HB 4388 provides a pathway for teachers to earn salaries over $100,000 a year. Yet, details about the new law may need refining for it to work in practice.

During the 2022 election campaign, Governor Kevin Stitt said that the state had made progress toward attracting and retaining high quality educators by making teachers eligible to earn six-figure salaries. Speaking at OU’s biannual Governor’s Conversation on Education, the Governor asserted that “We’re one of only three states in the nation that have designated a pathway to pay teachers six figures. So, we’re a national leader on that issue.”

The pathway that the Governor was referring to is HB 4388, legislation that he signed into law in May of 2022. The new law establishes the Teacher Empowerment Revolving Fund. The fund receives state lottery proceeds above $65 million, which can be used to match school district pay raises for teachers who have earned one of three designations (i.e. Advanced, Lead, or Master teacher). With matched funds from the state and district, HB 4388 could more than double the current salary that a teacher can earn under Oklahoma’s statutory pay scale.

Eligibility criteria

HB 4388 responds to a long-standing desire among some education reformers to tie teacher compensation to merit criteria rather than relying on seniority and professional credentials exclusively. The law directs districts to develop criteria for “Lead”, “Master”, and “Advanced” teachers according to evaluative components that include a teaching observation, an out-of-classroom measure, and a student performance metric. A maximum of 10 percent of a district’s teachers may be designated as Lead, Master, and Advanced in a given school year. The specific protocols for teacher evaluations are designed at the local level but are then subject to approval by the State Department of Education.

The three classifications build on prior legislation (SB 980) passed in 2018 that emerged from the Teacher Shortage Task Force. The 2018 law added Lead teachers who received a minimum $3,000 salary increase, and Master teachers who received a $5,000 boost. Both categories of teachers were guaranteed reduced teaching loads in exchange for performing other duties (e.g. mentoring, co-teaching). However, SB 980 came with no state funding attached to it, which critics say limited district participation.

Under HB 4388, the state added the category of “Advanced” and raised the minimum salary increase for both Lead and Master teachers (i.e. Advanced -$3,000, Lead - $5,000, and Master - $10,000). The maximum increase (for all three designations) is set at $40,000. These raises, paid for by districts, are eligible for a state match, subject to the availability of funds. One-time bonuses ranging from $1,500 to $5,000 are also given to the three categories of teachers who work in districts with a large share of low-income students and small districts of less than 1,000 students.

But how might these changes get a teacher to six figures? Let’s say a 20-year veteran teacher with a bachelor’s degree earns the state’s minimum base salary of $46,600. After being designated as a Master teacher, a teacher receiving a pay increase of $30,000 from the district would see these funds matched by $30,000 in state funds. The teacher’s new salary would be $106,600.

Funding questions remain

Although substantial pay increases for teachers are now possible, it’s unclear how they’ll be funded. No deposit was made in 2022 to the Teacher Empowerment Revolving Fund even though state lottery proceeds exceeded the $65 million threshold by about $15 million last year. And, even if state funds become available, districts must find ways to put their own limited funds into the program.

Perhaps more fundamentally, as school districts continue to struggle with teacher shortages, it’s not certain that they will have the capacity to fill classroom vacancies that would be created by allowing their top teachers substantial time out of the classroom to serve as Advanced, Lead, and Master teachers. In this sense, the law might reduce the number of students who have exposure to a district’s most talented teachers.

Other performance pay plans are also in the works. Newly-elected State Superintendent of Instruction Ryan Walters touted a $150-million performance-based pay plan as an alternative to across-the-board pay raises in his proposed budget to the Legislature. The plan appears to bear similarities to HB 4388, seeking raises of $2,500 to $10,000 for highly rated teachers.

Changes to teacher salaries and work conditions outlined in HB 4388 may require negotiations between unions and local school districts. Teachers’ unions tend to have an aversion to proposals that move away from seniority-based compensation. So, although HB 4388 makes substantial pay raises a possibility for Oklahoma’s teachers, whether the opportunities provided by the bill will be adopted by school districts, and how many teachers, if any, will ultimately benefit, remains to be seen. Core aspects of the law may first need to be ironed out before teacher pay increases can be widely put into practice.

Author Bio

David Blatt is George Kaiser Family Foundation Endowed Professor of Practice at the University of Oklahoma.