Information systems concepts and applications

Information Systems

Teacher Salaries

The potential problems with trying to use data in a national and/or a regional information system to make decisions at the state, province or district level

It has been observed that 'caution' is the word most frequently used when is talking about using information systems, or tables of data created by an organization, when these data tables are used as tools to make decisions and set school policy. The data must be placed in a larger context to determine whether apparent trends, like linking merit pay to improved performance in schools, are causally linked. For example, the Southern Regional Education Board houses a database of educational information, and supposedly objectively reports teacher salaries and other kinds of statistical data regarding schools throughout the nation. This is supposed to allow for comparisons on a dollar level between those salaries, as well as an opportunity to compare varying legislative policies regarding teacher pay between states. But the organization's non-contextualized analysis of average teacher salaries can be misleading.

First and foremost, when assessing any teacher salary median within a state, one must forget the old cliche that teachers only work for part of the year. Different teachers in different areas and districts work for varying durations of time. To take one obvious example, many school districts, particularly overburdened school districts, require teachers to teach summer school. Many teachers may put in extensive preparatory work during the summer, as well, to reeducate themselves in new district standards, or to simply fulfill administrative duties required by the district.

During the school year, the old cliche that teachers only work from 8:30-3:30 is also often grossly in error. In some schools, teachers may have to stay for long periods after school, to tutor students in basic skills, or to provide leadership in a variety of extracurricular activities. Teachers may work through their lunch hours grading papers, or serve as hall, lunch, or study hall monitors during break periods. Even after they come home, teachers often have to grade papers, field calls from parents, and prepare the next day's lesson. Some poor school districts may even require, not officially, but in practice, most of the teachers to make up for budgetary problems by stocking the classrooms with pencils, papers, and supplies out of their own pockets. The school may not adequately stock the supply cabinets and the students are unable to provide these supplies themselves.

All of these additional duties and financial burdens may be unpaid, and essentially devalue the apparent teacher income, in comparison to other teachers in other districts and states who do not have to perform these same duties. Also, district costs of living such as food and property taxes, commuting time, and other expenses will affect how far a teacher's salary dollar will stretch. For new teachers, even the cost of their education, and whether they have gone to private or state schools, will affect their financial needs and the way they view their salaries as generous or miserly. A school with a greater percentage of privately educated teachers may also mean that the supposedly better-paid teachers are also paying more money from their salary in student loans.

Merit pay for teachers is another problematic example of comparing data from different sources. A teacher with a relatively well-prepared classroom, full of children with parents who are quite focused on ensuring their children excel in school, perhaps with parents who even encourage students to get extra tutoring if they are in trouble, will find it easier to show demonstrable results than teachers trying to educate a difficult classroom of socially and economically deprived students. The teacher from the more affluent district with a merit-based salary does not necessarily boast higher-scoring students as the result of the district pay structure.

Thus, simply looking at the data regarding salaries is not necessarily helpful -- in fact, it can suggest easy causal relationships between improved salaries, merit pay, and other initiatives, with improved grades, when the real cause is far more complex, and may have to do more with the social and economic class of the area, or the culture of the students (such as their parent's commitment to education) rather than the teacher's salary.

This is not to discount some of the value that the Southern Regional Education Board serves. Its website provides important news updates regarding trends in teacher salaries such as in its 2006 Legislative Briefing. However, although it proudly notes that Mississippi, for example, is creating a merit-based pay organizational structure for its teachers, and that numerous states in the region are increasing pay for teachers, little data is included as to how the teacher's pay measured up against other professionals in the area, or if these hikes were addressing much-needed gaps in between the teacher's payment and teachers overall in the nation. It merely praises the increase, and looks forward to seeing these increases in salary and merit-based pay translate into higher scores.