Many states have withdrawn teacher bonuses for hard-to-staff subjects and schools, even as chronic shortages persist.
So finds the most recent teacher-pay analysis by the National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington-based research and advocacy group, released today. Seventeen states provide or require bonus pay for teachers in shortage subjects like math and science, five fewer than in 2022, when NCTQ last surveyed state pay policies. Fewer than half as many states now differentiate pay for teachers in high-poverty and other hard-to-staff schools; 13, down from 28 in 2022.
Only four states—Alabama, Hawaii, Texas, and Utah—boost the minimum salary for teachers in high-need subjects or specialty certifications by at least $5,000, the minimum incentive research suggests is needed to attract and keep teachers.
“We’re seeing states moving away from differentiating pay by shortage subjects, which seems counterintuitive,” said Heather Peske, the president of NCTQ. For instance, “it consistently surprises me that we don’t align the incentives and compensation for math and science teachers with the realities of the competition of the marketplace.”
Even some states that still have bonuses have reduced funding. For example, while Louisiana does still provide districts with money to pay stipends for teachers in “critical shortage areas” like special education, NCTQ found that it is no longer funding its Teacher Shortage Incentive Program, which previously allotted $3,000 per year, for up to four years, in direct bonus pay for hard-to-staff subjects and areas.
In special education—the specialty with the most chronic teacher shortages nationwide in the past 30 years—only 11 states give bonuses. Where they do, though, NCTQ finds those bonuses have been associated with lower teacher turnover. Hawaii’s $10,000 bonus pay for certified special education teachers, for example, has cut the share of open or unlicensed special education positions by more than a third.
Federal data show more than a third of public schools nationwide don’t have enough special education teachers. Even small differences in the time it takes to replace teachers who leave can hurt student achievement over time, according to Tara Anderson, a research partner for Education Resource Strategies, whose recent study found teacher turnover remains higher than before the pandemic.
ERS, a think tank working with states and districts to reimagine the teaching job, also found staffing shortages highest in special education and high-poverty schools.
“The impact that teacher turnover has in high-needs schools and for students with disabilities is really the challenge to focus on,” Anderson said, “because kids with greater needs are more impacted by that lack of stability.”
NCTQ called for states and districts to shift teacher-salary systems from traditional step-and-lane systems with higher pay based only on experience and education degrees to differentiated and performance-based systems. A half-dozen states—Alabama, Georgia, Hawaii, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and West Virginia—require or provide additional supplemental pay for both having an advanced degree and teaching in a school and/or subject with teacher shortages.
Based on prior research about teacher recruitment and retention, NCTQ advised state and district education leaders to:
- Ensure teachers in the highest-need subjects and schools receive at least a 7.5% bonus, or $5,000 annually.
- Ensure teacher-evaluation systems have clear, rigorous criteria and give highly effective teachers ways to earn bonus pay.
“I just don’t think we’ve paid enough attention both to the need for differentiating compensation and also for the structures to support teachers, particularly in hard-to-staff schools,” Peske said.
