In announcing its new contract with educators, signed last month, Oak Park and River Forest High School said teachers would get on average 4 percent raises in each of the five years of the new contract.
However, individual raises vary greatly. Some teachers’ raises will average closer to 10 percent each year, according to a Wednesday Journal analysis.
The school looks to hire new teachers with a master’s degree and five years’ experience. Such a teacher hired last year, who now earns $56,324, would make $84,035 in the last year of the contract, 2011-12. That’s an increase of 49.2 percent.
But one segment of the salary schedule doesn’t give a complete picture of raises across the span of the district’s 225 teachers, said Cheryl Witham, OPRF’s chief financial officer.
“The cost of the schedule depends largely on where people are on the schedule,” she said. That is, there are approximately 50 teachers at OPRF with five or fewer years of experience, where raises are higher. The salary schedule is designed to give better raises to teachers making less money, and lower raises to those who make more.
Better raises earlier in a teacher’s career are justified, said Paul Noble, the lead negotiator for the OPRF teachers union on the recently approved contract. Younger teachers improve more with each year of experience than older teachers do, he said.
“How much better am I at my 30th year than at my 29th year?” Noble asked rhetorically.
A teacher with a Ph.D. and 25 years of experience, who now makes $109,268, would make $137,037 in 2011-12, an increase of about 25 percent, or roughly 5 percent each year.
Fifty-three OPRF teachers have 20 or more years of experience.
And roughly 25 teachers will have lower raises because they’ve maxed out the raises given for experience. That cap is different for each level of education reached: 11 years for teachers with a bachelor’s degree, 18 years for those with a master’s degree, and 30 years for those with a master’s degree plus 30 additional credits.
Witham said the contract fits into the district’s five-year financial plan when viewed together with changes to teachers’ benefits. “For instance, although salaries are higher, the retirement and health care costs will be much less,” she wrote in an e-mail.
Still, the salary raises come at a time in the village when other bodies are cutting back to keep property taxes from rising any further. If OPRF had limited teachers to annual raises of 3.5 percent, the school would have saved approximately $25,000 to $50,000 per teacher for most teachers over the life of the contract.
That savings would come at the cost of attracting teachers, educators say. “It’s a market” for teaching talent, Noble said.
Witham does not know what the exact overall cost will be for the new contract because it adds new “lanes,” which reward teachers for gaining credits toward advanced degrees. More lanes mean more raises, but the raises are smaller, Witham said.
The structure of the high school’s salary schedule-typical for districts across the country, Witham said-rewards teachers three ways. First, the raises awarded in the contract apply to every teacher. Step increases award experience and seniority, while lanes award adding education. Roughly 25 OPRF teachers have reached the end of their step increases and can get raises only when a new contract is negotiated or by adding education credits.
Study questions assumptions
That system was called into question by a study issued in January by the Manhattan Institute, a think tank aimed at developing “new ideas that foster greater economic choice and individual responsibility.”
“Evidence suggests that the way we pay teachers is more important than simply what they take home,” Jay P. Greene, the study’s author, wrote in a letter to the Wall Street Journal in February. Greene said that neither seniority nor the number of added credits “has much to do with student improvement,” but that giving performance-based bonuses did improve students’ learning.
“We found that a Little Rock [Ark.] program providing bonuses to teachers based on student gains on standardized tests substantially increased math proficiency,” he wrote. “Researchers at the University of Florida recently found similar results in a nationwide evaluation.”
Noble said teachers might be willing to discuss a merit-based system, but he expected teachers would be suspect of the accuracy of a system that purports to measure teaching success.