Fair Pay & Benefits

Professional Pay

LAE advocates for improved salaries for all educators—K-12 teachers, higher education faculty, education support professionals, and specialized instructional support personnel—to reflect a simple fact: they deserve it.

Educators have long had increasing day-to-day demands and responsibilities, from bus duty to coaching, counseling to leading additional classes, and buying basic supplies for their classes. Yet they are not paid for their expertise, expenses, and time. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that teachers earn 19 percent less than comparable professionals, while the Learning Policy Institute reports that the wage gaps widens to 30 percent by mid-career.

Inadequate educator pay comes at a high cost for schools and children, who must deal with the ramifications of high turnover and teacher shortages. Our students in high-poverty schools see the greatest turnover.

Now is the time to join us in helping our affiliates and members fight for the compensation they deserve.

Health Benefits & Policy

LAE works closely with NEA’s Collective Bargaining and Member Advocacy Department (CBMA) o secure quality, affordable, comprehensive health coverage. We offer expertise to affiliates working in both bargaining and non-bargaining contexts. 

How We Can Help

It takes time and experience to evaluate health care options with different premiums, copays, and deductibles. And it takes time and expertise to analyze health care laws and policies that affect when and how you’re covered. That’s why, among other work, we’re here to:

• provide tactical and strategic advice on health benefits and health policy issues 
• assist in the development of, or response to, bargaining proposals and initiatives in labor-management health care committees 
• help with interpreting and demystifying complex health care laws and regulations 
• support affiliate-related health benefit trusts. 

We work closely with NEA’s national governmental affairs, legal, and other teams to support you as you make important health care choices.

Health Insurance Selection Tips for New Educators

If you’re starting a new job in the education field, chances are you’ll need to make decisions regarding your new employer’s health insurance. The “New Educators’ Health Insurance Selection Tips” in the downloads section below walks you through key decision points, provides plain-language explanations, and gives you space to make notes comparing insurance options.

Making Sense of Health Insurance

Making sense of health insurance is important, whether you’re using the plan you have, working with your employer to restructure a plan, or looking for a new plan. A good way to start is by breaking the issue into three parts: 

1. the financial features that establish your financial exposure 
2. the networks and other structural components that frame how you access care
3. common tax-advantaged accounts that help you cover your health care costs.

Pensions & Retirement Security

NEA is dedicated to protecting defined-benefit pension plans because these plans provide a predictable, guaranteed benefit. NEA’s Collective Bargaining and Member Advocacy department (CBMA) helps members defend their retirement security and advocates for these retirement programs.

Working with our state affiliates and numerous allies, we help organize the resistance to coordinated and well-funded attacks on educators’ retirement security. CBMA also provides support, resources, and consultation to members who serve as pension fund trustees in nearly every state.

When people were hired, money was taken out of their paycheck for their retirement, but the state didn't meet their responsibility. That's an injustice. –Pat Provnick, Retired Educator

Why Pensions Matter

Schools and students succeed when talented young people in search of a challenging career are recruited into the profession, and stay in it for the long term. Pensions help do that.

#1: Pensions provide excellent retirement security.

A traditional pension plan provides retired workers with a steady income stream that is guaranteed for life — unlike 401k plans, which offer no guaranteed benefits and are leaving far too many Americans facing a retirement crisis.

#2: Pensions are good for kids and schools.

A UC Berkeley Labor Center study of public schools in California found that “A large majority of teachers who survive the first few years of teaching, stay until at least early retirement age.” Keeping experienced educators in the classroom improves instruction and creates stable environments for kids. Since pensions help retain workers, they make perfect sense for public education.

#3: Teachers prefer pensions!

Some states provide educators a choice between pensions and 401k-style programs. Once they read over the details, educators choose pensions.

#4: America’s 401K experiment is failing.

Poor returns, high fees to Wall Street, and participants cashing out their funds prematurely — the list of problems with 401Ks goes on, and on. It is tremendously difficult just to know what your proper savings target should be and what level of savings will get you there. 

Pensions measure progress toward funding goals and make adjustments each year in a systematic way, but 401k’s have no such planning mechanism. Simple questions like, “How much annual income could I have with $500,000, what would it be worth in tomorrow’s dollars, and will I run out of money?” become very difficult barriers to sound planning. 

