How Arkansas aims to boost teacher quality and gender equity

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ signature education reform bill, the LEARNS Act, will profoundly change public schools, pleasing conservatives and perhaps making the governor a serious vice presidential contender. The law’s sweeping school choice provisions get most of the attention, but by raising minimum teacher pay from $36,000 annually to $50,000 annually, LEARNS likely will have profound impacts on both teacher quality and gender equity.

That’s because, even today, in public schools across the country, women do the teaching and better-paid men do the leading.

Those traditional gender norms reflect public school history. As one of us shows in “Boys will be Superintendents: School leadership as a gendered profession,” in the 1800s, both teachers and principals tended to be women, partly because people considered women more suited to working with children but also because school boards could get away with paying women less.

In the early 1900s, that changed — but only for leadership. Progressives sought to professionalize educational leadership with larger, more bureaucratic schools led by credentialed principals and superintendents. Back when “professional” meant “male,” this meant gradually replacing female principals and superintendents with men.

As Kate Rousmaniere details in “The Principal’s Office,” the new field of athletic coaching attracted men to public schools, providing clear routes into principal and then superintendent posts. Rousmaniere writes that “athletic coaching — communication, authority, disciplinary training of students, and public relations — aligned with the emerging professional identity of the new principal and, in a happy coincidence, provided the masculine image that appealed to both the public and to school reformers.” Today, 53 percent of male principals are former coaches — three times the percentage for women.

The masculinization of administration was reinforced by educational leadership graduate programs, which provided far more men than women the (sometimes questionable) credentials for advancement.

As a result, as Rousmaniere points out, the number of women in public school leadership declined through most of the last century, with elementary school principalships held by women falling from 55 percent in 1928 to 20 percent in 1973. By then, high school principal posts, which always had more prestige (and fewer women), were 99 percent male. For generations, it seemed natural that women taught and men managed.

Even in the more enlightened 21st century, 2012 National School and Staffing Survey data reported in “Boys will be Superintendents” showed that 90 percent of elementary teachers, but only 66 percent of their bosses, were women. In secondary schools, women were 63 percent of teachers and 48 percent of principals.

With a big pay raise for teachers and no raise for leaders, Huckabee Sanders undoes some of that history, with enormous implications for gender equity. Currently, more than half of Arkansas public school teachers — but few, if any, principals — have annual pay under $50,000. Reflecting the history of public schooling, around three-quarters of Arkansas teachers — but less than a third of superintendents — are women.

Increasing the state minimum teacher salary promotes not only gender equity, but regional and economic equity. The teachers most likely to benefit from the increase are concentrated in impoverished and typically rural areas of Arkansas, where schools often suffer teacher shortages. The proposed minimum teacher salary increase could help alleviate the hiring challenges these districts face by directing additional resources to schools and students who need them the most.

The Huckabee Sanders reforms also address teacher quality, which traditional educational pay systems had eroded. Discrimination once severely limited career options for college educated women and minorities, who had few professional choices other than teaching. A captive labor market let school boards pay teachers peanuts — and they did.

Since the 1970s, discriminatory labor practices have declined but teacher pay has not caught up, making it harder to hire talented teachers. As one of us and colleague Jonathan Wai details in “Why Intelligence Is Missing from American Education Policy and Practice, and What Can Be Done About It,” among female high school graduates in the top tenth of cognitive ability, the proportion entering teaching declined from roughly a quarter in the early 1970s to roughly a tenth by the early 2000s.  

Female teachers had daughters who went into other, more respected and lucrative fields — in the case of two of our relatives, a professor and an investment banker. Coupled with continued summers off, a $50,000 starting salary could lure some of that talent back to public schools, particularly in the parts of Arkansas that need it most.

Of course, increasing the minimum teacher salary will not fully address gender pay equity or teacher shortages, but it certainly will vastly improve them. That’s something to celebrate in a state, and nation, in desperate need of educational improvement.

Robert Maranto is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas and a former school board member. Josh McGee is associate director of the Office for Education Policy and a faculty member in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. The opinions expressed here are theirs alone.

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