Washington’s highest education official, Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn, says he plans to file a lawsuit against school districts, such as Seattle, Spokane and Everett, for paying teachers too much.  He says school leaders should not be allowed to use voter-approved local funding to pay teachers beyond the limits provided by the state.

Superintendent Dorn’s latest legal action comes after last month he urged the state’s highest court to close public schools over a funding dispute.  His new lawsuit adds to the swirling political conflict surrounding public education, as prompted by earlier court rulings to close the state’s charter schools and in the controversial McCleary decision.

Superintendent Dorn says his aim is to get the legislature to add billions of dollars to the state’s complex salary grid, a bureaucratic system that blindly pays teachers based on seniority and paper credentials, rather than actual on-the-job performance in the classroom.

The multi-layered grid treats all teachers alike, without considering how individual educators vary in professional ability, knowledge and how their instructional work benefits children in class.  Superintendent Dorn is seeking to bolster this antiquated salary grid with billions of dollars in new state revenue.  

By most standards public school teachers are well paid.  Table 19 from the Superintendent’s office reports average teacher pay for all 295 school districts.  The average salary is $53,767 for the ten-month 2015-16 school year.  Local districts add an average of $11,100, bringing the statewide average to $64,867 per teacher.  In some districts, like Seattle and Spokane, teachers can make well over $90,000 for a ten-month work year.  In Everett, teacher pay now tops $100,000 for a ten-month year.  Teachers also receive paid vacation, a lifetime pension and Cadillac-level health benefits.

Separately, educational research shows that the most important factor in student learning is the quality of the teacher, not the size of school budgets, not class sizes, and not whether a child attended preschool or all-day kindergarten.  Public schools are bound by rigid state laws that ban bonuses and merit pay and require monthly payments to the WEA union.  Private education is exempt from these limitations.  Teachers at private schools might not hold a formal state teaching certificate, but many of them do hold doctorate-level degrees in math, history and computer science.  In addition, teachers at private schools are not required to join the powerful WEA union as a condition of employment.  As a result, private educators often receive merit pay and year-end bonuses based on performance, without reference to the salary grid imposed on public schools.  Charter public schools are also free of the salary grid requirements.

Teachers should be well paid as professionals, based on performance, not on the state salary grid which treats teachers as if they were all exactly alike. Rewarding teachers for their individual merit and commitment would be much fairer to teachers than the way the state pays teachers now. 

For these reasons Washington Policy Center recommends doubling the pay of the best teachers, but not by blindly adding dollars to the salary grid.  We recommend allowing local districts and school principals to pay teachers based on their individual, professional value to their schools and the benefit they provide to children.  (For more, see our study Eight Practical Ways to Improve Public Schools.)  This would give public school teachers equal treatment, on a par with their professional colleagues at private and charter public schools.

A flexible compensation policy would also help reduce the political controversy that entangles the public education system, by reducing the painful strikes, sudden school closures and unending lawsuits that so often disrupt the education of children.