Here is an important piece of teacher support data: A majority of the school districts in the nation’s biggest cities do not provide a starting salary of at least $60,000 as recommended by the American Teacher Act. Most also do not pay differentiated compensation to teachers who work in hard-to-staff subject areas.
Those headlines anchor a series of “Regional Report Cards” issued by the nonprofit Educators for Excellence and focused on teacher support in K12 schools in Chicago, Boston, New York City, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Hartford, Bridgeport, and New Haven. Pay and access to quality teaching materials are the two key teacher support indicators measured in the report cards.
“With this survey, we have a thorough understanding of what teachers need to help students succeed,” Educators for Excellence co-founder and Co-CEO Evan Stone asserts. “These report cards show us where states and districts need to improve and where there are best practices that we should scale across the country.”
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The report cards are a part of the nonprofit’s sixth annual “Voices from the Classroom,” which, when released earlier this year, found that just 14% of teachers would recommend their profession to others due to poor compensation and a lack of culturally relevant instructional materials.
So here’s the big reveal from the organization’s latest analysis: New York City, Boston and Los Angeles stand out on the regional report cards for supporting teachers with higher compensation and access to evidence-based learning materials. Still, very few of the districts the nonprofit evaluated offer higher pay to teachers who work in hard-to-staff schools.
Teacher support salary standouts
Administrators know that most of their teachers would call salary the No. 1 retention and recruitment tool. The report cards contend that a majority of districts examined are not currently paying teachers a living wage, but:
- Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles and New York City are offering starting salaries above $60,000 for the 2023-24 school year.
- New York City was the only district where the average salary provided a living wage for teachers with a bachelor’s degree and one child.
- Los Angeles, Minneapolis-St. Paul and New York City were the only districts in states that offered higher pay for teachers in hard-to-staff schools and subject areas.
- Chicago was the only district where state law prohibited administrators from using seniority as the sole factor in determining layoffs.
Content considerations
Only a little more than a quarter of teachers believe that their curriculum materials are culturally relevant. And while the districts highlighted in the regional report cards have committed to providing culturally relevant education, most do not offer the requisite professional development. None the of districts evaluated are in the states that restrict discussions of race, racism, or gender identity:
- Most of the districts analyzed use a universal curriculum or provide a vetted list to choose from in math and ELA.
- Only Chicago aligns professional learning opportunities with curricular materials.
