Faculty Engagement to Improve Compensation Transparency

In 2023–2024, Milton Gottesman Jewish Day School of the Nation’s Capital launched a new salary scale for teachers. The scale was developed through a robust partnership between teachers and school leadership that sought to align school values, strategic resource allocation and competitive compensation. This integrated process led to a highly successful implementation that enhanced transparency and clarity around compensation (as evidenced by Leading Edge survey data) and deepened teacher commitment and connection to the school.

Prior to the pandemic, a salary scale existed at the school, but data showed that faculty neither understood the scale nor felt a sense of transparency around it. Even as the scale was implemented, certain teachers were awarded additional stipends without standardization. Further, teachers with experience at Jewish day schools earned more credit than those from secular or public schools, which felt inequitable to many. Leading Edge data showed that 76% of employees either felt neutral (22%) or negative (54%) about the compensation and benefits, and just 13% felt that they understood how salaries and raises were determined. In addition to the opacity of the scale itself, teachers expressed that they felt they were undercompensated relative to their colleagues at peer institutions.

We are well attuned to the evolving landscape of teacher recruitment and retention, including some of the challenges in retaining excellent teachers post-pandemic. Although we were proud of our retention rate coming out of the pandemic, the qualitative data from the employee focus groups held during spring 2022 and quantitative data gained through surveys indicated a need to bring transparency and clarity to our compensation and benefits programs.

Faculty Leading

We set out to change that through one of our faculty working groups. With a newly released strategic plan placing teachers at the center of our strategy, we sought to engage in a robust process that would be data-driven and turn the concerning trends around. Leveraging data from Leading Edge employee engagement surveys, individual and collective internal conversations, and discussions with colleagues in the field, within both the Jewish and broader private school world, we set out to design a better system, one that embodies the school’s values, carefully stewards the school’s financial resources, and ultimately leads to deeper satisfaction among the faculty.

Our first step was to convene a voluntary working group of faculty and staff representing diversity of departments, teaching experience, life stage and subject matter. Led by our HR and strategy department leads, the working group was tasked with identifying priorities, designing a clear process and ultimately recommending a new compensation model to the head of school and board of trustees.

As representatives of the broader faculty, the working group defined the values of the teaching scale. The group debated various factors, including teacher tenure, experience at other institutions, advanced education degrees and more. They discussed how our school values professional growth, how much we wanted to prioritize the recruitment of new staff, and how much we needed to honor the dedication and service of long-time teachers at the school. The working group pored over data made available via Prizmah, DASL and the NAIS databases. They also discussed structure: Should there be concrete steps on the scale, or should we utilize pay bands?

Finally, they created definitions for how and what experience should be counted. The HR team ultimately collected up-to-date resumes from every teacher to place them on the new scale. Each employee received a customized document with their contract demonstrating the exact calculations that determined their placement.

The Rollout

Once complete, the working group members—not management—introduced the new scale to staff during staff meetings. They explained factors considered, issues contemplated and ultimately the rationale for how we made the difficult decisions we did.

The process was not without challenges. The introduction of the scale necessarily meant that some teachers’ current salaries fell well below their projected placement, while others were well above the scale’s definition. This spurred frustration about “lost wages” from years past, even if the imbalance was being corrected for the future.

Another challenge concerned constrained resources. One goal of the committee was to increase competitiveness in the private school market. The committee sought to raise the overall average salary at the school.

Together with the board of trustees and finance team, the committee agreed to phase in the new structure over two years, gradually raising salaries of those previously undercompensated according to scale, and slowing the salary increase of those the school determined to be above-scale. Although teachers who were “above” scale understood the need to suppress their salary increases in a move toward equity, they were understandably disappointed to take a smaller raise than typical. The board of trustees and finance team sought ways to create budget space for increased compensation spending to accommodate the new model through a larger-than-typical raise in tuition for one year.

Impact

The results have been significant. In a short time, retention has increased, and teachers articulate a better feeling around understanding and transparency of compensation. Just two years later, the Leading Edge survey celebrates the results: Fifty-four percent of staff feel favorably, and only 22% feel unfavorably, about compensation and benefits. (The number of people with a neutral feeling towards salary and compensation increased slightly to 24%.) Sixty-one percent feel the organization takes action to improve the approach to compensation.

For management, the ability to point to a scale when speaking with teachers improves the contracting process for both new and returning staff. To further transparency, a copy of the scale for the majority of roles at the school and a document titled “How Milton counts years of experience” are attached to our annual employment letters.

Even with our successes, we know there is still work yet to be done. We eventually would like to establish a new working group to look specifically at non-salary compensation models including leave, retirement, health insurance and other forms of benefits. We also would like to address non-faculty salaries again. Included in this conversation are topics surrounding equity in teaching time and duties such as lunch and recess.

No system is perfect. However, we found that by engaging the staff and leaning into the school’s values, we could develop a system that was more clear, understandable and ultimately successful in recruiting and retaining top-tier teachers in the field.

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Jewish Educator Pipeline

Spring 2024