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Jennifer Smith
Weatbrook
English 2010
4 July 2015
Teacher Compensation Performance or Tenure?
An Annotated Bibliography
As a mother of 3 growing children, I have been very interested in the education system
and the quality of our teachers. I became so disgusted with the system and bureaucracy of it all a
few years ago and put all my kids in charter schools. Im not sure that they were much better, but
it was the only option at the time.
During this searching for a better system, I often heard that our teachers are unfairly
compensated and that the upper administration is overly compensated. There was much debate
about whether pay should be based on tenure or performance and how that would affect our
schools and children. I didnt pay a whole lot of attention to it at the time, but I thought I might
take the time now to look into it a little more and see what I might find out.

Grissom, Jason A, and Katharine O Strunk. "How Should School Districts Shape Teacher Salary
Schedules? Linking School Performance to Pay Structure in Traditional Compensation
Schemes." Educational Policy (2011): 663-95. Web. 4 July 2015.
Jason Grissom holds a Masters degree in Education and a PhD in Political Economics
from Stanford University. He studies the policy, politics, and governance dimensions of K-12
education. He has published widely in education, public administration, and political science,
with articles appearing in such outlets as American Educational Research Journal, American

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Journal of Education, and Teachers College Record. Katharine Strunk has a PhD in
Administration and Policy Analysis from Stanford. She is an Associate Professor Education and
Policy at the University of Southern California with a joint appointment in the Rossier School of
Education and the Sol Price School of Public Policy. Dr. Strunk has published in such works as
Educational Policy, American Educational Research Journal, and Peabody Journal of Education.
Both Grissom and Strunk are highly qualified rhetors in this arena.
In their research, Grissom and Strunk argue that districts are likely to benefit from
structuring salary schedules with greater experience returns early in the teaching career. They
thought by frontloading compensation schedules, or in other words, rewarding novice teachers
with greater salary returns, would reap greater rewards in relation to better performance among
the students. There has been debate recently about how best to pay teachers. This has focused
mainly on the use of merit pay to reward teachers for their students test score gains. This
compensation strategy differs fundamentally from the traditional salary schedule module used
by 92% of school districtswhich bases compensation for teachers on years of experience and
educational attainment.
While there are some who see promise in pay-for-performance, Grissom and Strunk point
out several reasons such compensation plans are not in widespread use. One, there are critics
who express concerns about mismeasurement of teacher performance versus student test score
gains and the problems of showing the individual teachers contributions within the team
production of schooling. Also, early merit pay programs have shown to be quite expensive, often
relying on large one-time grants from private or government sources to increase spending on
teachers salaries. And finally, many districts need the support of the teachers unions, who are
often unenthusiastic about substantial changes to the traditional salary schedule.

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Grissom and Strunk argue that by keeping the same salary structure that is currently in
place, but by frontloading it, instead of backloading it that is the current tradition, the districts
actually have a more efficient allocation of district budgets by saving funds that might
otherwise yield little return when allocated to veteran teachers salaries and putting those dollars
to more productive, student achievement-enhancing uses. Consistent with these claims, we show
that schools in districts with front-loaded salary schedules perform better in terms of student
proficiency in reading and math at the fourth- and eighth-grade levels.
This article gave me a different view than one I had thought about before. I had only
thought about the tenure (backloading) and performance based compensation structures. Grissom
and Strunk showed how paying teachers more at the beginning of their careers actually
motivated them and made them do better than if you paid them more at the end of their careers.
If you gave higher raises at the beginning, you get better results. You pay the same over the
course of the whole career, you just pay more at the beginning than at the end. It makes a lot of
sense to me and I believe is a smart choice for districts.

Lavy, Victor. "Using Performance-Based Pay to Improve the Quality of Teachers." The Future of
Children 17.1 (2007): 87-109. Web. 4 July 2015.
Victor Lavy is currently a professor in the Social Sciences Department of Economics at
Warwick. He has published numerous articles, mostly for the National Bureau of Economic
Research. He is a renowned author and professor and a highly credible rhetor for this subject.

