2013 Salaries in General Education: Cross-Regional Analysis, Trends and Outlooks

Abstract

Data obtained in the Electronic Monitoring of Education Development has been used to analyze the teacher salary trends that had evolved by 2013 and to compare teacher pay to the average regional pay levels. The 2013 data reveals that the regions find it ever harder to increase teacher pay to conform to the average economy-wide salary rate, as required by various decrees. In particular, this is confirmed through the size of year-end  premiums, which often turn out to be rather high. Month-to-month monitoring of this parameter provokes tensions in the work of governing bodies at different levels and encourages “manual management” used to achieve the desired result. Such practice conflicts with the standard planning and budgeting procedure. Budget expenditure indexes are used to compare salary levels across the subjects of the Russian Federation. When comparing the pay levels in different regions, monitoring of budget expenditure indexes allows for a deeper insight into the status of teachers and complements the parameter “deviation of teacher pay from the average pay level in the subject of the Russian Federation”. The author also discusses specifics of regional policies on incentive payments as an instrument of influencing the education quality, analyzes changes to teacher workload as an indicator of labor intensity, and gives an assessment of how regional budgets and the pursued national transfer payment policy affect the prospects of teacher pay rise in different groups of regions. All in all, analysis of the data obtained in the Electronic Monitoring of Education Quality has proved the teacher pay pattern to be extremely irregular. Regional differences depend little on the selected remuneration model, while financial constraints become an ever more dominant factor.