UF Study: Better Pay Can Bring In Better School Teachers

September 25, 2002

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Schools nationwide are struggling to cope with falling test scores, provoking debate about whether cash-strapped schools could attract qualified teachers by boosting pay.

Now a University of Florida researcher has determined in a nationwide study that raising salaries is an effective way for school districts to attract more qualified teachers. The link between higher pay and superior faculty is strongest in the nonunionized South.

A key reason why nonunion districts are most successful in hiring top teachers is because many of them use merit-based pay systems that compensate faculty for job performance, said David Figlio, a UF economics professor who conducted the study.

“Really highly qualified teachers might view a nonunionized school district as a place where individual motivation, effort and performance are more directly rewarded than in a unionized district bound by collective bargaining where everybody gets paid according to a straight salary schedule,” Figlio said.

Some educators are looking to Figlio’s study for ways to better the quality of public education.

“As we struggle to improve elementary and secondary education in the United States, research like David Figlio’s can help us design the best strategies for attracting high-quality teachers to all schools, improving the outcomes of all students,” said Susanna Loeb, an education professor at Stanford University who is an expert on the subject.

To measure a teacher’s qualifications, Figlio looked at the selectivity of the college a teacher attended based on its average SAT scores, as well as whether teachers majored or held a master’s degree in the subject they taught.

“There is no generally accepted principle for what makes a good teacher except maybe the ‘I know it when I see it test,’” he said. “But there is empirical evidence to suggest that students learn more when they are taught by graduates of selective colleges and by teachers who have college degrees in the subjects they teach.”

Twenty-nine percent of unionized teachers in the group that participated in the study are in the South, Figlio said.

“Since these types of schools, which tend to be heavily concentrated in the South, seem to have the best luck in attracting higher-qualified teachers by raising salaries, the logical conclusion is this might be a better strategy for southern schools than for schools in the rest of the country,” he said.

Unions have been concerned that merit pay gives administrations latitude to reward their cronies. One way to combat union concerns is to hinge a principal’s pay on the overall test scores at the school, he said.

“If the principal’s salary directly relates to the performance of students in the school, that will provide the principal with pretty strong incentives to allocate merit pay in the ways in which it is intended, ” Figlio said.

Teachers’ salaries have been increasing at a greater rate than many comparable professions over the last several decades, but that is partly because teachers’ salaries tended to be extremely low, he said.

The average teacher salary in the study was $25,899 in 1993 dollars, one of the last years covered by the study. In the South, this average was $25,057, while in the rest of the United States the average was $26,725, he said.

Until the early 1970s, teaching was one of the few professions widely available to women, Figlio said. As other career opportunities became available to women, the teaching profession had a much tougher time attracting highly qualified teachers with the same low salaries they once offered, he said.

Raising teacher salaries could be costly because salary schedules based on education and experience would require districts to raise the pay for lower-quality teachers along with their superior counterparts, he said.

Figlio said merit and across-the-board pay hikes in unionized schools are not incompatible. Such a hybrid system could provide merit pay for better teachers in addition to general raises for all teachers, he said.

Figlio’s study was published in the July issue of the journal Industrial and Labor Relations Review. It examined 2,672 newly hired teachers in 188 public school districts where salaries rose by differing amounts between 1987 and 1988, and 1993 and 1994. The districts Figlio selected appeared in three consecutive rounds of the U.S. Dept. of Education-administered School Staff Survey, or SASS, which provides information on individual teacher qualifications and teacher salary schedules.