Yeah. I’m going there. Let’s compare some salaries.
Before I do, a caveat: Salaries are (usually) a reflection of experience and age, and the differences between salaries are not necessarily a reflection of unequal pay, but may simply be an indication in a difference in the workforce attributes. I am not suggesting that the compensation differences below are unfair, just simply looking at the differences and pointing out what I see.
Transparent California has public records of salaries paid to many public agencies, including all public and some charter schools. Only some. So I took a look at the compensation of employees of LAUSD, Green Dot and Alliance in 2014.
The median base salary in LAUSD is almost twice as high as Alliance, and 53% higher than Green Dot. Part of this undoubtedly has to do with the age and experience of the employees – charters tend to employee younger, less experienced teachers, while many of the districts teachers have longer careers. In addition, Green Dot has a union, while Alliance does not (although they are organizing), which may explain their higher pay.
Again, LAUSD pays significantly higher benefits than the charters. Again, part of this has to do with the age and life-stage of the employees: LAUSD has older teachers, who may have families and are using the benefits to insure children (perhaps adult children thanks to Obamacare). Furthermore, the benefits include CALSTRS payments, which is a factor of salary. What I find interesting though is that Green Dot’s median benefit is the lower of the two charters, which I wouldn’t have expected from a unionized charter.
This last view, however, rings very true to me. When I taught in Charter schools, they used to keep our base salary (relatively) low, but would give us all sorts of bonuses and extra pay to compensate us a little higher. This works well as a business model because if they have to cut back a bit, they don’t have to worry about high salaries – they can just cut the bonus.
Is the teaching profession something that should land you in the middle class? According to Pew Research, the bottom of the middle class is an income of $46,960, an income level higher than their of the median base pay of the charter networks.
Are any of these results surprising? The surprising thing is not the pattern but the scale. The differences in these numbers show vast differences in how charters and districts operate their budget. And it raises big questions about the future of the teaching profession in Los Angeles – especially in light of the plan to expand charters in Los Angeles, and in light of the looming budget crisis in LAUSD.
***A note on the data: The data is yearly, while teachers’ contracts span the school year. As a result, the data includes several teachers who were hired in August, and is only showing half of their salary. There is also no indication in the data whether this is a total or partial salary, so we cannot just parse it out. I thought about this, and it appears that this error happens in all three groups. Teachers retire, teachers get hired, teachers leave and quit – this happens in every school, so we have to assume that the error would be equally distributed across all three sets.