Well-prepared, highly qualified teachers are essential if we are to ensure that all students achieve the high standards necessary for them to lead fulfilling lives and become productive citizens. In today's competitive marketplace, it is increasingly difficult to attract and retain the best teachers; to accomplish this, we must guarantee a salary commensurate with their education, experience and the challenging and complex tasks they perform.

Merit pay and pay-for-performance plans often are proposed as systems that would replace the "single salary schedule," the way most teachers—unionized or not—have been paid for the last century. This pay system, based almost exclusively on levels of education and years of experience, was designed in response to discriminatory practices and to ensure fairness—no differential pay for gender or race of the teacher or educational level of the students taught (elementary, middle or secondary). In the absence of more proximate measures of teacher quality, it had a commonsense validity—the more you know about the task and the longer you do it, the better you should be at the task. The pay system has persisted in large part because it is viewed by teachers as equitable and by management as easy to administer.

Nonetheless, it has some severe drawbacks given current goals of requiring teachers to teach all students to high standards. For example, paying for "greater knowledge" in many states and localities has been implemented in ways that do not relate to the "tasks of teaching." Teachers frequently are rewarded for more college credits or continuing education units (CEUs), regardless of the content of the coursework and its relationship to teaching and learning. Equally problematic, the traditional salary system, as commonly implemented, does not reward additional skills and knowledge that benefit children (e.g., licensure in multiple fields), exemplary practice (e.g., attainment of National Board for Professional Teaching Standards certification), extraordinary circumstances (e.g., teaching in hard-to-staff schools), and/or market forces (e.g., shortages in particular teaching fields such as science, math and special education). In short, as the late Albert Shanker, former AFT president, pointed out, the "rigid hierarchy" of the traditional salary schedule does not allow teachers to be compensated like other professionals in our society.

In February 2001, the AFT executive council approved a landmark resolution, based on the work of its Task Force on Professional Compensation for Teachers, that calls for enhancing the traditional teacher compensation schedule. The resolution says that the AFT "believes it is time to explore viable, fair and educationally sound teacher compensation options that will raise salaries while contributing to efforts already under way to assure high-quality, well-prepared teachers for all students."

Recognizing the limitations of the single salary system, the AFT is encouraging its locals to explore various teacher compensation systems based on local conditions. It is not recommending abandoning the traditional salary schedule. An adequate salary base for all teachers, labor-management collaboration based on mutual trust, and easy-to-understand procedures for awarding teachers additional compensation are among the conditions that must be part of any professional compensation system, the resolution says. In some places, such as Cincinnati, Ohio, enough of these conditions exist so that the local has been able to develop a new teacher evaluation and compensation system. The AFT supports such efforts, but wholeheartedly rejects any pay proposals that resemble the failed merit-pay plans that some have advocated.

A professional teacher compensation system could include financial incentives to teachers who acquire additional knowledge and skills; advanced skills such as National Board for Professional Teaching Standards certification; or who agree to teach in low-performing and hard-to-staff schools. The AFT believes that compensation proposals could include increased pay for schoolwide improvement, mentoring new and veteran teachers and teaching in shortage areas.