Compensation

By: Sarah Stanton and Ananya Subrahmanian

Originally published by The Dialogue's PREAL Blog.

Teachers are an essential component in the success of any education system. High-quality teachers are critical to student learning, and competitive salaries are one of the most effective ways to attract and retain effective teachers. However, teachers in the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region have fewer opportunities for salary raises compared with employees in other sectors, and the raises they do receive are often small relative to their compensation. The consequences of these salary policies can be felt throughout the region: rising rates of teachers—especially the most talented—leaving the profession, poor learning outcomes for students across the region, and limited opportunities to recognize effective teachers. A review of current policies reveals that most LAC teachers receive a salary heavily linked to seniority and qualifications, with limited opportunities to earn financial compensation for strong performance, and those opportunities that do exist are often for a one-time bonus rather than a permanent raise.

HOW ARE TEACHER SALARIES DETERMINED?

Salaries are most often determined by career ladder indicators, such as qualifications, years of teaching experience, or administrative positions. Although these indicators require a certain level of determination and ambition, there are also frequent opportunities to obtain them throughout an educator’s career. However, some salary raises are determined by performance-based indicators which can include competence-based tests, to assess mastery of content and pedagogy; teacher evaluations, including feedback from colleagues, supervisors, and students as well as formal observations and portfolio documents; and student learning outcomes, which consider test scores and other learning assessments. Unlike career ladder indicators, these performance-based measures provide financial incentives to teachers who prioritize professional development and student learning. Indeed, evidence has shown a strong association between performance-based salary increases and student learning outcomes. Additional determinants of salary increases include compensation for specific tasks beyond teachers’ standard responsibilities, for example working overtime or in a high-risk area.

Although compensation increases can involve either a raise of one’s base salary or a one-time bonus payment, the former is seen as a more effective reward for teachers. However, bonus pay is politically, technically, and financially easier to implement, given their one-time, fixed amount status.

The figure below shows the types of policies each country in the LAC region uses to determine teacher salary increases. Information was collected from 20 countries via government websites, Dialogue reports, and other policy publications.

Table courtesy of The Dialogue's PREAL Blog

Several key trends emerge from the data:

The majority of countries use a limited set of indicators to determine salary increases: Most countries rely heavily on qualification and seniority—both of which are career ladder indicators—to determine salary increases for teachers, and few countries use more than two or three indicators to determine raises. Mexico and Costa Rica stand out as two countries that include multiple and diverse indicators to determine teacher salaries, including career ladder and performance indicators. Overall, however, teachers throughout the region have fewer opportunities for increasing their salaries, since fewer indicators leads to fewer opportunities for financial reward.

Base salary increases are a more common policy mechanism than bonus pay for performance:  Only five countries in the LAC region—Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador and Mexico—have policies for bonus pay, and only Ecuador and some Brazilian states use multiple indicators. Bonus payments are not appropriate for recognizing achievements such as seniority and qualifications, which accumulate over time and do not fluctuate. Instead, bonus pay is consistently determined based on performance-based indicators linked to evaluations or student performance, which can vary from year to year. This heavy reliance on base salary increases rather than bonus pay means that teachers are consistently recognized for loyalty to the profession, but not skill in its execution.

Few countries with teacher evaluation systems use performance results to offer financial incentives: Thirteen of the countries surveyed have formal teacher evaluation policies. Most of these evaluation systems have been in place for a few years and are administered regularly, but surprisingly few countries use the results from these evaluations to determine teacher compensation. Only six of the countries with formal evaluation systems have financial rewards linked to a positive performance review, and in only five countries do positive evaluation results lead to an increase in one’s base salary, the exception being Ecuador, which has a one-time bonus payment. Within these six countries, the consequences tied to teacher evaluations results vary; Chile and Ecuador, which have strong evaluation systems, reward positive results with salary increases and penalize poor performance with extra training and, potentially, dismissal. Colombia and Cuba reserve consequences for negative evaluation results, but offer no reward for positive ones. Honduras, which has only just begun implementing teacher evaluations, has not yet developed any concrete rewards or penalties tied to performance. The Dominican Republic, which also bases salary increases off evaluation results, does not have a mandatory evaluation system in place.

CONCLUSIONS

While career ladder-based indicators such as qualifications, seniority, and administrative positions have long been used as a basis for salary raises in the LAC region, they fail to recognize exceptional performance or incentivize excellent teaching. This is not to say that these indicators are unimportant—they have the potential to increase job stability, prevent high turnover rates, and encourage commitment to the profession. However, they are over-utilized relative to performance-based indicators. The majority of the countries discussed above employ three indicators or fewer to determine teacher pay increases, but they rely heavily on those which are linked experience rather than performance. A policy that attempts to balance recognizing seniority with incentives to improve—by increasing focus on performance-based indicators —could be a more effective way to incentivize improved teaching and learning outcomes.  For example, Chile, which has one of the strongest education systems in the region, uses only three salary indicators, but employs both career ladder-related and performance-based inputs to determine salary increases.

Despite the lack of policies for performance-based pay in the region, the majority of the countries represented above have developed and implemented frequent teacher evaluations. Building these systems requires strong institutions and technical knowledge; countries should be applauded for their efforts to increase teacher accountability and encouraged to taking advantage of existing evaluation systems to recognize and improve teacher performance. For countries that cannot afford the cost of increasing salaries across-the-board, bonus pay could serve as a cost-effective starting point to reward teacher performance. In order for any of these policies to be effective, however, teachers and administrators must buy into the validity of the evaluation system and its use as a tool for determining pay. Improving opportunities for salary will incentivize effective teaching and improve the quality of the teaching profession and educational outcomes across the region.

