Why Teachers in High-Minority Schools Are Paid Less
Plenty of headlines popped up this week about a new analysis of the U.S. Department of Education's 2009-2010Civil Rights Data Collection, which revealed that the average teacher working in a school serving Latino and black populations is being paid nearly $2,500 less per year than the average teacher working at a school in a whiter neighborhood. That’s a disturbing piece of data, but are these teachers deliberately being paid a lower salary?
In most places, teacher-district contracts include agreed-upon salary schedules that are binding regardless of where in a district an educator works. For example, a first-year math teacher working in Watts, a predominantly black and Latino section of Los Angeles, earns the same salary as a teacher working in the less diverse west