An April 2000 survey of over 2,200 former math, computer science, special ed and foreign language teachers found that 28 percent left due to pregnancy or to raise a family and 20 percent quit out of frustration, with better salaries and benefits being the third most common reason for quitting. A private school in Silicon Valley has come up a creative way to help teachers afford homes in the area. Asked to testify about the adequacy of teacher pay in New York City for a school finance lawsuit in New York state, economist Michael Podgursky of the University of Missouri gathered a great deal of data on how much beginning and experienced teachers earn in different urban districts, how pay in different districts varies when compared with the pay of other professionals, and how much the length of the workday for teachers and hourly earnings vary. You can download his report at The Relative Pay and Contractual Work Hours of New York City Teachers . The 31st annual survey of the public's attitudes toward public schools by Phi Delta Kappa and Gallup has just been released, and it has been in the news because of disagreement about what the results really show about support for vouchers, but the poll addressed teacher quality issues too.
People seem to be confused about what performance-based pay means, though.
When asked how teacher salaries should be determined, the academic degree a teacher has earned and the years of teaching experience a teacher has were more popular responses than how a teacher's students perform on a test. We think that basing pay on student performance will become more popular as value-added assessment, a statistical technique for isolating a teacher's contribution to student test scores, becomes more widespread. This method prevents evaluation systems from penalizing teachers who are assigned students who start off farther behind. About 1000 teachers left Oklahoma last summer to take higher paying jobs in other states, the state education department reported. Many other states are now offering a range of incentives to attract teachers, including signing bonuses, benefits packages, streamlined hiring processes, and housing discounts.