Influence of School District Characteristics on Salary Change

Abstract

The problem was an analysis of school district factors?economic, geographic, demographic, psychological and political?and their employment to determine prediction equations for salary change of school district superintend ents, secondary principals and base salary for beginning, bachelor degree teachers. The statistical techniques of fac tor analysis, regression, and analysis of variance were utilized. Some major conclusions were that district size, wealth, indebtedness and average past superintendent's pay were the best predictors of superintendent's change in pay. The best predictor of principal's salary change was the factor of district size. To predict change in base salary for beginning, bachelor degree teachers, only the knowledge of the average base salary for the past 6-year period (length of the study) was needed. THE PURPOSE of this study was two-fold. First was to contribute to a better understanding of some of the variables which have a close rela tionship with changes in salary paid to school dis trict superintendents, secondary school principals and the base for beginning, bachelor degree teach ers. Because salaries comprise approximately 80 percent of a typical school budget, analysis of relationships involving salary increases should provide major insights into the total school sup port mechanism. A second purpose was to compare the salary changes of school district superintend ents with those of secondary school principals and with those of the base of beginning, bachelor de gree teachers. Some segments of the education profession appear to believe the administrators have not been treated equally when it comes to salary increases; others seem to believe it has been the teachers who have been slighted on salary increases when compared with administrators. The problem of this study was concerned with analysis of Iowa salary changes for school district superintendents, secondary school principals and changes in base salary for bachelor degree, be ginning teachers from 1961 through 1966. The analysis focused attention on a hypothesis regard ing (1) certain selected environmental character istics of school districts, and (2) prediction of and comparison between the salary changes of the three groups, beginning, bachelor degree teachers, secondary school principals, and district superin tendents. The rationale underlying this study is expressed in the following basic assumption: Salary changes for Iowa school superintendents, secondary school principals and the base for be ginning, bachelor degree teachers are each de pendent upon a combination of economic, geo graphic, demographic, psychological and political factors unique to each school district. This assumption generated the following work ing hypothesis which was tested. No combination of school district factors? economic, geographic, demographic, psychological and political?can be used to predict salary change for district superintendents, secondary school principals, and base salary for beginning, bachelor degree teachers. This hypothesis necessitated the selection of school district variables in each of the factor areas. Ten economic factor variables selected were :