KEEP Illinois - Defining Educator Compensation

Hi there. Thank you so much for joining us for today's Keep Illinois webinar, which we're going to go over our defining educator compensation study. Uh this webinar will be joined by the full report that we'll be releasing a few days from now as we record the webinar and it will be included in our newsletter on Friday, May 7th, 2026. We will also update the description here in the YouTube video and include the link to the full study uh after it has been published this Friday. So with that said, uh welcome. Thanks for joining us and if you have questions, we'll take those at the end today. So, my name is Jason Klein. I'm the senior director of learning partnerships here at Northern Illinois University. As part of my role, I'm lucky enough to facilitate the Illinois P20 Network. I was joined on this study by Drs. Kelly Summers and Benjamin Creed. They are both professors, assistant professors in our uh leadership, educational psychology, and foundations department in our college of education. and we did this work together as part of the NIU P20 research and data collaborative. So, we're really excited to have this joint effort between the Illinois P20 Network and the College of Education as part of our uh P20 research and data collaborative and to help continue to inform the work that uh people from across the state have undertaken through our P20 networks keep Illinois initiative. So, a couple of years ago, nearly nearly a couple of years ago, we released a literature review as a result of the work of um keep Illinois participants and that report was called the road to retention. We'll also have that linked in the description of the video. And from that report, there were four recommendations that we felt that the research suggested. The first of those was to uh support compensation for educators as an effort to increase retention. Other strategies for increasing retention were uh teacher leadership, professional development, instructional coaching and co-eing and then the culture, working conditions and wellness of school districts and um and other organizations in which educators work. So things like special education cooperatives, etc. So with that all said, based on these four recommendations, we looked at the landscape of what the Illinois P20 Network was already doing, as well as what other organizations in the state were doing. And uh the two areas that stuck out as being most in need of ongoing research and support were compensation and then culture, working conditions, and wellness. And originally we endeavored to engage in a study that looked at both those areas. But as we began the development process for this study, we zeroed in on compensation. And that is what we're going to talk about today is compensation and and remembering that what we're studying here is compensation as one driver potentially of educator retention. Now, our study of compensation took a little bit of a different angle and we decided to study not how much money people make. That data is available. We could have asked Isby for that data. There's publicly available data for each school district in the state on the report card in average teacher salary and average administrator salary. Um but instead we said what does compensation mean to educators? Let's take if we're going to do this research, let's take a step back and try and understand that because of course compensation I as any chief school business official or assistant superintendent for human resources will tell us or frankly anybody schoolboard member uh union leader that's on a collective bargaining team would tell us there is a lot more dollars being spent as part of our overall compensation package on things like health insurance and dental and disability, our TRS contributions or our IMRF contributions depending on one's role in an organization. So, so that's what we were here to look at. So, with that said, the methodology that we employed, this was a a survey study and this was an original survey that we created. It was tested internally at niu and with the field testing particularly focused on survey clarity uh as well as time to completion. We also engaged in with a number of key communication partners to help get the survey out. Those partners included the Illinois State Board of Education, a wide range of statewide professional organizations. their help was invaluable on sharing out the survey and the partnership with the Illinois Education Association which uh highlighted the survey directly with its members across Illinois. One of the difficult sets of decisions we made in developing the survey was to really heir on the side of focusing on anonymity. uh knowing the wide range of school districts in Illinois with hundreds of small districts, we really wanted to ensure that not only would participants in the survey be anonymous, but that they would feel like they were anonymous. So, as a result of that, there were some key questions that we chose not to include. We didn't ask participants if they were a TRS or an IMRF employee. To some degree, we can make uh assumptions about that based on one's self-reported position um but not entirely. For example, there are administrators that are IMRF administrators in operational areas of school district work, for example. We also did not ask uh whether people were tier one or tier 2. And again, while we did ask about their years of experience in Illinois and in their current school district, we can't just make assumptions based on that, unfortunately. And and again, we chose not to ask this to preserve anonymity. And then we also chose not to ask about a variety of demographic fields that you would normally ask respondents about, but in this case, we felt like it would preserve anonymity. And and while would be very interesting and potentially very important in helping further understand how different educators define compensation differently, we decided to hold off on this case. What we did include, and this was optional, you did not need to respond to this, was the identification of your school district. And when people did select their school district, that we were clear about this in the survey, that was going to allow us to then pull in publicly available data from the Illinois school report card and and be able to potentially look at uh factors across districts. Uh