All these problems led directly to our retirement crisis, in which the median 55-to-64 year-old has only put aside about $14,500 for retirement.

Knowing all of this, claims that teachers would be better served in 401k’s are simply not credible.

Job & Career Security

Privatization is a threat to public education. Educators must be aware of privatization and take measures to prevent its dangerous impact on school communities.

The Perils of Privatization

In our nation's history, public services like education were considered so essential to the functioning of society that they could not be left to the whims of the market or the opportunities of profiteers. When public school employees, especially education support professionals (ESPs) are “privatized” or “outsourced,” this means that a private contractor is taking over their services. The employees are no longer public employees working for the school district—they are employees of an individual or company with a contract to provide services for the district.

Why does privatization cause problems for ESPs and schools?

1. When ESP jobs are privatized, the primary goal becomes making a profit versus delivering a quality service.
2. Private contractors may or may not use former district employees to provide the service.
3. Whatever contracts, agreements, understandings, or board policies that existed between the district and their employees no longer exists between the new private contractor and his/her employees.
4. ESPs won’t have the advocacy of the Association under the new employer.
5. Privatizers don't underprice at-cost public employees simply by being “efficient” or having “superior management techniques.” Privatizers function by significantly reducing employee compensation, usually through the elimination or reduction of benefits such as pension, health care, and paid time off.
6. Because of their employment practices in the pursuit of profit, privatizers have high turnover of staff. Most of the time these are people looking for a job, not a career. And the privatizer is typically not concerned about who might be well suited to work around children.

What is lost in privatization?

• Caring adults who come from the community, and who overwhelmingly want to stay in their careers are not part of the business model
• Quality services focused on keeping students safe, healthy, supported, engaged, and challenged, are replaced by tasks carried out as quickly as possible by individuals compensated as little as possible, all to make a profit for the employer.
• Flexible services that come with the personal relationships between ESP and administrators and other staff are more uncommon.

How can local associations can take preventative measures against privatization?

• Get involved in school board politics. As public employees, we have a unique privilege to elect our bosses. We can: screen candidates for endorsement in school board races, ensure they are aware of the impact of privatization, and elect those who won’t outsource the jobs of public school employees.
• Build relationships with education decision makers such as the school board and superintendent, and with stakeholders such as parents. A simple way to begin building these relationships is by attending monthly school board meetings.
• Demand high-quality professional development, preferably under the guidance of the ESP Professional Growth Continuum. ESPs who acquire skills that make them valuable members of the education team are more difficult to replace. 

Need assistance?

NEA provides ongoing support for local and state affiliates facing privatization, including preventative measures and crisis campaigns. Contact Tim Barchak of NEA's ESP Quality Department for more information.

Navigating Tenure for Higher Ed Faculty & Staff

Tenure inspires innovation and protects academic freedom, and NEA and its affiliates are working hard to defend and expand it.

Why Tenure Matters

Let’s say a faculty member wants her students to explore the efficacy of gun-control laws in a state where the governor wants to repeal an assault-weapon ban. The governor’s appointees of the state board of higher education hear about this classroom exercise and say to the college president — we’re not entertaining anti-gun opinions in university classrooms. Tell that professor to stop, or fire her. Or, let’s say a faculty member is developing alternatives to a popular cancer drug in her research lab. The corporation that owns that drug is a big donor to state political campaigns, and doesn’t want new competition. Word gets back to college administration: shut down the lab.

Tenure is about providing vital protections for academic freedom. Without it, faculty could be dismissed for teaching unpopular political opinions, or exploring research costly to big corporations. The common good, which is at the heart of higher education, would be undermined.

This is why NEA defends tenure and works with its local bargaining units to include tenure protections in faculty contracts and to convert part-time or contingent positions to tenured ones.

NEA’s Position Statement on Tenure

The NEA statement on tenure “affirms that academic and intellectual freedom in institutions of higher education are best protected and promoted by tenure, academic due process, and faculty self-governance. Such protection is enhanced by including—where possible—these items in a collectively bargained contract enforced by binding arbitration.”

Increasingly, institutions are excessively using part-time faculty, misusing temporary or “rolling” contracts, extending probationary periods, and establishing tenure quotas. These anti-tenure practices are dangerous to academic freedom.