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In Using Performance-Based Pay to Improve the Quality of Teachers, Lavy reviews

evidence on individual and school-based incentive programs implemented in recent years in the
US and abroad. He evaluated programs in Israel and found substantial gains in student and
teacher performance.
Tying teachers pay to their classroom performance should, says Victor Lavy, improve
the current educational system both by clarifying teaching goals and by attracting and retaining
the most productive teacher. He does note that while implementing pay for performance creates
practical challenges.
There are measurement problems, such as agreeing on goals and evaluating progress
toward the goal fairly and accurately. Another concern Lavy addresses is unfair competition
between teachers, especially in the absence of transparent criteria, thus undermining
collaboration. Even if the evaluation is precise and fair, teachers can still feel upset if their
competence is questioned. Lavy also points out that unintended consequences may arise from the
pay based compensation plan. Teachers, for example, may focus on the easiest way to increase
the rewarded measure while ignoring measures that schools and parents ultimately want to
improve. There is also the risk that while test scores may be based on reading and math, that is
what teachers will focus on, letting music and arts, or values and civic responsibility fall by the
wayside.
Lavy highlights that the system must measure the true performance in a way that
minimizes random variation as well as undesired and unintended consequences. Goals should be
attainable. All teachers should be eligible for the incentive offered, but only a subset of teachers
should be rewarded in practice. If too many teachers are rewarded, teachers may not need to
exert much extra effort to benefit.

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I had never thought of some of the things that Lavy pointed out. I hadnt thought of the
fact that if teachers were focusing so much on the tested subjects, other subjects would not get
any notice. That is already such a problem that we dont need any more of that. There is already
such a lack of culture and art in the schools anymore that anything that hurts it more is not a
benefit to our children.
Lavy also makes it sound like it is a benefit package that teachers receive. I was under the
impression that performance based pay was built into the salary structure; the teachers
performance was in direct relation to how they received their raises, not in a bonus they received.
I will definitely have to finish my research to find out more about how performance pay really
works.

Meyer, Warren. "The Teacher Salary Myth -- Are Teachers Underpaid?" Forbes. Forbes
Magazine, 22 Dec. 2011. Web. 4 July 2015.
Warren Meyer has an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a mechanical
engineering degree from Princeton University. He runs a small business running parks and
campgrounds under concession contracts with public recreation authorities. He writes about
business, economics, and climate change. He is a relatively dependable rhetor for this topic.
Meyer starts out by saying how often we hear that teachers are grossly underpaid in our
country and that many of the bad outcomes in public education are directly attributable to low
teacher compensation. He wonders how true this really is.

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He takes a unique stance when he says that he doesnt care how much people are paid. If
he doesnt like how much someone is paid, for example a sports athlete, he wont go to that
sporting event. But in the case of teachers pay, he doesnt have a choice, The government
enforces a school monopoly in which I have to pay for public schools, whether I have kids in
their schools or not. I am thus required by law to pay public school salaries. That is why he
cares.
Meyer goes on to point out that the problem with salaries for teachers is that, in a
monopoly, the usual checks and balances on compensation dont exist. If a private school wants
to give its teachers a big raise and has to raise its tuitions to do it, the parents are then left with a
choice as to whether to accept the higher tuitions or to look elsewhere. If they stay, then the
teachers make more money.
But what happens when the state overpays for teachers? Usually the government just
demands more taxes. Sure, voters can push back, but seldom do they win in a game dominated
by concentrated benefits but dispersed costs. On a per capita basis, teachers always have more to
fight for than taxpayers, and are so well-organized they often are one of the dominant powers in
electing officials in states like California. This leads to the financially unhealthy situation of a
teachers union negotiating across the table from officials who owe their office to the teachers
union.
In an annual compensation survey from 2010, Meyer shows that the average wage of an
Elementary and Secondary School Administrator is $46.85 per hour; the average wage of
Elementary and Secondary School Teachers is $38.39 per hour; and the average wage of
Kindergarten Teachers is $35.20 per hour. He goes on to say that it appears that public school

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teachers are paid roughly the same, perhaps even a bit more, than other white collar, nonmanagement professionals.
Meyer also goes on to refute such statements such as teachers are only paid for 9 months
of the year and teachers do a lot of work at home and the real problem is a shortage of good
teachers.
When reading this article, I was shocked at the numbers it portrayed. I took it with a grain
of salt though when later in the article Meyer does admit that the numbers portrayed were a
nationwide average and did not take into account rural areas, and that obviously places like San
Francisco will make more than rural South Dakota. Im not sure how close his numbers are for
Utah.

Stoddard, Marianne. Personal interview. 4 July 2015.