finally as once we had all the data and were beginning to um initially understand what was in the data, we created some some fields that did not end up being quite as critical for the research uh as we had envisioned when we created them but might be useful for future research. Um the first was we created this administrator toteer salary ratio um that could be very helpful when looking at issues around compensation. For that we simply use the ISBY publicly reported data for those fields. The average administrator salary and the average teacher salary. There would be more nuanced ways to look at that um if conducting this research specifically on that locally. Um again that field did not end up being something that we utilized but we wanted to call it out as part of our process of working through the survey data. We also looked at the available uh fields for district geographic location and diff district size that were in use in the state of Illinois and we felt like for this study the existing fields were not kind of didn't hit that that goldilocks just right measure. So, so we created some new fields for those and um we won't we won't go into great detail on those here, but we'll we'll briefly touch on them in this webinar. So, let's look at who responded to the survey. And the survey was given last spring, a year ago at this time, and that was a very intentional time frame. And so, in terms of who responded, at the end of the day, after we had cleaned the data, we had over,300 usable responses. Of those 1300 usable responses, 103 were non-licicensed educators. They did not have a PEL or a professional educator license. Uh there were over 1,200 with a PEL. And of those 1,200, the vast majority were classroom teachers of all different kinds, but we also had 186 administrators and 244 non-classroom non-administrator PEL holders. So those those folks are people like school psychologists, school social workers, speech language pathologists, librarians, instructional coaches. All of those positions would fall in that category of 204 uh individuals who responded with Appel but who are not in a classroom role right now. We did ask people about their highest postsecary degree that that becomes pretty important uh oftentimes in people's actual compensation. Uh and we had a lot of respondents who had graduate degrees uh including multiple graduate degrees and even a number with doctoral degrees. And so this does skew to to the right a bit uh as you're looking at this graph in terms of who our respondents were and and the percentage of them that that had advanced degrees. The years of experience in Illinois, pretty wide range of years of experience. We can see the the bell-shaped curve here. Um we've got uh quite a mix from early career educators to experienced educators with the bulk of the respondents um having um somewhere between five and 30 years of experience. So being in the middle of their careers, the years of experience in the current district shifted significantly from how much experience they had in Illinois. So, one of the things that tells us is this speaks to some mobility among respondents of moving districts. And so, um, what we don't really have is how that compares to the population of educators statewide, but it's it's interesting to note and probably important to note, um, that people who have responded this survey uh, have been in their current districts less years than they've been working in Illinois, which suggests they've been working other districts in Illinois previously. So in terms of districts, uh 972 of the 1,311 respondents did identify their district and there were 228 districts that were identified. So about a fourth of Illinois school districts were identified. Now, how many people from each district participated? Well, there was a very wide range from as few as one respondent to as high as 82 respondents from a single district. It's important to note 130 of the districts or more than half of the identified districts only had one response. So, we're going to be cautious about drawing conclusions about districts from this. Um, just like we're going to be cautious about drawing conclusions about the whole population of educators in Illinois. uh given that there was less than 1% of uh educators who responded to the survey, even despite the significant outreach efforts statewide over a a two-month window last spring with some really high-profile organizations. So, where were the districts that did response? Well, here we can see on this slide we do have a good mix of of Illinois districts here. So on the on the right side from very small to very large, we have districts across that continuum. Um, and frankly, and this is in the written report, we'll see if I get the numbers exactly right as I'm doing this off top of my head, but I think our smallest district represented had 146 students and our largest district represented had hundreds of thousands of students. And so, uh, we had a quite a range. We also quite a range geographically. And while we've reported here in the raw numbers, one of the things to remember is that the numbers of districts in some of these regions are much smaller than the numbers of districts in other regions. So again, we had a real wide mix. Another factor to consider when thinking about district numbers is which regions have a mix of elementary and high school districts where you'll often have anywhere from 2 to 10 districts that would that would make up a single unit school district that goes from prek through 12th grade. And so so that also skews how many districts there are in each of these regions. but pretty diverse representation of school districts that match the range of districts that exist across the state of Illinois. We were quite pleased with that. So, I've said some of these things already, but just to summarize who our study participants were, uh, pretty high degree attainment. Lots of people taking this survey with at least a master's degree and in many cases multiple graduate degrees or certificates. Uh we've got some evidence here that the participants who responded to the survey uh have more mobility um because they've been in their current districts for fewer years than they've worked in Illinois. uh we have strong diversity of districts that was represented in this survey and and again we do need to remember that while in a lot of ways