Intellectual and Academic Freedom

According to the 1940 "Statement on Principles of Academic Freedom and Tenure," which NEA first endorsed in 1950 and again in 1985:

Institutions of higher education are conducted for the common good and not to further the interest of either the individual teacher or the institution as a whole. 

The common good depends on the free search for truth and its free exposition. Academic freedom applies to teaching and research. While freedom in research is fundamental to the advancement of truth, academic freedom in the classroom protects the rights of teachers to teach and of students to freely learn.

Academic freedom also includes the rights of scholars:

• to publish the results of their research;
• to retain the rights to their intellectual property;
• to participate in institutional governance; to advance in their profession without fear of discrimination;
• and, when necessary, to criticize administrators, trustees, and other public officials without recrimination.

Faculty and staff also have the right to assist colleagues whose rights have been violated.

Tenure Process

Tenure may be defined as the expectation of continuing and/or permanent appointment in an institution, granted to a faculty member after a probationary period and extensive, objective peer and institutional review of their teaching, research, and service, according to criteria adopted by faculty at that institution.

During the probationary period, generally not to exceed seven years, untenured faculty should enjoy the same academic freedom as their tenured colleagues and be made aware of the criteria for promotion and tenure. In this system, any attempt to legislate tenure criteria for an entire state would be inappropriate.

The courts generally recognize tenure as a right of property that, under the Fourteenth Amendment, cannot be alienated from a faculty member except by academic due process and for just cause. Academic due process usually is established by faculty by-laws, constitutions, and collective bargaining contracts, and typically looks like legal proceedings. In such, the burden is on administration to prove beyond reasonable doubt that a tenured faculty member should be dismissed or suffer sanction.

Temporary, non-tenure, and part-time positions

More and more, U.S. institutions are hiring part-time faculty members, or those on temporary or rolling contracts, to save money and weaken the voice of faculty on campuses. These contingent faculty often earn poverty-level wages, forcing them to cobble together gigs at various institutions to make a living wage. This means they’re often on campus to teach only, and unable to participate in the mentoring and advising that underlay student learning.

Typically, they also lack job security or access to grievance procedures, which means they’re less likely to engage in controversial but important classroom conversations. It would be potentially dangerous to their livelihoods to stand up and say such critical things as, this university is dangerous to students who have mental-health needs.

As a result, the popular trend to academic contingency is harming faculty’s academic freedom and its ability to share governance.

Tenure Quotas

Tenure quotas — arbitrary limits on the percentage of tenured faculty — have a negative effect on the academic environment of an institution. Decisions on tenure should not be motivated primarily by a desire for budgetary "flexibility."

Academic excellence

Faculty development plans should be developed and implemented with faculty involvement. In order to provide students with a quality education experience, faculty have a responsibility to remain current in their fields to provide students. Tenure does not and should not interfere with faculty continuously working to better themselves.

Educators Employment Liability Program

The Educators Employment Liability (EEL) program is a professional liability insurance program which NEA provides as a benefit of membership. The program is totally dues-funded; members pay no separate fee. It is designed to protect association members—whether classroom teachers or support professionals—from personal financial liability for most incidents arising out of their educational employment activities or duties.

The EEL Program provides insurance coverage for a variety of situations which result in injury to someone other than members. For example:

• Student injuries
• Charges of educational malpractice
• Corporal punishment

The EEL Program is administered through your NEA state affiliate association. Liability and insurance laws vary in each state. If you want more information on the specific provisions of EEL coverage in your state, contact your local UniServ representative or state affiliate association.

Find more about the benefits and advantages of the EEL program.

Student Debt Support

From pre-K to Ph.D., our right to learn, grow, and thrive should be based on how big we dream and how hard we work.  But the astronomical cost of higher education—even public higher education—forces many students to either forego their education or be trapped in a lifetime of debt. No matter who we are or how big our bank accounts, we should be able to learn without limits. 

Get the Facts

For too long, some policymakers have weakened programs designed to help all Americans achieve a higher education, and enabled profiteers, including federal student loan servicers, to profit off the backs of students and educators. Generations of barriers also have denied Black, brown, and Indigenous communities a fair shot at resources that would make the college dream a reality. 

Find student debt resources at NEA.org.