School Counselors
Much like school nurses, teachers strongly value school counselors and are willing to trade off additional income to work at a school with a counselor. Teachers are willing to trade a 12.5 percent increase in pay, or $6,734, to work in a school with one full-time counselor—more than double the per-teacher cost of $2,475 at a school of average size, based on an average counselor salary of $81,689. Working at a school that employs two full-time counselors is worth trading off $8,959 in additional salary to teachers, which is almost 1.8 times the per-teacher cost of $4,950.
School counselors are in relatively short supply in American schools: just 65 percent of elementary schools, 71 percent of middle schools, and 79 percent of high schools have a full-time counselor on staff, and 11 percent do not employ any counselor at all. Four out of five schools do not meet the recommended counselor-to-student ratio of 250:1.
School counselors are trained to support students’ mental health, including during personal challenges and global emergencies. A Massachusetts study found that effective school counselors also boost college readiness and educational attainment (see “Better School Counselors, Better Outcomes,” research, summer 2020).
Instructional Coaches
An estimated two-thirds of U.S. schools offer teachers access to instructional coaching, either from a dedicated coach or school leader, which is a growing area of focus in research and reform efforts in recent years (see “Taking Teacher Coaching to Scale,” research, fall 2018). Prior research has found that teachers value opportunities for professional growth. On the whole, however, teachers in our sample strictly prefer investments in counselors, nurses, and special-education specialists to investments in instructional coaching. Teachers are willing to trade a 4.2 percent raise, or $2,245 in additional salary, for one hour of individual coaching per month.
Although the offer of coaching does not appear to influence teachers’ employment preferences as much as the availability of special-education specialists, nurses, and school counselors, the value teachers place on coaching exceeds its cost. Based on the average full-time salary and benefits package of $89,100 and assuming three hours of worktime per coaching session, including observation, preparation, delivery, and administrative support, a full year of monthly coaching would cost $1,511 per teacher—about two-thirds of what teachers are willing to forgo in salary increases for that support.
Childcare Subsidies
To date, research on teachers’ preferences has largely overlooked the question of whether offering teachers childcare benefits would be a fruitful strategy to recruit or retain teachers. Districts rarely offer this benefit, which may be a missed opportunity—a robust body of evidence suggests childcare benefits increase women’s participation in the labor market and the challenge of juggling family and professional responsibilities without institutionalized, family-friendly workplace supports has long been a top reason women exit the teaching profession.
We therefore include two childcare subsidy amounts in our survey, both of which are capped at two children: $1,500 and $3,000 per child, for maximum subsidies of $3,000 and eligible expenses like daycare and after-school programs and expire when a child turns 12.
Teachers treat the smaller subsidy as a nearly one-to-one swap in pay, whether or not they have qualifying children at home: the average teacher is willing to trade off a 5.8 percent increase in salary, or $3,121, for a $1,500 per-child benefit that is capped at $3,000. For the larger benefit capped at $6,000, teachers would trade an 8.2 percent pay increase, or $4,411 in additional salary.
Some 43 percent of teachers in our sample had at least one child under 12 at the time of the survey; 57 percent did not and would be ineligible for these benefits. We compare their responses and find that, intuitively, the size of the childcare benefit matters most to eligible teachers, who would trade a $3,148 raise for a $3,000 subsidy and a $5,924 raise for a $6,000 subsidy. Ineligible teachers are willing to trade off about the same amount, approximately 6 percent or $3,200 in additional salary, for both subsidy sizes. This suggests that even teachers who would not immediately benefit from a childcare subsidy still value it.
For a hypothetical teacher making $60,000 with two children under 12, providing the larger childcare subsidy in lieu of a 10 percent raise would be far less expensive in the long run. Districts can cap subsidies at a fixed amount, and only a subset of the teaching workforce is eligible. A childcare subsidy expires as children age out, unlike a pay raise.
