How Pay Actually Influences Teachers

When Doug Larkin and Suzanne Poole Patzelt set out to study the relationship between teacher pay and retention, what they found surprised them.

“Without fail, no matter what school we went to, what state we were in, that was always the number one response,” Poole Patzelt says. “We did nothing to put that at the top. That was far and beyond the number one reason why teachers stayed was because of who they were working with.”

She adds, “We are relational organisms. We rely on relationships and other people.” 

Pay, Larkin explains, mattered but differently than we often assume. Teachers generally felt their compensation was adequate. What didn’t hold up was the idea that increasing pay would directly increase effort or retention. “It doesn’t fit that behavioral logic,” he says. “If we pay teachers 10% more, they’re going to work 10% harder. That’s not what was happening here at all.” Instead, what consistently surfaced were collegial cultures where teachers felt supported rather than scrutinized.

In their new book, The Reasons Teachers Stay, they draw on a six-year longitudinal study of US schools, districts, and communities with high rates of teacher retention. In the districts they studied — spanning rural, suburban, and urban communities — a defining feature was a “real lack of teacher isolation.” Teachers shared resources. They kept doors open. Administrators fostered trust. Poole Patzelt notes that many of the top retention factors were intertwined: supportive leadership strengthened teacher relationships, and those relationships reinforced a broader culture of care.

Each district operated within its own cultural and political context. Still, the strongest schools resembled what Larkin calls a “healthy ecosystem for teachers,” where induction went beyond onboarding and new teachers were not left in “sink or swim” environments.

To make sense of these dynamics, Larkin introduces the “teacher embeddedness” framework, a way of understanding retention not as a single decision, but as the accumulation of many small connections. He shares a metaphor from elementary schools where principals are duct-taped to a wall as part of a reading challenge. One strip of tape does nothing. But layer enough pieces together, and they hold someone in place. “Each little thing you can identify,” he explains, “is another piece of tape that holds that teacher in place.”

In this episode, they introduce the “teacher embeddedness” framework and gain better insight in why understanding what keeps teachers in the job might be the biggest shift a district can make.