Value Our Teaching Professionals, Make Schools More Accountable
Teacher salaries should allow for teachers in the greatest demand to earn additional pay and funds should be allocated to reward the most outstanding teachers.
Any attempt to raise teacher salaries in LA at the state level should include a differentiated compensation model that is market responsive, allowing for teachers in the greatest demand to earn additional pay (i.e. science, math, SPED, hard to staff schools) and funds should be allocated for merit pay (rewarding the most outstanding teachers).
Many schools struggle to recruit and retain highly effective teachers, limiting students’ exposure to high-quality instruction and driving institutional and community instability.
Differentiated pay for highly effective teachers has a proven correlation with greater test score gains for low-performing, high poverty schools. These retention bonuses are crucial to combat teacher shortages, which are not unique to the state of Louisiana.
Louisiana can either develop a differentiated compensation model that is market responsive, or ensure that districts and schools have the flexibility to create their own competitive compensation systems, rewarding effective teachers for the positive impact they have on student learning.
Establish a classroom teacher bureaucracy reduction taskforce to develop recommendations on the statewide reduction in bureaucracy for teachers.
A national survey of teachers found that a typical teacher works a median of 54 hours per week, but just 46 percent of their time in the school building is spent teaching. This bill would establish a classroom teacher bureaucracy reduction taskforce to develop recommendations on the statewide reduction in bureaucracy for teachers.
Increase transparency and accountability for school funding.
Louisiana policy requires 70 percent of all public-school funding to be used for instructional purposes. However, there is currently no accountability measure in place to enforce this rule. To ensure the bulk of new and existing money is spent directly in our classrooms for our students, we need greater transparency on district spending.