Increasing Minimum Teacher Salaries
Opportunities and Drawbacks Across Geography and Race
J. Cameron Anglum (Saint Louis University), Anita Manion (University of Missouri-St. Louis), & Sapna Varkey (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill)
One might be hard-pressed to turn on the evening news these days and avoid reports of some form of staffing shortage, a phenomenon which seems to cut across a myriad of professions ranging from bus drivers to hospital nurses. Public school teachers fall squarely in this concern, particularly in school districts that serve the largest shares of low-income students, often in urban and rural locales. Simply put, many schools struggle to recruit new teachers and retain their current teachers, often resulting in inadequate staffing. Meanwhile, the perception of the teaching profession may not be what it once was—mired at a fifty-year low considering the professional prestige of teaching, attractiveness to new teachers, new teacher preparedness, and overall teacher satisfaction (Kraft and Lyon 2022). Many of these difficulties have been heightened by the pandemic, which thrust unprecedented working conditions on classroom teachers across the country.
So how might public policymaking address the teacher workforce to reduce shortages, improve longevity, and reestablish its stature? While many promising changes to the teaching profession likely would require long-term adjustment, increasing teacher compensation represents one recent and potentially immediate strategy to try to improve teacher morale and longevity and minimize shortages (Steiner et al. 2022; Nguyen, Anglum and Crouch 2023). It may be especially palatable as a policy solution today considering record-high public backing for higher teacher salaries (Houston, Peterson and West 2022). Along these lines, many states instituted pandemic-era teacher salary reforms funded, in part, by budgets enriched by substantial, albeit temporary, federal COVID-19 relief funding (Duncombe and Francies 2022). Teacher salary disparities and staffing shortages, however, are not experienced uniformly across school settings. For example, rural and metropolitan area schools often vie with different teacher labor market conditions, complicating the role of state-level salary reform efforts.
In our work, we examine a pandemic-era salary reform in Missouri, home to one of the nation’s worst teacher salary landscapes, where starting, full-time public school teacher salaries can be as low as $25,000. Missouri’s starting salary grant program, enacted in 2022, raised a subset of beginning salaries to $38,000. As we consider Missouri’s policy reform and teacher compensation policies more broadly, our analyses focus on the distribution of policy benefits; in other words, how may salary reforms benefit different types of teachers and students? Do urban, suburban, or rural teachers reap disproportionate gain? How does funding reach school districts of varied teacher and student demographic characteristics? Do proposed or enacted salary reforms raise socioeconomic and/or ethno-racial equity concerns? Like many states, Missouri’s geography includes both large urban metropolitan areas and large rural regions. Also applicable to other state settings, Missouri includes significant ethno-racial residential and school-based segregation, often coinciding with geographic differences.
Meanwhile, Missouri’s political elites typically represent rural jurisdictions, conveying rural-centric control over statewide teacher salary policies. In recent decades, much education policymaking has shifted away from the purview of local governance to general-purpose governing bodies such as state legislatures (Henig 2013). In education, this shift may grant white rural voters significant influence on electing policymakers who enact legislation that may significantly impact students and teachers of color (Henig 2013), who in Missouri teach disproportionately in urban metropolitan areas. Across state legislatures and congressional geography gerrymandering has led to an overrepresentation of rural white voters, often at the expense of liberal urban voters (Canon 2022; Rodden 2019). In this context, policy reforms, like those that encompass teacher compensation, must be assessed both by their average effects and by their distributional impacts across diverse teacher and student characteristics and district geographies.
Combining our interests in contemporary teacher compensation reform and urban-rural political divides, we find Missouri’s policy conveyed meaningful salary reform to thousands of teachers, an average 7.6% salary increase among eligible teachers. Rural, white teachers, however, were the overwhelming beneficiary of the policy reform, with urban, suburban, Black, and Hispanic teachers nearly entirely excluded from policy reform funding. In fact, fewer than three percent of non-white teachers received funding. By extension of the state’s racial and ethnic segregation in school enrollment, the schools Black and Hispanic students attend also received minimal funding. These findings cast doubt on the capacity of this specific funding reform to improve the professional working conditions for teachers of color, no less the staffing shortages experienced disproportionately by the urban and suburban schools that employ them.
As a growing evidence base affirms students’ academic benefits from having teachers of color, especially among students of color, such teachers remain severely underrepresented in public school settings (Bristol and Martin-Fernandez 2019; Ingersol and May 2009). Moreover, their turnover rates are higher than their white counterparts and they teach in hard-to-staff urban schools far more frequently (McCorkell and Hinkley 2019; Achinstein et al. 2010), heightening the need to craft policies, such as equitable compensation reform, to attract these teachers to the profession and stem their higher rates of turnover.
Read the full UAR article here.
References
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Bristol, Travis J., and Javier Martin-Fernandez. 2019. “The Added Value of Latinx and Black Teachers for Latinx and Black Students: Implications for Policy.” Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 6 (2): 147–53. https://doi.org/10.1177/2372732219862573.
Canon, David T. 2022. “Race and Redistricting.” Annual Review of Political Science, 25: 509–28. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci041719-102107.
Duncombe, Chris, and Cassidy Francies. 2022, February 3. “State Information Request: Teacher Compensation and ESSER Funding.” Education Commission of the States. https://www.ecs.org/state-information-request-teacher-compensation-and-esser-funding/.
Henig, Jeffrey R. 2013.The End of Exceptionalism in American Education: The Changing Politics of School Reform. Cambridge, MA, USA: Harvard Education Press
Kraft, Matthew A., and Melissa Arnold Lyon. 2022.The Rise and Fall of the Teaching Profession: Prestige, Interest, Preparation, and Satisfaction Over the Last Half Century. Providence, RI, USA: Annenberg Institute at Brown University.
Ingersoll, Richard M., and Henry May. 2011. Recruitment, Retention and the Minority Teacher Shortage. Philadelphia, PA, USA: Consortium for Policy Research in Education.
McCorkell, Lisa, and Sara Hinkley. 2019. “Retaining Teachers of Color to Improve Student Outcomes.” Institute for Research on Labor and Employment Policy Brief. https://irle.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Travis-Bristol-Policy-Brief-Teacher-Representation-1.pdf.
Nguyen, Tuan D., J. Cameron Anglum, and Michael Crouch. 2023. “The Effects of School Finance Reforms on Teacher Salary and Turnover: Evidence from National Data.” AERA Open 9: 23328584231174447. https://doi.org/10.1177/23328584231174447.
Rodden, Jonathan A. 2019. Why Cities Lose: The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Political Divide. New York, NY, USA: Basic Books.
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