How to Give Your Teachers Bigger Raises and Save the School Money

Last spring I was named the founding principal of St. Michael Catholic High School, a new Catholic high school located in Fairhope, Al, part of the Archdiocese of Mobile. I began work in July of 2015, and our first day of classes will be in August, 2016.  

It’s been thrilling to design a school from “scratch,” and I’ve been blessed with excellent support from the archdiocese and the broader community. But it’s also been an occasion for me to be reflective about things we principals often take as “givens,”  be they bell schedules, the classes we require, the extracurriculars we offer, and as will be the topic of this article, HOW we structure our pay scales and salaries. 

Let me begin with this general observation about us concerning salaries: We principals often draw the lines too firmly, unwilling to offer an outstanding faculty prospect a few extra thousand dollars to secure his or her place on our faculty, or to retain an excellent teacher who needs more. Our most important expenses are salaries, and our most important assets are excellent teachers. We can try and hire “on the cheap,” but the reality is, for every mediocre teacher on our faculty, we end up losing tens of thousands of dollars in tuition dollars in the long run, as unhappy or uninspired students leave us, or as a mediocre reputation dampens enthusiasm for admissions. Making PURELY an economic argument (and setting aside, for the moment, the profound difference a gifted teacher can make in young peoples’ lives), we are too often “a penny wise and a pound foolish” in our hiring and retention practices.

But often, this “mistake” is hardwired into our salary charts. I have challenged the very idea of salary charts elsewhere, because they too often hamstring us from hiring people at the salaries we need to get them. But if we must have salary charts, we should create them such that they help us retain our best teachers  (or attract high end teachers), and this means, I believe, having salary scales with the greatest range possible between starting salaries and the veterans: austere on the front end, but generous on the back. Our 15+ year veterans are presumably the pillars of our school (if they’re not, we don’t have a salary issue as much as a performance evaluation issue). I believe they should be making 25,000+ dollars more than our first year teachers. If they are, every year (or every couple of years, depending on how we choose to do it), we can give these teachers a sizable bump in salaries, recognizing their growing importance to our school. Too often, however, we keep the ranges so narrow that our annual raises barely keep pace with inflation, and almost certainly do NOT keep pace with the increasing expenses of a young person, who may begin with us as a single person, but then marry and have children. He or she may be deeply committed to our mission, but there are bills to pay and mouths to feed. 

There’s another reason a wider range salary scale is better: It’s usually cheaper. If my starting salary is relatively high but my 20+ salaries are relatively low, I’ve tilted the “average” salary up, since the statistics say the majority of our faculty will be with us less than 10-12 years. But if I am paying excellent wages to my most long-standing teachers, who represent a smaller fraction of my faculty, and if I am keeping starting salaries as low as possible, then my “average” salary will be less. 

For illustrative purposes, let’s look at two fictional schools, A and B, each with 20 faculty. Both schools have 7 (35%)  of their faculty as “level 1” (1-5) years, 7 (35%) as “level 2” (6-10) years, 4 (20%) as “level 3” (11-15 years) and  2 (10%) “level 4” (16+ years). Though every faculty is different, this would not be an entirely unusual Catholic school breakdown per 20 faculty.

School A, however, has a narrow range of salaries, with a starting salary of 38,000 and 53,000 for 15+ teachers.  School B has a wider range, with a starting salary of 33,000 and a high end of 58,000. For the sake of this illustration, let us assume that salaries increase each year in both schools in a linear fashion, meaning they go up equal amounts from level 1, to 2, etc. So in school A, the increments would be $5,000 as one moved up the levels, whereas for school B, the increments would be $8,333. 

What is the total cost of salaries? In school A (7 * 38,000) + (7 * 43000) + (4* 48000) +  (2* 53000) = a total salary of  865,000. In school B, (7* 33000) + (7*41333) + 4 * (49666) + (2* 58000) = a total salary of 838,995. School B pays out $26,000 less in salaries, even while it gives each of its teachers a bigger salary increase each year. It’s a “win—win” for both the school and employee—a happy instance where philosophy and practicality marry for the common good of all. 

