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Teacher Compensation Initiative
Celine Coggins
Executive Director, Grantmakers for Change
What role can philanthropy play, or does it play, in supporting increased teacher compensation?
CELINE COGGINS:
I think many philanthropists are concerned about increasing teacher pay, recognizing that teachers are the most important variable that matter for students in a school. At the same time, philanthropy is not going to be the entity that raises salaries over the long term. You would never see a situation where philanthropy would say, “We’re going to figure out how to pay every teacher 5% more out of our endowment.” What I can picture philanthropy doing and what Philanthropy currently does is support organizations that are doing advocacy for teacher salary increases, support organizations that are helping schools to rethink how they allocate resources and support changes in the structure of the teacher’s role that may allow some teachers to make more money.
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Why is teacher compensation a concern for philantropists?
CELINE COGGINS:
I think especially since the pandemic, we’ve seen that students have fallen behind in their learning. We really have to invest in our teachers to make sure that we catch our students up, that teachers have all of the skills that they need to support the social and emotional needs of students, the academic needs of students, the out of classroom needs of students and all of that. They deserve to be paid well for that.
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Is there an increased focus in this area since the pandemic?
CELINE COGGINS:
I think that philanthropy is right now, trying to make sense of what is most important to focus on among lots of different challenges. We know that students have experienced trauma through the pandemic. We know that their mental health is suffering in a lot of cases. We also know that we need modernized curriculum. There’s a million things in between all of those need to be focused on. You see different folks in philanthropy going in different directions.