Pay Teachers More, Improve Education?
Furlough Fridays gave Hawaii a black eye when it comes to public education. Some argued that teachers should have done what many of their counterparts in charter schools did: keep teaching even if the state couldn’t pay them for every day they worked. Others, the teachers union in particular, argued that the teachers had a contract and couldn’t be expected to work for less.
The result: Teachers took an 8 percent pay hit and stayed home for 17 days last year.
Now the union has worked out a deal to avoid furlough days next school year, but that doesn’t mean the debate is over about how much teachers should be paid.
If anything, it’s heating up across the nation, with states taking steps to move to performance pay and higher salaries for early-career teachers, in part to position themselves to win Race to the Top funding from the Obama administration. Washington, D.C., teachers, for example, just approved a merit pay contract making it possible for some teachers to earn up to $150,000 a year in salary.
Teacher compensation is a thorny issue. On one hand, you have some arguing that it’s directly linked to a district’s ability to recruit and retain quality teachers. On the other, you have a lack of research showing that teacher pay is tied to the academic achievement of students.
In Hawaii, this debate will come to a head in coming months as the union begins negotiating a new contract with the Hawaii Department of Education. (Read the current contract ).
So at Civil Beat we decided to look at the facts about teacher compensation in Hawaii. This article will explore salary and a related article will explore benefits.
The in 2007. Sounds good. But the federation’s salary survey fails to factor in what those salaries are worth locally, or the high cost of living in Hawaii.
The AFT survey calculated Hawaii’s average teacher salary was $51,916 in the 2006 school year; the national average was $51,009.
“My guess is that Hawaii has one of the highest regional costs in the nation,” said Mike Griffith, a senior policy analyst for the Education Commission of the States. “So does Alaska, and you can see it reflected in Alaska’s higher teacher salary. (Alaska’s average in the AFT survey was $54,678.) You also see it in the New York suburbs.”
The National Center for Policy Analysis, a free market think tank, that comparing salaries as objective numbers was an ineffective way to the value of teacher salaries, that cost of living needed to be factored in.
“A number of people like to compare the average teacher salaries, but that can produce skewed results,” Griffith said.
At the time of the October 2005 NCPA analysis, the value of elementary school teachers’ salaries in Pittsburgh and Grand Rapids actually increased after adjusting for the cost of living there. But in Honolulu, the cost-of-living adjustment dropped the average elementary school teacher salary of $45,467 down to a real value of $27,048.
Price of Paradise hurts teachers
The cost of living in Hawaii is such that federal employees working here receive a , or COLA, of 25 percent over their basic pay to compensate for the comparative expense of goods and services. The COLA is 25 percent in all parts of Hawaii except the Big Island, where it is 18 percent.
The center has not updated its numbers to reflect today’s average salary and adjust it for cost-of-living, but Hawaii’s teacher salaries haven’t changed that much since then, said President Wil Okabe.
Teachers aren’t the only workers with lower pay in Hawaii, Okabe said. The mean annual salary for Hawaii workers in all occupations is $42,760, as of the issued by the National Bureau of Labor Statistics. The national figure is $43,460.
The estimates showed Hawaii elementary school teachers earned a mean salary of $48,730. The national mean for the same occupation was $53,150. The teachers earn their mean salary based on a 10-month year, while others typically work a 12-month year. The 10 months include 16 days of vacation and other time off, so a comparison of 10 months with 12 months is roughly equal. If the teachers’ mean salary was adjusted to add two additional months, it would be $58,476, or 37 percent higher than the mean for all workers.
| Mean Wages | Elementary Teachers | All Occupations |
|---|---|---|
| Hawaii | $48,730 | $42,760 |
| Nationwide | $53,150 | $43,460 |
“A lot of what teachers get paid is based on how much a district needs to offer to get qualified personnel to apply for those positions,” said Griffith, the education financial analyst. Some school districts know they are competing with low salaries in other fields, so they also offer low wages for teachers, he explained. This makes teaching jobs competitive with other local jobs, but makes it difficult to attract outsiders.
In Hawaii, the challenge of attracting outsiders becomes ever more difficult when entry-level teachers from the mainland make more than $10,000 less than their counterparts who attended . In other words, they take an almost $1,000 a month pay hit to work in Hawaii.
According to the department’s current salary schedule:
Entry-level teachers with a bachelor’s degree who haven’t completed a state-approved teacher education program make $32,713.
Entry-level teachers with a bachelor’s degree who have completed a state-approved teacher education program make $43,157.
Mid-level teachers, with a master’s degree, after about 10 years, make roughly $54,033.
The highest pay grade, for instructors with doctoral degrees within the field they teach, is $79,170.
Benefits critical part of compensation
Of course, salaries are just one critical component of compensation. Teachers also receive a benefits package, including retirement, health care, sick days and professional days. Benefits account for about one-third of most teachers’ total compensation packages, said Griffith. Read more about Hawaii’s teacher benefits in today’s coverage and in our teacher compensation topic page. The National Center for Education Statistics estimated that the Hawaii Department of Education spent on instructors’ salaries1 for the 2007-2008 school year, and another $303 million on their benefits.
Despite the relative competitiveness of teacher salaries in the state’s overall labor market, Okabe said it is especially challenging to attract young talent to Hawaii because most students right out of college have a hard time finding affordable housing and food on . An entry-level teacher with a bachelor’s degree from the mainland makes $32,713 according to the latest contract. No matter what the qualifications, a teacher who has not completed a state-approved teacher education program will never advance beyond a salary of $38,981 — or step 3 on the 15-step schedule.
However, Sandy Goya, communications director for the state Department of Education, said 55 percent of teachers were trained elsewhere. Attracting new teachers isn’t a problem, she said.
The annual turnover rate for teachers in the Department of Education held steady for several years at approximately 1,600 per year, or 15 percent, according to a by the Hawaii Educational Policy Center, which researches and analyzes educational policies affecting Hawaii. Approximately half of departures are related to retirement, health issues and other personal reasons. The other half “might be” related to dissatisfaction with pay and work conditions, the report stated. For 2008-2009 though, the turnover rate was down, to 1,328.
“I think you can say in the last couple of years that given the programs that the department has instituted, we’ve seen a higher retention rate,” Goya said. She was speaking of orientation and support programs for teachers.
Work conditions and job satisfaction key
Salary is not the main issue in retaining teachers, said Christine Sorensen, dean of the University of Hawaii at Manoa College of Education. There is little research supporting a direct correlation between teacher compensation and retention.
“It is a factor, but it is not the factor,” said Sorensen. “Even more important are work conditions and job satisfaction.”
As evidence, Sorensen pointed out that the state is not facing a universal shortage of teachers. As in most school districts, Hawaii’s teacher shortages occur primarily in specific content areas or in geographic areas with difficult student populations, she said. Waiahole Elementary School in Kaneohe has the highest turnover rate in the state, at 60 percent. Washington Middle School, near downtown Honolulu, on the other hand, has a turnover rate of 10 percent.
“Money is not everything,” agreed , a research professor at the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington, which provides research and analysis on a number of education reform issues for public K-12 schools. “The characteristics of the students being taught in the schools appear to be very, very important.”
