Salary Raises and Education

Teachers in public schools in the Philippines are scheduled to receive raises this year. Without seeing the actual numbers, this sounds like good news. With the actual numbers, the news is not necessarily good. It is actually bad. Novice teachers are about to see a 3-4 percent increase in their pay while master teachers are set to gain 6-8 percent. Percentages, however, only tell part of the story. Since novice teachers' base salaries are lower than those of master teachers, the absolute amount in pesos for the raise of a master teacher could be as high as seven times that of a novice teacher. Such arrangement is not only unjust, but also detrimental to basic education.

Above copied from Manila Bulletin

Research shows that providing higher salary raises for teachers early in their career benefits education. Grissom and Strunk write in a study published in the journal Educational Policy, "We find that frontloaded compensation schemes—those that allocate greater salary returns to experience to novice teachers—are associated with better performance in multiple grades and throughout the achievement distribution."

Teachers early in their career are often facing challenges of making ends meet since they usually do not have savings and a house of their own. Making the teaching profession attractive to young talent requires attractive salaries and yet, novice teachers in the Philippines have to start at much lower salaries. Worse, the increases for the salaries of these teachers even fall short of the inflation rate in the Philippines.

Above copied from BusinessWorld

At this rate, how do we expect to attract talent? Actually, at this rate, novice teachers will not even be able to keep up with inflation. In real terms, novice teachers are in fact about to experience a pay deduction.


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