this population of respondents or the sample of respondents represented the population of the state, it's a very small percentage of the overall population of Illinois educators. So we want to take some caution in drawing conclusions, but we still think this study uh provides a great landscape analysis and foundation for additional research work that can be very very important uh particularly in a world in which we need to use our resources or limited resources as effectively as possible. So what do educators think of their compensation? Well, educators across all types of educators uh and everybody all 1300 people plus who responded uh we see there's a wide range of answers to whether they view compensation is take-home pay, total pay, versions of total pay, um and how that plays out. A large a large percentage do view take-home pay uh as being their view of compensation versus total pay uh which would include insurance, other kinds of benefits including things like tuition reimbursement, etc. So now we're going to break it down and look at it through a few different lenses. The first we're going to look is by job type here. So non-licensed educators view. So typically these would be paraprofessionals. Um we see a higher percentage here viewing their compensation as as being rooted deeply in take-home pay. When we look at teachers and other notadministrators who have a professional educator's license, we see a similar pattern with it being deeply rooted in take-home pay. When we move to administrators, we see it shift and the shift here is to total pay plus all other benefits. Now, we have some thoughts and ideas about that, but they're just thoughts and ideas. And so, again, this is this is what we know from the research we conducted here. We definitely think as we'll talk about at the end of the webinar, there's room for further study here. now that that this study can direct us towards pretty specifically. Now, we're going to look across the years of experience, and this is the years of experience teaching in Illinois, not just the years of experience in their current district. And so here for our less experienced teachers and other educators, we can see again take-home pay, the the multiple categories that call take-home pay, the majority of responses fall into those categories. As we move through the years of experience, we see that pattern continues to hold through 5 to 10 years of experience, 11 to 20 years of experience. And then once we get beyond 20 years of experience, we see it shift. And this is not the only time we will see that shift happen like that. And now total pay starts to take precedence. And by the time we look at our most experienced educators who are also typically our most highly paid educators, total pay becomes the priority in terms of how they define compensation. So we've got a number of key takeaways and when you see the written report when it's released on Friday, you'll be able to to drill in and read these right off the bat in the executive summary. We're going to call each of them out here and provide some supporting data for each key takeaway. Some of this will get a little redundant uh because the same data points to multiple takeaways. So the first takeaway, unsurprisingly, educators want to be paid more. So, some of the data that pointed us to this key takeaway is that all respondents feelings about whether or not they're well compensated. We've got quite the bell curve here and it it really distributes uh across a very normal curve here. Um but it does skew a little bit to the right um when we look at all respondents. Now, the story starts to look different when we look at it by job type. For example, none of our uh non-licensed educators who responded said that they were compensated very well and and only a handful said that they were compensated well. Whereas a large percentage, the majority uh by far said they were compensated either not well, poorly, or very poorly. When we look at teachers, uh, the curve evens out a little bit, but it still skews to the right, uh, a little bit with, um, but it's pretty even. And again, there's there's a lot of potential research here that could be done as a followup. um looking in more detail different types of teaching roles, the grade levels student uh excuse me that educators are working in the geographic regions and and that was the kind of work we had wanted to do with the geographic regions but we feel like we need more data from more districts to be able to do that effectively. So we point to additional work that that can be done now in this direction. And then when we look at administrators, we see the polar opposite of um the feelings that that the paraprofessionals had in terms of their feelings about their compensation uh with the majority feeling like they're being paid adequately well or even very well. Years of experience tells a similar story. Now, this is a more condensed data graph to look at. Um, but the the navy blue bars on the left of each cluster are the 1 to four years of experience and the purple bars on the right of each cluster are 31 or more years of experience. And if you start to look across the colors, uh you see a shift though though the pattern is fairly similar across years of experience. There is a noticeable shift um that we see as people uh have significantly more experience from their counterparts who are in the earlier the middle parts of their career. Now when we look across all three job types, still the most frequent response in each among respondents from each job category is the area of compensation they would like to see improved is additional salary as take-home pay. So that is loud and clear. That is a consistent message here. And that's part of all of this together is how we come up with the key takeaway that educators would like to be paid more. Our next takeaway is this one. For early and mid-career educators with less than 20 years of experience, increasing take-home pay in their paychecks is their most important compensation priority. And and we see some of that evidenced here. Again, these are things we've looked at already. our our newest educators are telling us our educators with the least experience are telling us take-home pay is most important. Um and and we see that consistent to consistently being true until we have 20 years of experience. Similarly, when we asked about