Teachers have lower salaries in schools with more minorities

by David Safier

This is an important statistic which is too often overlooked. A recent analysis says, within the same district, teachers at schools which have a large contingent of African-American and/or Hispanic students get paid an average of $2,500 less per year than teachers at other schools in the same district.

This has to be thought out to make sense. Of course school districts don't have a different salary schedule for higher-minority schools. What those schools tend to have in common is less experienced teachers and sometimes full time substitutes when they can't fill teaching positions. Many teachers who have a choice will teach at the whiter, more affluent schools, so a significant number of experienced teachers at the higher-minority schools transfer when they can, and teachers in their first years of teaching take their place. That accounts for the salary difference.

Now here's the big equity question. Do both types of schools get the same amount of money per student, or do they get the same number of teachers per student? If the money is allocated evenly, the higher-minority schools with lower salaried teachers would be able to stretch their budgets and hire more teachers and specialists, or they could choose to spend more money on books, computers and other equipment. If the number of teachers per student is kept constant, less money will be spent on the students who tend to show achievement gains when they have lower class sizes and other educational staff and equipment — students who are most in need of the educational boost.

I don't know how this works at TUSD, but I know how it should work, here and elsewhere. Spread the money out based on a constant dollars-per-student formula (some students like ELL and special ed students get more, and that should continue), and let the school principal make decisions about how the money should be allocated in the school.