Differential Pay: New Mexico
Retaining Effective Teachers Policy
Analysis of New Mexico's policies
New Mexico supports
differential pay by which a teacher can earn additional compensation by
teaching certain subjects in a high-need school. The state's STEM teacher initiative provides a $5,000 stipend per year to highly effective or exemplary STEM teachers to teach Science, Technology, Engineering or Mathematics (grades 7-12) for two years in a hard-to-staff (low performing D/F, rural, urban) school.
New Mexico does not offer additional incentives to teach at high-need schools, other than to teachers participating in the STEM teacher initiative.
However, the state has no regulatory language that would directly block
districts from providing differential pay.
Recommendations for New Mexico
Support
differential pay initiatives for effective teachers in high-need schools.
New Mexico should encourage districts to link compensation
to additional district needs. Such policies can help districts achieve a more equitable
distribution of teachers.
State response to our analysis
New Mexico asserted that in 2015, it offered hard-to-staff grants to schools needing teachers in the areas of SPED, bilingual, TESOL and other areas that have been expressed by applying schools.
New Mexico also noted that it has distributed $7.2 million (FY15) and $9.2 million (FY16) in funds for districts and charters to establish pay-for-performance programs through the Pay for Performance Pilot (PPP) program. The purpose of the PPP is to establish incentive pay pilot programs to reward New Mexico’s best teachers and principals throughout the state. Pay-for-performance systems have an impact on reducing turnover among high-performing teachers, maintaining performance among those teachers and elevating student achievement. By using local expertise and negotiating with local partners, PPP applicants will create innovative systems to reward teachers and principals for their excellence. All programs must be aligned with the NMTEACH evaluation system.
The state added that in FY15, the program received applications requesting $11 million dollars, and in FY16 the department received $17 million dollars in application requests, as there is a robust demand for performance pay in New Mexico.
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New Mexico
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Delivering Well Prepared Teachers
- Admission into Teacher Preparation
- Elementary Teacher Preparation
- Elementary Teacher Preparation in Reading Instruction
- Elementary Teacher Preparation in Mathematics
- Early Childhood
- Middle School Teacher Preparation
- Secondary Teacher Preparation
- Secondary Teacher Preparation in Science and Social Studies
- Special Education Teacher Preparation
- Special Education Preparation in Reading
- Assessing Professional Knowledge
- Student Teaching
- Teacher Preparation Program Accountability
Expanding the Pool of Teachers
Identifying Effective Teachers
- State Data Systems
- Evaluation of Effectiveness
- Frequency of Evaluations
- Tenure
- Licensure Advancement
- Equitable Distribution
Retaining Effective Teachers
Exiting Ineffective Teachers
Pensions
Research rationale
States should help
address chronic shortages and needs.
States should ensure that
state-level policies (such as a uniform salary schedule) do not interfere with
districts' flexibility in compensating teachers in ways that best meet their
individual needs and resources. However, when it comes to addressing chronic
shortages, states should do more than simply get out of the way. They should
provide direct support for differential pay for effective teaching in shortage
subject areas and high-need schools. Attracting effective and qualified
teachers to high-need schools or filling vacancies in hard-to-staff subjects
are problems that are frequently beyond a district's ability to solve. States
that provide direct support for differential pay in these areas are taking an
important step in promoting the equitable distribution of quality teachers.
Short of providing direct support, states can also use policy levers to
indicate to districts that differential pay is not only permissible but
necessary.
Differential Pay: Supporting Research
Two
recent studies emphasize the need for differential pay. In "Teacher Quality and Teacher Mobility", L. Feng and T. Sass find that high performing teachers tend
to transfer to schools with a large proportion of other high performing
teachers and students, while low performing teachers cluster in bottom quartile
schools. Calder Institute, Working Paper 57, January 2011.
Another study from T. Sass, et al., found that the least effective teachers
in high-poverty schools were considerably less effective than the least
effective teachers in low-poverty schools http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/1001469-calder-working-paper-52.pdf.
C. Clotfelter, E. Glennie, H. Ladd, and J. Vigdor, "Would Higher Salaries Keep Teachers in High-Poverty Schools? Evidence from a Policy Intervention in North Carolina," NBER Working Paper 12285, June 2006.
J. Kowal, B. Hassel, and E. Hassel, "Financial Incentives for Hard-To-Staff Positions: Cross-Sector Lessons for Public Education,"
Center for American Progress, November 2008.
A
study by researchers at Rand found that higher pay lowered attrition, and the
effect was stronger in high-needs school districts. Every $1,000 increase was
estimated to decrease attrition by more than 6 percent. See S. Kirby, M. Berends, and S. Naftel, "Supply and Demand of Minority Teachers in Texas: Problems and
Prospects," Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Volume 21, No. 1, March 20, 1999, pp. 47-66 at: http://epa.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/21/1/47.