Differential Pay: Delaware

Retaining Effective Teachers Policy

Goal

The state should support differential pay for effective teaching in shortage and high-need areas.

Meets goal in part
Suggested Citation:
National Council on Teacher Quality. (2015). Differential Pay: Delaware results. State Teacher Policy Database. [Data set].
Retrieved from: https://www.nctq.org/yearbook/state/DE-Differential-Pay-72

Analysis of Delaware's policies

The Delaware Talent Cooperative provides additional compensation for highly effective teachers at high-need schools. Educators can earn up to $20,000 over two years for working at participating schools with underserved communities. 

Delaware does not support differential pay by which a teacher can earn additional compensation by teaching certain subjects. However, the state has no regulatory language that would directly block districts from providing differential pay.

Teachers who are National Board Certified are eligible to receive an annual 12 percent increase in base pay. However, this type of differential pay is not tied to teaching at high-need schools.





Citation

Recommendations for Delaware

Support differential pay initiatives for effective teachers in subject-shortage areas.
Delaware should encourage districts to link compensation to district needs. Such policies can help districts achieve a more equitable distribution of teachers.

Consider tying National Board supplements to teaching in high-need schools.
This differential pay could be an incentive to attract some of Delaware's most effective teachers to low-performing schools.



State response to our analysis

Delaware noted that the National Board supplements have been “frozen” for nearly a decade at this point. They are still being allocated to those who previously earned them, but no new supplements have been disbursed since pre-2010.




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.