Mission based salary systems may be challenging to design and implement, but more schools should make the attempt. Lock step salary scales, individual negotiations upon arrival, individual periodic requests for adjustments, and annual across the board percentage increases do not serve independent schools well.  Why? These models are financially not sustainable for most schools in the long term.

Because teachers are intrinsically caregivers who prefer absolute predictability in their salaries, they tend to favor rigid salary scales based on years of experience and graduate credentials earned.  Heads almost always are forced to work around these scales to meet the current needs of both the school and the teachers who need ways to influence their future earning power. Negotiating around the scale to retain valued teachers usually leads to a huge growth in stipends, extracurricular pay, titles, and teachers leaving the classrooms to become administrators. 

Across the board salary increases always hurt the lower paid faculty and help the higher paid ones. Individual negotiations are still widespread. Most nonassertive teachers never try to renegotiate their pay. A number try many times and succeed occasionally. In these circumstances distrust in the administration and in the salary system develops.

There is no public acknowledgement that heads would be fired even more often if they could not find ways to reward teachers who are great classroom teachers; have a wonderful rapport with students; mentor and collaborate with their peers; take on extra work without always being paid more; listen, grow and innovate; accept constructive criticism; and listen thoughtfully to the client, the parents. 

The middle ground of salary systems offers both some predictability and some ability to influence future earning power in a mission aligned manner. Everyone has different names for such systems. However, a history of incidents, faculty and staff discontent, collective bargaining, and strong faculty personalities, all play a role in the development of school culture which influences and is tied to any salary system. 

Heads come and go, but each one leaves a distinct mark on a school’s culture. The culture is most influenced by “incidents.”  Sometimes the head’s legacy is unfortunately one of distrust, especially when the head of school needs to cut staff for budgetary reasons or to initiate changes in the faculty’s workload, schedule, or evaluation protocols. Perhaps the head fires some senior teachers or leadership team members, or the culture is racked by outside political forces, or by parent/faculty unification in grievances against the administration. These “incidents” can define a school culture and can determine what kind of salary structure will be acceptable.

All faculty/staff cultures have “influencers” except perhaps those with a high level of faculty turnover or very new schools where they have yet to emerge. In some teacher cultures the senior teachers drive the politics of the “staff room.” In others it is the mid-career teachers trying to raise a family and make ends meet. In others, it is the younger teachers who have the ambition to succeed, gain promotions and recognition or are newly motivated by the sheer joy of teaching. 

We should also not ignore non-teacher compensation, i.e. for the non-teaching staff and teaching assistants who are not part of the same salary and evaluation protocols but usually participate in the overall benefits package. 

We have one international client school where the local hires and overseas hires do not mix and rarely even exchange pleasantries. Although the local hires are among the highest paid teachers in this country, they are paid in the local currency, which is always losing value to the dollar. The expats are paid in dollars. The expats have housing, free tuition for any number of children, flights home, and other unique benefits that cause resentment among the local staff. Strikes have occurred periodically. The salary systems are viewed by locals as unfair.

Some international schools have committed to honor the dollar/local currency exchange rate and the expats are paid in local currency but pegged to the US dollar. That can be very expensive and challenging to manage. Some schools have committed to pay expats in US dollars, thus avoiding local currencies entirely, but the long-term costs can be unsustainable. 

Underlying all these practices, incidents, and history is a salary system, formal or informal, logical or illogical, published or not published, performance based or based on years of experience, or a combination of both. Over time these systems are no longer relevant to the mission or culture or to the current faculty profile. Then each head who arrives tinkers with the system, but few try to restructure it in its entirety to develop an actual mission-based salary system. 

In many schools, the salary system sends the message that everyone is considered equal in terms of opportunities for pay regardless of marital or family status, yet in the same school the benefit system can make it clear that families with children are more well off with tax free tuition, better medical plans, childcare, extended day, etc. These are all benefits that single teachers or teachers without children may view as discriminatory, especially since these teachers sometimes carry a heavier coaching and extracurricular workload. 

There is nothing wrong with this practice IF these are clearly decisions purposefully designed to support the school’s mission. However, when compensation and benefit practices are random or even at cross purposes, then the whole system is viewed with distrust. 

The tone of faculty and staff culture, the employees’ views toward management, and the clout which management has with the board can have a huge impact on the ability of the leadership of the school to be more creative and take some risks in designing truly creative mission-based systems.  

Career ladder systems can reward teachers significantly over time with shifts in status and base pay according to a carefully crafted set of criteria that include experience and degrees but go far beyond those. An annual salary increase may be inflation based, bonus based, or a combination of both.

Over time in a rigid salary system, money is funding exploding extra pay and reduced workloads rather than base salaries.  When this Consultant asks teachers about their salaries, they seldom mention their stipends but mainly focus on what they remember their base to be. The good news is that most teachers are not motivated solely by money. They and the support staff are caregivers and educators. If the salary system is transparent, understood, deemed to be “fair” and reasonably competitive, their main focus is the job, not the money. 

For most day schools 70 to 85% of the budget goes to salaries and benefits, and almost no board member can define how the salary or evaluation or benefit systems work and how, if at all, they are related to the mission. Yet the board’s most important job is to define and support the school’s mission.  One independent school Client said, “One of John Littleford’s promises was that we would develop a compensation system based on an articulated philosophy of compensation grounded in our mission. I know with certainty that the new compensation system we developed is both mission driven and mission enhancing.”

One international school Client hired Littleford & Associates to assess school climate and culture. A successful outcome to this process led to a satisfactory new contract with the teachers’ union, thus underscoring the link between culture and salary structure. The Head said, “Several months after the completion of our climate project, we began negotiating the next contract with the local teachers’ union. Ultimately, the union membership voted overwhelmingly (86%) to accept the School’s offer; there was no strike. The contract set the School on a sustainable course by eliminating the significant and unaffordable raises in the prior contract and by charting a way forward. High on the list of factors that led to this outcome was the revived positive school climate and sense of trust between community members- both of which John helped us re-establish.”