CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Despite concerns about teacher shortages in certain school districts and subject areas, a recent study found that schools are not adjusting their salary scales strategically so they can better attract novice teachers.
Paul Bruno, a professor of education policy, organization and leadership at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, found little evidence that schools frontload salary scales — boost the pay for entry-level and early career teachers — to aggressively compete with nearby school districts for qualified teachers.
In the study, published in the Labor Studies Journal, Bruno found that when teacher salaries in districts increased by 1%, adjacent districts increased their own pay scales by just .15% to .25%. And the ratios of increases were no bigger for novice teachers’ salaries than for more experienced educators.
“I don’t find much evidence that school districts are raising their salaries when neighboring districts are in order to compete strategically as they could or should, with all of the current concerns we have about teacher shortages,” Bruno said. “That’s particularly concerning if we want school districts to be thinking carefully about how to get the best teachers into the classrooms that need them.”
Salary schedules for teachers are often heavily “backloaded”— meaning that salary increases are deferred to relatively late in teachers’ careers — and it is unclear whether this promotes recruitment and retention, Bruno said.
“Some previous research suggested that it might be more advantageous if school districts increased the salaries for novice and early-career teachers to be more competitive with neighboring districts and that’s what motivated this analysis,” Bruno said.
In recent years, there has been growing concern about a nationwide shortage of teachers in the U.S. and that primary and secondary schools may be putting underqualified instructors in classrooms.
In a 2024 study, Bruno and first author Tuan D. Nguyen of the University of Missouri and Chanh B. Lam of Kansas State University examined data across all U.S. states and estimated that there are at least 39,700 unfilled teaching positions and at least 288,000 positions currently held by underqualified teachers.
Published online in the journal American Educational Research Association Open, the findings also were cited in the recently released 2025 Economic Report of the President, prepared by U.S. President Joseph Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers. The findings were mentioned in an analysis of the challenges that primary and secondary schools are experiencing with teacher recruitment and retention in the labor market.
In the current study, Bruno explored whether the structures of teacher salary schedules are shaped by competition with adjacent school districts and whether they are influenced by teachers’ unions.
The study sample contained the salary and benefit schedules for 498 California school districts’ collective bargaining units that were submitted to the California Department of Education. Bruno restricted the sample to those schools with complete information for every school year from 2009-2010 through 2018-2019, and he compared the pay at contiguous school districts for teachers with a bachelor’s degree and an additional 60 units of educational credits.
He included several control variables for school characteristics that might influence teacher compensation, such as school districts’ proportions of minority students and students eligible for free or reduced lunches, whether districts had a trend of declining enrollment and the number of service days for returning teachers.
On average, schools’ pay increases were very modest and most beneficial to mid-career teachers. For example, a 1% increase at Step 1 of the pay scale — i.e., the starting pay for entry-level teachers — was about $554, while the same proportion of increase amounted to $898 for experienced teachers at Step 30. By comparison, when a district’s neighbors increased their salaries by that much, that predicted a district would increase its own salaries for novice and experienced teachers by just $97 and $130, respectively. That did not indicate a strongly competitive response for attracting teachers, Bruno said.
Bruno explored whether the small spillover effects on salaries at adjacent school districts might be due to their serving differing grade levels and therefore not competing for the same pool of teachers. However, he said there was little evidence that was the case.
“My results suggest that even if schools are somewhat sensitive to neighboring districts’ teacher salaries, they do not respond in optimally strategic ways,” Bruno said. “Even where unions are increasing teacher salaries, they don’t seem to be increasing the pay for brand new teachers because the raises are disproportionately benefitting experienced teachers.”
Bruno said that the larger pay raises for veteran teachers were plausibly consistent with labor union involvement because these members tend to be more influential in their unions than their less experienced colleagues.
Therefore, it might be advantageous for unions to better engage early-career teachers so that their interests are similarly represented and salary levels are prioritized when contracts are negotiated at the bargaining table, he said.