And now, a few qualifications: 

These numbers don’t work, of course, if a school is comprised of predominantly long term teachers. But that’s a relatively rare phenomena—consider yourself blessed if you have that “problem”! But I’ll add this: ask yourself if those longer term faculty are among your best teachers, or to put it differently, if your performance evaluation of faculty each year is sufficiently challenging as to weed out the average teachers as the years go by. Better teaching ought to be expectation for our longer serving faculty, given that they have been able to hone their craft over the years, but often, we give our longer serving teachers a pass. 

These numbers also don’t hold if a school is unable to attract good teachers at the lower starting salary. In my example, if school B can’t find good beginning teachers at 33,000, then it’ll have to pay more. But there’s good news on that front: Having just accepted over 175 applications for 15 teaching slots as we begin a new school at St. Michael, I can tell you it’s a “buyer’s market.” Plus, as I have written elsewhere, if it’s necessary to sweeten the pot to get a hard to find position, consider giving a young person a signing bonus rather than raise beginning salaries across the board. Signing bonuses are one time payments. 

“Be wise as serpents, and gentle as doves,” Jesus commanded. May we be given wisdom to lead our schools well. 

Pay Scales?

Unlike my previous diocesan school, the school I work for now doesn't have a “diocesan pay scale" from which I must pay teachers. Nor does my school’s Board of Trustees dictate a pay scale for our school. Instead, the Board approves a line item in the budget for “salaries” and I have freedom within that budget to pay teachers as I see fit, depending on their value to the school and the “market forces” at work for their particular position. 

I have found this lack of a prescribed template extremely liberating, and truth be told, in the best interest of the school I serve. In my previous school, I often lost out on the battle for a fine teacher candidate, simply because the salaries I could pay that person paled in comparison to what others were offering. I didn’t go down within a fight, however! I would often “scaffold” his or her salary offer by including a laundry list of non-teaching stipends (coaching, extra-curricular clubs, etc) as a means of approximating market rates. I won some and I lost some. But the truth is, I was waging battle beginning with the self-inflicted wound of a pay scale that worked for some disciplines but not for others. 

Let me be specific. Catholic schools have always had the greatest difficulty securing and retaining good science teachers, especially in the physical sciences (Chemistry and Physics). The reasons are simple: What a young graduate in the physical sciences can make in the corporate/business world dwarfs what Catholic school pay scales usually dictate for first year teachers. Depending on the source, the average beginning salary for a person with a B.S. in Physics in the corporate world is between 60K and 80K whereas most Catholic school pay scales currently begin in the high 20’s or low to mid 30’s. And that gap widens as that person gains experience as a scientist! By contrast, when we have an open position in English or History, we are overwhelmed with highly qualified candidates, some with PhD’s, most who are willing to work within the salary scales common to our schools. 

Let me guess what you may be thinking: Is it just to pay some of our teachers more than others? Are we saying that the cracker-jack English teacher is less deserving of higher wages than teachers in our science department? I’d say “No, the cracker-jack English teacher is not less deserving.” But let me quickly add: If a school has a true maestro teaching English, they’d be wise to compensate that person generously, because they are a rare and great gift to the school! And in a school unconstrained by a pay scale, such maestros can be rapidly rewarded by higher than average increases in salary in successive years of teaching. But I believe it is foolhardy to insist that the beginning teaching salaries for English and Physics teachers should be the same. Once they’re in the fold, without a pay scale to hamstring them, principals can make rational judgments about relative worth and adjust salaries accordingly down the road. 

In the world we live in, those with science degrees get paid more than those with degrees in Arts and Letters. As an Arts and Letters guy myself, I was painfully aware of that reality when I decided to major in theology, and reminded of it every time someone asked me “What are you going to do with a theology major, become a priest?” My room mate was a Chemical Engineering major. We both knew he'd be making more than me when we graduated. We were right!

Insisting on a common pay scale artificially inflates what we need to pay some incoming teachers and deflates our capacity to pay others more. They don’t help us. If we are part of a diocese or have a Board that insists upon a salary chart, create "bands" of salary ranges for teachers, which give you flexibility over what you offer a teacher. Having some flexibility will help your school get the teachers it needs.