While many of us were hibernating or visiting the mall Santas, a familiar story was published in Arkansas Democrat Gazette about the gaps in teacher salaries between higher-paying and lower-paying districts.  In fact, this story was also linked to the website of the nationally influential Education Week.

The story begins with this provocative line:  ”The gap between the haves and the have-nots among Arkansas schoolteachers has widened.”

Then, there are a few salary tables along with the sympathetic comments from legislators, one of whom bemoaned, “It’s very unfair and unfortunate that people can make twice as much as people doing the same thing with the same credentials with the same experience.”

You might ask …. what’s the problem here?  There are a few.  First, there is little if any mention of student learning; presumably, the public should care about teacher salaries because of the potential link to the quality of the schooling delivered to our children.  However, the tone of the article  feels much more like we should worry about this for the sake of our teachers.

Moreover, the article is laden with flawed reporting and erroneous implications.  Allow me to briefly summarize the key points of the story and simultaneously describe the associated problems.

1.  The teacher salary group is defined as the difference between the highest average district salary and the lowest.

This is not a good way to define any such gap — average salary is a function both of the pay scale in a district and the age of the teaching force in that district.  Thus, generous districts with younger teaching forces will have lower average salaries than will lower-paying districts with older faculty.

Moreover, defining the gap simply by the 2 districts at the high and low end of the scale is not very meaningful.  These districts might be extreme outliers. A more thoughtful strategy for assessing the gap might be to focus on the districts in the bottom 10% of average salary to those in the top 10%.  This measure of the gap, at least, would not be wholly defined by 2 individual districts.

2.  The article then presents a table of the average salaries of 20 districts — the 10 highest and 10 lowest — and includes a column for enrollment.  This shows that all of the high-average salary districts are large and all of the low-average salary districts are small.  The article then puts forth the idea that this is because of higher funding in the larger districts and the choice (and ability) of some larger districts to levy additional local property taxes.

Indeed, it is not necessarily fair to conclude that our state policies unfairly disadvantage small districts, as this article seems to imply.  In fact, the article does not focus on the actual data which show that smaller districts receive additional state support to the extent that, on average, small districts spend more per pupil than do large districts in Arkansas.  This deserves repeating — small districts actually have more dollars per pupil than do large districts.  For example, in the DemGaz article, the average per-pupil expenditures for the 10 high-average salary large districts was about $8,200, as compared to $8,500 for the lower-salary smaller districts!

So, if we need to remedy the differential salary levels, we should at least proceed with evidence in hand.  We can’t fix this by simply ensuring that the poor small low-average salary districts get as much funding as the bigger districts do — they already get more!

3.  Finally, while the article relays that this is a difficult issue without an obvious answer (true!), it perpetuates the concern that teachers are not fairly compensated and that we should base fairness on equal pay for equal experience and credentials.

This is so 20th Century!  These days, we realize that all teachers, even similarly experienced and credentialed ones, are NOT doing the exact same jobs.  Fairness does not mandate that they all be paid equally.  In fact, this type of a pay plan is “unfair” to the hardest-working and most effective teachers, right?  If we really care about students in rural and poor areas, we should figure out who the best teachers are and pay THEM a lot more to live and work in these areas.

Furthermore, these analyses, which simply compare the nominal pay of one district to another, ignore one very important fact — costs of living differ widely among districts within the state.  It may cost more to live in Rogers than in Caddo Hills … any true analyses of a salary gap must pay attention to this.

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So, here is what makes me cranky about these cursory “analyses” focusing on our “paltry” teacher pay.  They perpetuate the common belief that teacher pay in Arkansas is our primary problem and that the equity we should focus on is equal pay for all teachers.  Shouldn’t the focus be on equal opportunities for all students?   Indeed, it may well be the case that, to be “fair” to our students, policymakers are going to need to create intentional inequities in teacher pay (for example, for more effective teachers, for teachers of math or special ed, or for teachers in hard-to-staff geographic areas) so that our students are served by the best possible teachers in all areas.