The Un-COLA*

* with apologies to 7-Up, and whoever owns the relevant intellectual property.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about teacher compensation and cost of living adjustments (COLAs). I’d like to clarify a few misconceptions.

When most people here the term “cost of living adjustment” they immediately think of labor contracts containing escalator clauses which automatically adjust wages for inflation. That’s the context where COLA first made its appearance.

But in California education funding, the COLA is something different. It’s not necessarily embedded in labor agreements (it isn’t for the District), and it doesn’t just cover wages and salaries. It covers many, but not all, of the budget items funded by the State (for the current school year it covered about 83% of the District’s budget). It also has to pay for increases in ancillary programs, like the District’s literacy support efforts.

As you might imagine, this makes budgeting for the District even more difficult than it would otherwise be. Ever since I’ve been on the Board it’s been a struggle to provide the level of service expected by the community with the resources we have. Through it all, though, we’ve tried to do the best we can for teachers. I think the following chart shows this pretty clearly (click the picture a larger version):

As you can see, for 15 years the District has, on a cumulative basis, increased teacher salaries more than either the State-provided COLA or the local cost of living index. By the way, this does not include increases teachers get from seniority or investing in additional training. It’s just looking at how the salary schedule has improved over time.

Does this mean teachers are well-compensated? In my opinion, no. But that problem is bigger than just our District. What it does mean is that the District does what it can, when it can. It’s not always able to do what teachers want, but over the long haul I think it’s done a fair job with the monies available to it.

Some notes on the graph:

The COLA line is the State funded COLA, not the “announced” COLA. In an interesting attempt at a sleight-of-hand, the State often announces a COLA factor…and then “deficits” it to take back what they’ve just announced they’re giving. The COLA I used is what the District actually got, not what was announced.

The Bay Area inflation index, like any average, doesn’t necessarily reflect the cost increases faced by individuals.

Astute readers (and all of my readers are astute, thank you very much) will ask “How can the District consistently give pay increases larger than the increases in its funding?” The answer, I think, is two-fold.

• Attendance rose a lot over this time period. Since the State pays us mostly on a per-student basis, the more students we have, the more money we have, even after deducting for the cost of operating more classrooms. But that can’t go on forever, and, in fact, we are going to have to cap enrollment growth because we’re running out of space.
• As teachers retire, the District generally hires younger teachers at a lower pay level. This allows higher increases to be offered in the short run, although this factor, too, eventually goes away as the average experience level of the teachers increases.