Index salary schedule - American Education

A list of ratios relating the salaries of school teaching and nonteaching personnel to an arbitrarily selected unit figure of 1.00 for one member of the staff. The selected unit for teaching personnel might, for example, be a beginning teacher’s salary or that of a teacher with 10 years’ tenure. Regardless of the salary unit selected and represented as 1.00, every other salary may be listed as a fraction or multiple of that figure, thus standardizing the salaries paid to all school personnel. If, for example, the beginning teacher’s salary was the designated unit of 1.00 at a particular school, the index salary schedule might list the salary of a teacher’s aide as .50, a teacher with 10 years’ tenure as 1.50, a department chairperson’s salary as 1.70 and the assistant principal as 2.00.
The salary index schedule was developed in the 1960s and 1970s to try to simplify salary negotiations with increasingly militant unions. By agreeing on a salary index schedule first, negotiators could concentrate their remaining efforts on establishing a specific dollar figure as the appropriate base unit. The constantly shifting and often expanding nature of each job classification in recent years has left various school staffers such as teacher aides and assistant principals unwilling to accept the arbitrary limitations to pay increases established by indexes devised years earlier, when their duties were less demanding.