Who should be the highest paid people in a school?

Responsibility and experience are the key criteria.

Originally published in the Moultrie News.

At my kids’ school, teachers do nearly everything, but they aren’t even the highest-paid group in their own building. Shouldn’t they be?

I could be self-serving and simply agree with you. Instead, I’ll try to take a more analytical view with the caveat that if it were up to me, everyone in a school would be a millionaire because I know how hard they work. But if we posit that a tiered compensation system must exist, then a three-tiered system would make sense.

However, we first have to start with logical criteria for how school employees should be paid: responsibility and experience.

In general, the more responsibility someone has, the more they get paid. Hence, pilots get paid more than flight attendants, and engineers make more than them all.

Teachers are responsible for the education of as many as 150 students every day, and education is the sole aim of a school. Teachers’ duties include discipline, grading, planning, conferencing, supervising, and … I’m getting tired just writing it all. Needless to say, it’s a lot of responsibility, so the salary should be high — let’s put them in the 2 million dollars annually tier. (We can dream, can’t we?).

Others with significant responsibilities for students may be part of this tier, though they aren’t necessarily classroom teachers. They might include counselors (who usually have obligations well beyond “counseling”), librarians, and nurses (who, in larger schools, practically run dispensaries).

I can think of only one group in a school building with more responsibility than teachers: principals. Not only do they indirectly supervise every child in the building, they also supervise every adult responsible for the children, including teachers.

If you think teachers have a long list of responsibilities, principals (both chief and assistant) would like to have a word. Their endless duties include managing, scheduling, disciplining, communicating, and evaluating. They supervise everything, including athletics, PTA, lunch, buses, special education, nurses, employee relations, parking, celebrations, terminations, and … Sorry, I’m getting tired again.

At any rate, principals are undoubtedly higher than teachers on the responsibility scale because the buck stops with them. If a teacher screws up, the principal has to clean it up. If an employee quits, the principal has to manage it. Oh, and they usually work year-round and are on call 24 hours a day. No teacher can say that. Ergo, we’ll put them in the top, 3 million dollar tier.

So what about the third, million-dollar tier? These are the selfless individuals who indirectly support the school’s goal. They may not be directly responsible for students (though sometimes they are), but without them, teachers would find it next to impossible to do their jobs.

They include school secretaries, attendance clerks, bookkeepers, IT staff, custodians, bus drivers, teacher’s aides, cafeteria workers, psychologists, tutors, and therapists. Depending on certain factors, like school size, some in this tier might make even more than teachers; there’s a vast difference in responsibility between a bookkeeper in a school with 200 students and one in a school with 200 teachers.

In addition to responsibility, experience is a crucial criterion on which to base pay. The more experience someone has, the more effective they tend to be. Attempts to pay educators according to more subjective criteria (e.g., “effectiveness”) have all fallen short, while experience has stood the test of time. The use of experience permits transparency and fosters teamwork within schools by eliminating interpersonal competition.

Using two criteria can occasionally create inconsistencies that we just have to live with. For example, a 40-year veteran teacher might make more than their first-year principal. This shouldn’t trouble us. We see coaches making less than their players all the time, yet they still guide their teams to championships. It wouldn’t make sense to throw more money at the novice principal just because someone on staff has a better salary.

If you have questions about this three-tiered system, well, so do I. I’m just grateful that most people in education serve children because they love them and want to make the world a better place. That kind of attitude in any job is worth a lot more than money could ever buy.

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Jody Stallings has been an award-winning teacher in Charleston since 1992 and is director of the Charleston Teacher Alliance. To submit a question, order his books, or follow him on social media, please visit JodyStallings.com.