Teachers who reach goals in the new compensation plan can also move up the pay scale faster than they were able to move up the old salary schedule, Busler said, while those not interested in reaching goals can expect nothing more than annual cost-of-living salary increases.
But overall, the amount the district would put into teacher compensation is greater than the amount it would have had to put in under the old salary schedule, he said.
I was curious about why the district bothered to include seniority and degree-attainment in the new compensation plan at all, given that research has shown seniority isn’t correlated with more effective teaching beyond about five years on the job, and there’s little, if any, connection between getting more college credit and better teaching.
School Board member Charles Uphoff, who sat on the committee that created the new plan, said a main goal of the new plan is to pay the “profession of teaching more professionally.”
It’s nice to see someone in public education realizing teachers are not, say, interchangeable workers on an assembly line.
Meanwhile, back in Madison, the school district is possibly the last one in the state still wedded to a salary schedule — by way of a collective-bargaining agreement repeatedly extended by a union-beholden School Board while Act 10 was held up in court.