Mississippi offers a Teacher Loan Repayment Program. Teachers who have
received an alternate route license in a critical shortage subject area or
hold a teaching certificate in any subject area and who agree to teach in a
critical geographical shortage area can apply for $12,000 of loan forgiveness
($3,000 payable per year for up to a maximum of four years).
Additional incentives for teachers in geographical shortage areas include a Teacher Fellowship Program (tuition, books if accepted into an approved Master of Ed/Ed Specialist program), a Moving Expense Reimbursement and Housing Assistance.
Teachers who are National Board
Certified are eligible to receive an annual salary supplement of $6,000.
However, this differential pay is not tied to teaching at high-need schools.
differential pay initiatives for teachers in subject-shortage areas and
Although the state's loan forgiveness program and other incentives are desirable recruitment and retention tools for teachers at certain
points in their careers, Mississippi should expand its program to include all
teachers. A salary differential is an attractive incentive for every teacher,
not just those with education debt or those considering an advanced degree.
tying National Board supplements to teaching in high-need schools.
This differential pay could be an incentive to attract some
of Mississippi's most effective teachers to low-performing schools.
Mississippi was helpful in providing NCTQ with facts that enhanced this analysis.
States should help
address chronic shortages and needs.
States should ensure that
state-level policies (such as a uniform salary schedule) do not interfere with
districts' flexibility in compensating teachers in ways that best meet their
individual needs and resources. However, when it comes to addressing chronic
shortages, states should do more than simply get out of the way. They should
provide direct support for differential pay for effective teaching in shortage
subject areas and high-need schools. Attracting effective and qualified
teachers to high-need schools or filling vacancies in hard-to-staff subjects
are problems that are frequently beyond a district's ability to solve. States
that provide direct support for differential pay in these areas are taking an
important step in promoting the equitable distribution of quality teachers.
Short of providing direct support, states can also use policy levers to
indicate to districts that differential pay is not only permissible but
Differential Pay: Supporting Research
recent studies emphasize the need for differential pay. In "Teacher Quality and Teacher Mobility", L. Feng and T. Sass find that high performing teachers tend
to transfer to schools with a large proportion of other high performing
teachers and students, while low performing teachers cluster in bottom quartile
schools. Calder Institute, Working Paper 57, January 2011.
Another study from T. Sass, et al., found that the least effective teachers
in high-poverty schools were considerably less effective than the least
effective teachers in low-poverty schools http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/1001469-calder-working-paper-52.pdf.
C. Clotfelter, E. Glennie, H. Ladd, and J. Vigdor, "Would Higher Salaries Keep Teachers in High-Poverty Schools? Evidence from a Policy Intervention in North Carolina," NBER Working Paper 12285, June 2006.
J. Kowal, B. Hassel, and E. Hassel, "Financial Incentives for Hard-To-Staff Positions: Cross-Sector Lessons for Public Education,"
Center for American Progress, November 2008.
study by researchers at Rand found that higher pay lowered attrition, and the
effect was stronger in high-needs school districts. Every $1,000 increase was
estimated to decrease attrition by more than 6 percent. See S. Kirby, M. Berends, and S. Naftel, "Supply and Demand of Minority Teachers in Texas: Problems and
Prospects," Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Volume 21, No. 1, March 20, 1999, pp. 47-66 at: http://epa.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/21/1/47.