This post is also available in: Spanish

The PREAL Blog is the blog of the Inter-American Dialogue’s Education Program. Find the orginal post here.

During a weekly visit through Cuna Más, a facilitator guides a mother and her child through stimulating activities, like singing, storytelling, and playtime. Photo credit: Programa Nacional Cuna Más

By Kimberly Josephson and Gabriela Guerrero

Lucía walks 30 minutes to the first home. When she arrives, she greets a mother and her son. She is a facilitator, or volunteer home visitor with Cuna Más, a public early childhood development (ECD) program in Peru that runs daycare centers in urban areas and a home visiting service in rural communities, like this one. She asks how things are going and asks about the mother’s daily routine — feeding, bathing, washing her son’s hands — providing guidance and feedback from time to time. Next is playtime, and she takes out a toy for the mother and child. While the child explores, she encourages the mother to talk to the child and ask questions about what he is doing. After, they sing a song together, or tell a story. When the hour is over, Lucía says goodbye to the family and walks to the next home. 

This sequence of activities is common for the 9,000 facilitators, mostly women, who deliver the Cuna Más home visiting service in poor, rural districts across Peru. They have been nominated by their communities to work with families to strengthen parenting practices and support the holistic (cognitive, language, physical, and socioemotional) development of children under 3. In exchange for volunteering about 10 hours per week, facilitators receive a small monthly stipend of about US $115 (a little less than half the minimum monthly wage for a full-time employee).

We know that children who have access to high quality early childhood programs lead healthier and more productive lives; in fact, interventions during the early years are among the most impactful and cost-effective for reducing inequalities, particularly for children living in poverty. Home visitors, along with child care workers, preschool teachers, community health workers, nurses and many others, are on the frontlines of ECD programs, but they’re also at the center of many challenges being faced as programs look to reach more children and improve the quality of their services. The Early Childhood Workforce Initiative (ECWI), led by Results for Development (R4D) and the International Step by Step Association (ISSA), is a global effort to bring these practitioners to the forefront of the conversation around ensuring access to quality services. Through new analysis, knowledge sharing, and collaborative learning, ECWI aims to provide country decision makers with the resources they need to build, support, and grow a strong early childhood workforce.

To increase the ECD community’s knowledge of workforce issues, R4D and the Group for the Analysis of Development (GRADE) decided to study Cuna Más, a program other low- and middle-income countries increasingly look to because of its success in reaching thousands of the poorest families in Peru and demonstrating promising effects on child development.

But the program has faced difficulties recruiting and retaining qualified members of the workforce and this presents a threat to sustaining program quality and expanding it to reach all vulnerable families. Our study identifies some of the main challenges and successes this workforce experiences in their day-to-day work. Unsurprisingly, many of these findings came from conversations we had with facilitators directly.

In these conversations, we discovered that facilitators love their work and feel their role is making a difference in the lives of children and families in their communities. They are eager to learn and value working closely with their supervisors who continually encourage and support them. But facilitators work twice the number of hours they have committed to (despite their volunteer status), earn just two-thirds of what their counterparts in non-formal preschools make, and have little room for professional growth. Much of their daily frustration surrounds a chronic lack of materials (puzzles, picture books, dolls and other toys), thus the very resources meant to embolden their work become an added source of stress.

“We give all of ourselves to be able to be part of the program, to be able to dedicate ourselves to young children… but the stipend they give us is very little.” — Cuna Más facilitator

To address some of these issues, we provide concrete recommendations for Cuna Más to consider, which may resonate more broadly with other ECD programs and policymakers. These include:

• Gradually increase stipends to match those of facilitators’ peers in non-formal preschools, to better reward them for their work and make Cuna Más a competitive employment opportunity.
• Offer scholarships for 50 facilitators to study ECD (or a related field), creating a path for outstanding individuals to advance professionally within the program and allowing Cuna Más to retain and leverage their experience.
• Improve the process for purchasing and distributing program materials to make sure facilitators have the educational resources they need, when they need them, to feel prepared and confident in their work.

Feeling overburdened and underpaid isn’t unique to Cuna Más, Peru or to ECD programs at all for that matter. Yet we continue to overlook or minimize the challenges facing the early childhood workforce, when in fact they may be our biggest bottleneck and greatest opportunity for improving the lives of young children and families. How much do we, as a global community, know about what these practitioners experience every day and what they need to be more motivated and effective in their work?

We’ve come a long way in proving that early childhood policies and programs can lead to long-term health, education and social benefits. But we often fall short in trying to understand and support the very people who are key to delivering services to children and families. Whether designing a policy to expand access to preschool, evaluating the impact of a child care program, or launching a campaign to encourage parents to read to their children, we won’t see the progress we’re looking for until we put the workforce first.

Under the Early Childhood Workforce Initiative, a series of country studies will examine ways to strengthen and scale up a quality workforce. The first of these studies, Supporting the early childhood workforce at scale: The Cuna Más home visiting program in Peru, focuses on Cuna Más.

Kimberly Josephson is a senior program associate at R4D on the Global Education team where she focuses on early childhood development and secondary education, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Gabriela Guerrero is a senior researcher at GRADE in the areas of education and learning, poverty and equality, and methodologies for research and evaluation of policy and programs. Her research interests are ECD, educational transitions, intercultural bilingual education, and school effectiveness.