Trust Teachers’ Talents
The Troy School District (TSD)’s success relies greatly having excellent teachers.
- TSD has many great teachers, but economic realities imperil its ability to retain existing talent and recruit outstanding teachers in the future.
- The district no longer pays a competitive salary and has started to struggle to recruit and retain its best talent.
- The district must more effectively advocate for additional resources as well as better leverage those resources.
TSD needs board members who are able to work more effectively with the Troy Education Association (TEA) to restore TSD as the top destination for early career teachers as well as retain mid- and late-career teachers.
The Challenge:
All students deserve exceptional teachers. TSD can only recruit and retain the best available talent by dramatically increasing its average teacher salary, which means augmenting and better targeting financial resources. In addition to direct compensation, the District could help teachers fully realize their potential through strategic investments in their professional development.
Why This Matters:
A consistent and robust finding in educational research is that the most important schooling input in determining student educational outcomes is teacher quality. The relative quality of their teacher is a critical determinant of each student’s long-term educational and post-secondary success. Students who have high-quality teachers are not only more likely to achieve higher test scores, but also to graduate from high school, enroll in and complete college, and secure higher earnings throughout their careers. Furthermore, the benefits of high-quality teaching are not limited to academic and financial gains. Effective teachers also foster crucial non-cognitive skills like self-regulation, motivation, and resilience, which are strong predictors of long-term success and well-being, including lower rates of teenage pregnancy. Consequently, investing in and ensuring access to high-quality teaching is a fundamental strategy for promoting individual opportunity and societal prosperity.
Another consistent and robust academic research finding into teacher effectiveness is that teachers dramatically improve in their first 3-5 years of teaching before most will plateau, at least according to value-added models of teacher effectiveness based on standardized assessments. This is not to say that teachers do not continue to learn and improve, but the steep trajectory of improvement seen in the early years levels off. Therefore successfully recruiting and retaining experienced mid- and late-career teachers will improve student outcomes.
In the five years preceding COVID-19, Troy School District (TSD) ranked an average of 18th among all school districts in the state of Michigan in terms of average teacher salary. However, in 2023-24, TSD ranked 37th with an average teacher salary of $78,446. In addition, it should be noted that the average teacher salary was $76,371 in nominal terms back in 2011-12, which adjusted for inflation is $103,984 in 2024 dollars. It should be noted that estimated years of experience (11 to 12 years) are fairly consistent since 2017-18, the earliest year for which average tenure is available. Therefore, it is unlikely that the changes in average teacher salary are being driven by compositional changes in the experience levels of TSD’s teachers.
Source: Michigan Department of Education’s Bulletin 1014 and US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ CPI Calculator
TSD can increase its investments in teacher professional development by being a more competitive applicant for special grants that cover assessments, professional development aligned with Science of Reading, and grants that can be used to support curricula adoption including related professional development.
Strategic Initiatives to Trust Teachers’ Talents:
- Aggressively pursue every categorical grant that is offered: Adjust policy and practice when necessary to secure funding when the state requires alignment with research-based policies and practices as TSD has not always pursued all available avenues for supplemental funding when doing so would require some adjustments to curriculum and instruction
- Invest in an established survey instrument to collect stakeholder feedback from teachers and other staff: Listen to learn and then act to address concerns proactively before unaddressed frustrations lead to an avoidable voluntary separations that disrupt student learning and weaken staff morale
- Leverage these additional revenues to increase teacher salaries and lower class sizes: Position the District to recruit and retain the best available mid- or late-career teachers
- Support all instructional staff maximize their impact through continued professional development: Empower teachers and other instructional to reach their full potential so that they can adequately support all learners to do the same
Key Results for Trusting Teachers’ Talents
- Key Result #5.1: Exceed 85% in Teacher Retention across the district in every year through 2028-29 (it was 86.9% in 2021-22 [earliest available] and 81.9% in 2023-24 [latest available])
- Key Result #5.2: Maintain an increase of 3% in Compensation Costs per Staff FTE in every year through 2028-29 (it was +4.6% in 2020-21 [earliest available] and -1.6% in 2023-24)
- Key Result #5.3: Show +20 Net Promoter score on a district-wide stakeholder survey of teachers (see future blog post on stakeholder surveys)