Differential Pay: Colorado

Retaining Effective Teachers Policy

Look at National Findings

Goal

The state should support differential pay for effective teaching in shortage and high-need areas.

Meets goal in part

Suggested Citation:
National Council on Teacher Quality. (2015). Differential Pay: Colorado results. State Teacher Policy Database. [Data set].
Retrieved from: https://www.nctq.org/yearbook/state/CO-Differential-Pay-72

Analysis of Colorado's policies

Colorado offers a loan-forgiveness grant to first-year teachers who teach in a high-poverty elementary school in a rural district, or who teach math, science, special education or linguistically diverse education in a public school. Teachers are eligible for up to $2,000 in loan forgiveness for each of the first four years of teaching. However, the statute is repealed as of July 1, 2019.

Teachers who are National Board Certified are eligible to receive an annual stipend of $1,600; the stipend is increased by $3,200 for teachers in low-performing schools.

Recommendations for Colorado

Expand differential pay initiatives for teachers in subject-shortage areas and high-need schools.
Although Colorado's loan forgiveness program is a desirable recruitment and retention tool for teachers early in their careers, the state should expand its program to include those who are already part of the teaching pool. A salary differential is an attractive incentive for every teacher, not just those with education debt.

State response to our analysis

Colorado was helpful in providing NCTQ with the facts necessary for this analysis.

Compensation for Prior Work Experience

Select another topic

Delivering Well Prepared Teachers

Expanding the Pool of Teachers

Identifying Effective Teachers

Retaining Effective Teachers

Exiting Ineffective Teachers

Pensions

Research rationale

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 necessary.

Differential Pay: Supporting Research
Two 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.

A 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.

State Teacher Policy