Stoddard has been an educator for over 18 years. She began her career in WY after
graduating from Special Education and Elementary Ed at MSU-Billings in 1997. She now
teaches Special Ed preschool in 5 different elementary schools in the Granite School District.
She has personal knowledge of this topic and is a reliable rhetor for the subject.
Stoddard was very passionate about this subject. She started by talking about how the
district was talking about how the new merit pay was going to work. They (the teachers) would
be getting their pay raises based on the performances of their students. Stoddard went on to say
how unfair this was as she would never get a raise again, as her students will NEVER reach the
performance levels necessary for thisbecause they are all special ed. They never have reached
standards and they never will. So merit based pay does not and will not ever work for her.

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She went on to say how it should workhow the merit based pay should be for how she
gets her IEPs done on time, and how she never misses a day and has all her sick time accrued
for the last 3 contract periods, how she has team meetings for almost all of her lunch breaks, how
she meets all of her team and personal goals, and how she is always there to fill in for the
teachers who cant or wont make it for whatever reasons. Stoddard said merit pay is like saying
to the dentist you only get paid if your patient has no cavities.
There are so many things that influence whether or not you will get your merit pay: if the
students parents are blue collar or white collar workers, if the parents spend time doing
homework with the students, if the students are living in a two or a one parent home, if the
student is living in an immigrant situation with more than one family in the home, if English is
the first language of the student, if the student has to work to help support the family, and the list
goes on. With so many variables, there is no fair way to measure whether a teacher really
reached the goals that were set. Stoddard pointed out that you cant measure the teachers
progress by the students progress.
I went into this interview thinking I was going to get validation for performance
compensation. I thought Marianne would be all for itthe teacher does a good job, the kids do
well, the teacher gets paid well. I was so wrong. She opened my eyes to so many drawbacks of
the system. I had never thought of her problem before, which really bothers me because I am
going into a profession to help kids just like that. I know that there are kids who will never reach
those performance marks and those teachers do a remarkable job. They should not be held liable
for what those kids cant do. They do so much for them. Just because they cant read or do math,
the teachers dont get their merit raises? I now see the flaw in the system.

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Wimmer, Nadine. "76% of Per-pupil Spending Pays Teachers' Salaries, Stats Show." Utah News,
Sports, Weather and Classifieds | KSL.com. 27 Aug. 2013. Web. 4 July 2015.
Nadine Wimmer currently co-anchors KSL News at 5, 6, 6:30, and 10pm. She is also an
Emmy award-winning reporter who covers education and leads the stations literacy initiative
Read Today. Education has always been important to Nadine She earned her Masters degree
in political communication and bachelors degree in communication from the University of Utah.
She attended a fellows program in education and journalism through the University of
Washington. She is a highly credible rhetor on this subject.
In this article, Wimmer points out that half of Utahs state budget goes to school and 84%
of that funding goes to salaries. When asked if that meant teachers or administrators salaries,
most people polled thought that too much of Utahs education money goes to pay administrators.
When the school finance experts at the State Office of Education pulled apart the salary
stats, heres what they found: of the roughly $5,803 spent on each Utah student, $4,379 or 76%
- goes to teacher salaries. That includes aides, librarians, and counselors. They also found that
$399 or 7% - goes to school administrators, like principals and office staff. Only 1%, or $72,
goes to general administrators, like superintendents, and the state board.
It gets really interesting when Utah numbers are compared to those across the country.
According to the National Center for Education statistics, Utah ranks last in spending per
student. But it ranks No. 6 in the nation for the percentage of education budget spent on teachers
salaries. Utah came in at No. 39 for the percentage spent on administrators.

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The article goes on to say that even after knowing the national comparisons, many people
want more money directed to teachers. I would say administrators are vital to the whole
operation, but teachers need to be compensated for their efforts in the classroom, said Utah
resident Annie Storrs.
I found this article highly informative. I had no clue that administrators are only paid 1%
of the overall budget. You hear their overall salaries, over $200,000 in some of the larger
districts, and you are amazed. But knowing that 76% of the overall budget is going to the
teachers, I feel a lot better about how our teachers are paid. And, knowing that we are number
one in the nation per studentthat may be true but with the number of kids that our state has, it
doesnt come close to being enough to cover the needs of the system.

In conclusion, I see that there is obviously much I didnt know about the merit and tenure
based compensation system. I am still only on the very surface of it. I have seen the inside of a
system which I thought at first to be on the verge of making some great strides in moving toward
a merit based structure. In talking to someone on the front lines of it though, I now see I am
grossly misinformed and not ready to make any kind of judgement on this issue. Our public
education system is complex and we need good teachers to help us with our children and their
futures. In terms of fair compensation, a frontloading system seems to be the most beneficial, to
get kids the scores that we want, to give teachers fair compensation, and to save districts money.