We Need to Talk About How We Compensate School Staff

Most of public school operational budgets are dedicated to compensating staff, and school staff are important for schools and students. Yet discussions about teacher shortages and teacher quality have tended to ignore many important aspects of school staff compensation beyond broad generalizations about average teacher salary levels. Consequently, these discussions are often muddled. In this essay, I highlight five important choices about school staff compensation faced by school district boards and other policymakers that are commonly neglected: the choices (1) to hire more staff rather than to pay staff more; (2) to replace salary with benefits; (3) to backload rather than frontload compensation; (4) to make compensation contingent on education; and (5) to compensate staff uniformly rather than to strategically differentiate compensation. How school systems navigate these choices, and their trade-offs, has implications for their ability to recruit and retain high quality staff. Rather than taking for granted the decisions of stakeholders in the past - which has tended to obscure potential solutions to staff recruitment and retention problems – school leaders and policymakers should make these choices actively and explicitly on an ongoing basis. Additionally, researchers should do more to inform their decisions.