Insights Getting Smart About Teacher Pay

nvesting in education is viewed as important to ensuring the success of our nation’s children. One of the largest dollar investments in education is teacher salaries. In fact, roughly 60 percent of all instructional dollars go to paying teachers. But how well do we pay them, and are their salaries based on what we value in a quality teacher? SEDL’s past research highlighted the importance of resources, such as money and staff, often used to directly impact teaching and learning. We found that high-performing school districts in the southwestern region spent more on instruction and had more teachers than did low-performing districts (Pan et al., 2003). In our new study on teache