we don't need these kinds of considerations. Um, but also one of the problems I'm having with my student loan is that because I live and work in one of the most expensive areas in the country and my salary package reflects that, you know, it's like I'm nowhere near the bottom of a threshold of middle class life for the Bay Area with my salary.

And so, since the debt relief packages that are offered to teachers is a one size fits all approach, one magical number for every teacher in the country, right?  This is the time when there is consistency applied across the, um, the gambit of all teachers. But because of this, I don't qualify. I don't qualify for housing help.

I don't qualify for income driven repayment plans for my, um, teachers. Loans, I am held to a much higher standard with my, um, income tax, and there's just zero consideration applied to the very highly variable cost of living that teachers are experiencing. I mean, what are we saying here? Don't live in urban areas?

We don't want that.  

Yeah, and I think, um, yeah, I think you do see, I don't know that people are aware of this necessarily, it's sort of inside baseball, but it is true that some universities, um, Do you have a variety of approaches to helping faculty with housing? You see that primarily. Places with the highest housing costs.

It's sort of less of an issue here in central Illinois than it is in some places like on the coasts. Um, but, you know, something I will say, you said you don't see it in K 12 schools, but I would say actually something that's been, I think, interesting over the last decade or so is how many school districts, including in California, have said, Oh, you know, we've got this land we're sitting on.

We don't need it for schools anymore because our enrollment is going down because housing costs are going up and they're actually building housing, uh, for their staff. I think the, I don't know exactly how widespread it is. There were a few, a few years ago, there were a few, uh, news reports, uh, sort of about like this new trend, but it's always hard to tell what was really a new trend.

But I think, and this is a place where, you know, the evidence is not in on how effective it is to try to house, uh, Your own teachers, but I and I'm going to get a little bit out ahead of the evidence. Therefore, which is not normally my style, but I will say my instinct is that if a school district is building its own housing that represents a broader policy failure. 

Um, the school district ought not to be responsible for in the first place. I think we ask school districts to do so much already. 

Oh, I agree. 

I have a very hard time imagining that a cost effective use of school resources is to try to become a landlord. 

It conjures up images of company towns, Paul! It's horrific!

And it's Totally different from the university example. It's frightening. And I will say that OUSD, Oakland Unified School District, was playing around with the idea of creating  whole, like, lots of tiny homes for teachers. It is so demoralizing and patronizing. It is ridiculous. 

And I think the only way I can make sense of it is that In places like California state and local policy makers who are not directly involved in the school system have not done enough to make sure that other people can build housing or so that school staff can afford it.

And I think maybe, maybe for school districts, given their other options, that's the best that they can do. But I think if we're counting on school districts to solve housing shortages, then we are going to be fundamentally disappointed with The results.  

I think we're talking about the extent to which the school districts are trying to act as a social safety net because our society does not provide that for our citizens.

And so there's like this issue of the fact that we are highly educated people. And if you look at our level of education and that of other state employees. Our pay doesn't measure up against that. So we're attempting to ameliorate this lack of pay. And if we have no power to change the social systems and the lack of the safety net, if there is no national health care system, if there isn't a plan to make housing affordable, if college education is still going to be wildly expensive, um, and all that is still happening, and K 12 doesn't have the ability to change any of that, The only thing we can change is our teacher pay packages and making it commiserate with the local cost of living in an area.

Um, and it needs to come back to this bottom threshold, this like social contract that has been broken for decades now with teachers. Um, that I was told my first day of my first class of my credential program. Like you're never going to be rich, but you'll be able to own a modest home. Which is build a little bit of wealth for your family, right?

Take modest vacations, put your kids through child care and college, and take care of your aging parents. Like, that is the social contract that we owe our teachers. And that is the contract that has been broken.  That's it for today. Thanks for listening, everyone. Please let us know if you want to join in this or any conversation on the podcast, because we have only begun to delve into each topic and we need your voice to do this justice.

Don't forget to go to teachershortagecrisis.  com to sign the petition and join the movement to save K 12 schooling and our democracy. And remember, you're not alone. We may just be teachers, but we're the only ones who can fix this 

mess.