Why public schools are bogged down by a single-salary schedule

OPINION:

A lot has changed since 1962.

That was the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis when the U.S. engaged in a nuclear showdown with the U.S.S.R.  Today, the U.S.S.R. no longer exists. The year 1962 was also when African American Air Force vet James Meredith’s admission to the University of Mississippi was revoked when the registrar learned of his race. Today, a couple of thousand African-American students are enrolled at UMISS.

Unfortunately, some things have hardly changed at all since 1962. That February, Joseph Kershaw, then chief economist for the nonpartisan, Calif.-based RAND Corporation, and his colleague Roland McKean published Teacher Shortages and Salary Schedules, a carefully argued, 232-page analysis showing that the so-called “single salary schedule,” the prevailing method of setting pay for government school teachers across America, was seriously harming schoolchildren and taxpayers alike.

As Messrs. Kershaw and McKean explained, the K-12 “single salary schedule” provides “only two kinds” of salary differentials – “those for different lengths of experience and those for different amounts of college work beyond a bachelor’s degree,” without regard to subject area.  Because it fails to recognize “the existence of the [high-paying] professional opportunities outside of teaching for teachers with certain subject-matter skills,” including physics, chemistry, and advanced mathematics, this system invariably leads to shortages of teachers with scarce skills and/or unnecessarily heavy burdens on the taxpayers who finance government education.

In recent years, think tanks and public officials with otherwise widely disparate viewpoints have concurred that the “single salary schedule” is a relic that has to go for the sake of schoolchildren, parents and taxpayers. Free-market economists like Stanford’s Eric Hanushek have called for the abolition of this system, and so has the Center for American Progress, a generally pro-Big Labor think tank founded by Clinton Administration stalwart John Podesta.

There is no doubt whatsoever that the single salary schedule is “rigidly indifferent to expertise, effectiveness, and market conditions” that under it, teachers typically earn the same whether they teach “effectively or ineffectively” or whether they teach a subject that requires “general knowledge or specialized knowledge.”  Nevertheless, it continues to be the case, more than six decades after the publication of Teacher Shortages and Salary Schedules, that in “virtually all American public schools,” teacher pay is based on the “number of years a teacher has worked in the district and the number of postgraduate credits the teacher has completed.”

How can that be?  The sad fact is, during the 1960s and 1970s, union-label state elected officials across the U.S. opted to make it far more difficult for themselves, their successors, and localities to get rid of the indefensible single salary schedule by passing laws authorizing and promoting union monopoly bargaining in K-12 schools and other public institutions.  

In 1962, only a small handful of American government school teachers outside of New York City were subject to a regime under which union bosses wielded the power to codetermine with public officials how educators were compensated and managed. By 1975, roughly two-thirds of public school teachers nationwide were unionized.

By making it effectively impossible to implement key changes in school governance without the consent of teacher union officials who were already fiercely protective of the single salary schedule during the early 1960s and continue to be today,  monopoly-bargaining statutes kill hopes of implementing teacher pay systems that recognize the law of supply and demand in Big Labor-dominated states like New York, California and Illinois.

Meanwhile, school officials in Right to Work states like Texas and North Carolina are beating forced-unionism states in the interstate competition for “customers” – schoolchildren – and the federal tax dollars that accompany them. While this means that Right to Work states have less of an incentive to switch up teacher pay schemes, small-government states’ greater protections against union hijacking of government functions should still make them ground zero for reform.  

As University of Missouri education professor James Shuls noted in a 2019 radio interview, “The salary is one of the best levers to attract and retain people.  If we don’t have any flexibility on the district’s part, we’re undermining the district.”  That’s been the destructive status quo across America since the early 20th Century. In all likelihood, before it can be ended, state laws foisting union monopoly bargaining on public school teachers will have to go first.