their ability to save, one of the things that we have found is educators with less than 20 years of experience um have less of an ability to save. They are pretty consistent in in answering that question. And so that's not only our first through fourth year teachers or our fifth through 10th year teachers. That also gets into our teachers who who've been in the profession for a while. Um and we see it here on on questions around living um you do or you can live in the district. We've got a pretty high percentage all the way across. But when we look at homeownership on the right side of the graph, um over half of the respondents uh have essentially told us that home ownership is a real challenge. Um until we get to that most experienced category of educators, 31 or more years. And even there, it's only 55.6% that's saying they own or can own a home. um in the district like that. And so there's if home ownership is one of those uh bellweather figures for uh a solidly middle class experience in the United States of America. Uh we're seeing that being uh a trailing factor here for many educators as we've just seen from our data on our 1 to fouryear our 5 to 10 year and even our 11 to 20 year educators um having challenges and and seeking take-home pay additionally as the antidote to those challenges. We can see here that for later career educators with more than 20 years of experience as well as for administrators, improving overall compensation is their most important compensation priority. So they're they're not just looking at take-home pay. So this is another key takeaway. And we see that here where um once you're beyond that 20 years while take-home pay still has a very high percentage there are increasing percentages of other of educators that responded to the survey saying hey total pay is really important to us and and when we get to 31 plus years of experience all of those other views of of compensation holistically definitely take root. with administrators. We looked at this already. We see that administrators feel like they are well compensated and and when we see the ability to save, we again see that our most experienced educators um have a much greater ability to save according to their own self-reporting than do newer educators who responded to this survey. We looked at that home ownership data according to years of experience as well. For non-licensed educators, primarily paraprofessionals, increased take-home pay was again their most critical compensation priority. We've already seen this in the data. Um they don't feel like they are being well compensated. Um, we look specifically at the ability to save by um by job type and we see the non-licensed on the left side of this graph. um there are almost no one who is able or easily able to save. Whereas with administrators, there's a large chunk that are able and easily able to save. And and with teachers uh and other non-administrator PEL licensed staff, we see a a not quite a normal distribution curve as there's not many who are easily able to save um but more of a normal distribution to the data. This is another interesting factor when we look at other employment. We asked about who has another job outside of their work for their school district during summer and who has another job outside their work for their school district during the school year. And unsurprisingly, a large percentage of our pair of professionals, 57.3% who responded said they are working during the summer in another job. and over a third of them, 35% are working another job during the school year. What is interesting is those numbers were not far off the numbers of teachers. Now, one of the things that we did not ask about that again would be worthy of additional study is what are these other jobs? Which of these other jobs are different people doing that are additive to their current job as a as a school district employee and which are completely unrelated or maybe even subtractive to their school district employment? So, for example, if administrators are teaching coursework for universities, that may be very additive. They're growing as learners. They may even be finding employees, future employees to hire through that process. um versus if I'm uh working another job for a delivery company or in a warehouse setting and very tired three nights a week and one day on the weekends, uh it's hard to physically recover as a paraprofessional who may also have a very physically taxing job at school working with students each day. And so that would be an example of a job that's subtractive. We didn't go there in this study, but we think this data raises some questions that are are worthwhile for future study. Home ownership story here for non-licensed paraprofessional staff, very few saying they own or can own a home. Um, very few. And so that's important to call out and again leads us towards this key takeaway that uh significant increases to take-home payer are what they're looking for. Then this key takeaway, the time to retirement for tier 2 educators is overwhelmingly considered problematic. Now remember, we did not ask respondents, are you a tier one or a tier 2 educator? But we found that everybody gave us the same response regardless here. So we asked about the time to retirement for tier one educators. What were respondents to the surveys feelings about that? And we see again a very very normal distribution like we almost could not have made a more normal distribution here uh from outstanding to terrible. And we did allow for the I don't know for people who may not have know about what what that looks like for tier one. But we contrast this when we flip over to the next slide and we asked about the time to retirement for tier 2 educators in Illinois. And overwhelmingly cross experience, cross job type, uh there is a very significant uh feeling that it is either not so good or frankly terrible. And um and so uh that that was pronounced here. So in terms of policy considerations, we've got some state level thoughts that are re just the initial formation of thoughts. They are not anywhere near ready for some kind of legislation or policy action. There is a lot of work to be done by a lot of stakeholders, by a lot of researchers before these thoughts can be formed into policy considerations. And then we've we've actually got some some thoughts that are a little more wellformed