Compensation
Explores staff satisfaction with their compensation, including their perceptions of the fairness and competitiveness of their compensation.
Recommendations
Based on our extensive experience, TNTP recommends the following as evidence-based practices for this domain:
- Engage stakeholders – including families, teachers, leaders, and district personnel – before, during, and after making changes to your compensation system.
- Based on input from stakeholders and trends in talent data, clearly articulate objectives, or what you hope to achieve by updating your compensation system, and guiding design principles that reflect your values. Ground all decision-making in these objectives and guiding principles.
- Consider how changes to your compensation system will affect teacher pay for groups of teachers, and particularly teachers of color.
- Model the cost of changes to your compensation system and ensure there’s a plan in place for sustaining changes long term.
- Keep in mind that compensation is an important part of valuing and retaining employees, but no reasonable amount of money can overcome a dysfunctional school culture or severely challenging working conditions.
Resources
Browse Resources by Audience
Teachers
Resources for Teachers
Applying Research-Based Strategies to Strategic Staffing Initiatives: Strategies and tools to develop and sustain strategic staffing initiatives
Shortchanged: The Hidden Costs of Lockstep Teacher Pay: A report from TNTP on how lockstep teacher pay can undermine student learning, with examples of innovative compensation models that lead to better outcomes for both students and teachers
Texas’s Teacher Incentive Allotment: A case study on one state’s approach to teacher compensation
Teacher Compensation Strategies: A report on trends, innovations, and approaches to teacher compensation
School Leadership
Resources for School Leadership
Leading for Change: A Framework for Instructional Leadership: Protocols and tools from Insight Education Group to help school leaders create a vision and align their instructional leadership actions to them
National SEED Project: An organization that trains leaders to guide conversations around social change within their school community and institutions