We have great kids, we have a very good department, and Dallas pays better than most of the suburban districts in the area. Vacancies existed through most of the school year. Good candidates went other places. It’s frustrating.
I’ll wager the hiring process would go faster, and work better, if teacher pay in Dallas were $5,000 higher. I’d wager, as an administrator, that the $5,000/year raise for teachers would provide greater savings in hiring, tutoring, testing, and all other areas of academic performance.
But, then, I think supply/demand economics often works. What do I know?
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
I have to agree completely with the above and it certainly applies to individual schools and not just districts.
I work in the education industry and I have such firsthand. One school I’ve worked at had brand new and well designed facilities, lots of support workers (integration aides, etc) and the school itself was fine. But the principal at that school was an idiot and that made working at that school a real test on everyone. Teachers left one after the other and the word soon spread it was not a good school.
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When we come out of teacher’s college, we’re all looking to go somewhere that pays well. The high rate of teacher dropout in the first 5 years speaks to another issue besides money: administration. There are two parts to this: First, Dallas has to have nationally competitive hiring practices, second, it has to be able to retain teachers by having sensible, supportive administration in the schools.
The other part of all this is if Dallas is anything like other large school districts, they’re looking to cut spending on teacher salaries by hiring non-teachers to fill the job. One of the things I observed in Hillsborough is non-trained friends and relatives being hired over trained experienced teachers.
Education, it seems, is kinda like the good-ole-boys network. It isn’t always what you know, but who you know, and what you’ll settle for.
One teacher of 20+ years told me: “Don’t bother to look at the wages, it isn’t what’s going to make your life easier or even bearable. Look at administration. If the administration is no good you don’t want to work there no matter how much they pay you.”
I have to agree.
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