in terms of process of what school districts can do to use this information um for their own collective bargaining and compensation decisions. So first at the state level um increasing take-home pay is I mean there's a clear call for that here. We see it in two of these three bullets. And so couple of ideas there. One is a call to action for economists, public finance experts to put their heads together and say, "What are some creative ways that we could increase take-home pay without maybe significantly increasing or possibly increasing at all the resources that are available for educator compensation? That's the the real magic, right? And again, similarly, um a question of a policy consideration. Should there be increased take-home pay that targets additional funding for early career educators to help keep them in the profession until their their funding gets to a certain level to some degree the legislation from a few years ago to set a statewide minimum salary. Um did do this. Um likewise there could be targeted funding to support specialized areas of educators areas that the shortage is particularly averse and that there's great need in school districts. So early childhood special education bilingual ESL career and technical education would would tend to be the areas that would be foremost among um the the educator areas for further conversation. And then one of the areas we explored briefly but think may have some potential and again requires a lot of additional effort uh additional research and analysis certainly stakeholder engagement. It's it's not ready for prime time now though there have been some efforts in the last few years to move in this direction direction is to find ways to to better um support the efficient use of existing resources. So supporting insurance cooperative, school districts have moved to insurance cooperatives significantly over many many years and and that is very common now. Um allowing districts to participate in statewide state of Illinois insurance um or other solutions that might lower school district insurance expenditures. I I mean, we're recording this the week after the Illinois Association of School Business Officials held their annual conference in Poria this year, and it was not uncommon in the hallways in the lobbies to hear uh school business leaders from across the state say to each other, "How much is your health insurance going up next year?" and um numbers were often around 15% but numbers 19 and 20% were not unheard of in those conversations. And so, um, looking at where where maybe those insurance costs can be lowered and capped, um, and supporting school districts with that could allow some of that money to, uh, certainly go towards additional compensation in the form of take-home pay or towards other district needs as well. Now, for local actions, again, it we focus more on process uh, that we learn from this. And so one of the things we're suggesting is beginning with local data collection. So we've asked here statewide, hey educators, what compensation is important to you? And we've seen some patterns, but there's no reason a district locally couldn't 6 months before, 4 months before collective bargaining begins conduct the same research locally and do it collaboratively where um administrators uh union leaders and and even board members are all analyzing that data together. Uh in the written report in the appendix we have a version of the survey that could be could be given as a local survey to understand your local stakeholders compensation definitions and then instead of just doing what you've always done if there are some changes based on the needs of your school district. For example, if if you have a large group of retirees or soon to be retirees, excuse me, um you might negotiate the contract differently than the contract after that, which will likely have a large group of first through fourth year teachers. Uh we see that that statewide there's some different needs based on this research. You can find out locally if that's true. Um, and so then once you've got that data, being really creative and finding ways to meet different employees needs. We think that both IEA and IF along with IASPA and IASBO can be real leaders as districts find creative solutions that work for them to help share out those solutions um with both administrators and um and with union leaders as well as then through IASB with schoolboard members across the state. And then again, one of the things that will probably come out uh based on this data in in local data is how do we prioritize increasing take-home uh pay for less experienced employees and non-licensed employees. So, further research opportunities, um there's a lot here. If you are thinking you're going to pursue a um a degree uh graduate degree, a doctoral degree in particular, you you've got some stuff at the end of this report that you can certainly peruse and consider as as potential research opportunities. So everything from um student loan debt, we asked some questions about that that we didn't share here, and homeownership um to educators budgeting and spending habits uh are all interesting topics for further research. studying um educators um receive money to to lead co-curricular activities and and to provide supervision in in many if not most school districts. How does that money impact um their individual lives as individual educators and how does it impact school district budgets overall? Um further study around employment outside of the school district. We've talked about that. um tier 2, TRS, IMRF. Um, another interesting topic is we know that career and technical education teachers are one of our areas of shortage and um, pay retirement and retention can look different when you're coming from a job where making maybe you were making 80 to $100,000 a year and now you're going to make $45,000 a year and you're a new teacher and so it's hard and it might be attractive to go back to making $90,000 a year in in in that profession instead of teaching about that profession. So, lots of topics here for future research. Um, finally, we really appreciate you joining us and and being with us to learn about this. Again, we will be releasing the study itself this Friday in our newsletter and it will be on our website and we'll add the link here to the YouTube video. So, um, thank you so much for for joining.