District of Columbia Teacher Salaries

Late last week District of Columbia Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee reached a tentative agreement with Washington Teachers Union President George Parker and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten on a long-awaited new contract for DCPS teachers (entire .pdf here). Among other things, the two-years-in-the-making agreement would establish a small performance pay plan and new “professional development centers” and created new options for excessing teachers. In addition to making salary increases retroactive, it also would create an entirely new salary schedule.

Base salary schedules are determined entirely by years of experience and education credentials, and they set the base salary for every teacher in the district. Any performance pay would be in addition to these amounts, but there are no details yet on how much those supplemental payments might be. They’re certainly going to amount to far less money than a teacher’s base salary.

The chart below shows what base salaries would look like for DCPS teachers in 2009-10 (this chart and the ones below are all pending the contract’s approval). The blue line represents base salaries for fully certified teachers with only a bachelor’s degree. It increases fairly steadily from the employee’s first year until they reach 11 years of experience, where it pauses for three years, jumps $5,410 at year 15, and then stays constant for the remainder of the teacher’s career. The red line represents the base salary for teachers with a bachelor’s degree plus 30 credits or a Master’s degree. It is a bit steeper than the blue line (meaning these teachers experience larger raises), has the same pause, a $7,226 jump, and then longevity bonuses after 17, 19, and 21 years of experience.

Such schedules are not linked to what research has discovered about teacher effectiveness. Teachers tend to make rapid improvements in their first few years on the job, but a teacher with 17 or 21 years of experience is no more or less effective, on average, than a teacher with only four or five years of experience. Master’s degrees are also not linked to gains in teacher effectiveness, but DCPS is about to enter into a contract that will pay large sums of money to teachers for both longevity gains and Master’s degrees. The proposed contract will make these payments more pronounced.

The chart below shows the changes over time in the base salaries for fully certified teachers with bachelor’s degrees in DCPS. The blue line was 2005-6, the red line was 2006-7, and the other five are the salaries negotiated during this round of contract talks. As the chart shows, DCPS is committing to back-loading salaries more than they did previously.

In Current Dollars; *Retroactive

This trend is not just for teachers with bachelor’s degrees. The next chart shows the proposed salary schedule for teachers with a bachelor’s degree plus 30 additional credits or teachers with a Master’s degree. The colored lines correspond to the same colors in the previous chart, and they show the same thing: DCPS is going to be giving large raises to teachers late in their careers. These raises are even more pronounced for teachers with Master’s degrees compared to their bachelors-only peers.

In Current Dollars; Retroactive

With finite resources, these choices matter. To see how DCPS’ salary schedules compare to those of other large school districts, or to see how a district might best use what research tells us about teacher effectiveness to shape salary schedules, read my report from a year ago called “Ladders of Success.”

Tagged as: DCPS Teachers Contract, District of Columbia, George Parker, Michelle Rhee, Randi Weingarten, Teacher Effectiveness, Teacher Experience, Teacher Salaries, Teachers with Master's Degrees