Building Pay Equity Into the Structure, Not Bolting It On

Most organizations treat pay equity as a check on top of an existing system. Do the audit, find the gaps, patch the worst ones, move on. It's better than doing nothing, but it usually leaves the underlying structure exactly as unequal as it was, just with a few individual corrections layered over it.

A charter school network we worked with took a different approach. (This post is drawn from our compensation redesign with BRICK Education Network.) Starting in 2019, they set out to build a pay structure that was competitive and equitable from the formula up, not as two separate projects, but as one.

Competitive and equitable are usually treated as a tradeoff. They aren't one.

The instinct in a lot of organizations is to pick a lane: either you're trying to pay above market to win talent, or you're trying to close equity gaps, and you pursue whichever one the board or a funder is currently asking about. BRICK's target was both at once: pay in the top 25% of comparable roles regionally and nationally, while dismantling structural disparities tied to race and gender in the same pass.

That's a harder brief than either goal alone. It's also the more honest one, because a highly competitive pay structure that still has embedded disparities isn't actually competitive for everyone it needs to be. It's competitive for whoever the old structure already favored.

The fix wasn't a policy. It was a formula.

Here's the part that actually holds up over time: instead of a compensation philosophy that lives in a policy document, the new structure runs on four explicit factors that combine into every person's pay. Role and title requirements. Years of experience. Longevity. Performance. Growth opportunities, like taking on a teacher leadership role, get their own separate stipend rather than getting folded invisibly into base pay.

The reason this matters for equity specifically: when the inputs to pay are explicit and the same for everyone, it becomes much harder for informal, inconsistent factors, the ones that tend to disadvantage the same people over and over, to quietly drive the outcome instead. A four-factor formula isn't just a compensation decision. It's a bias-reduction mechanism, whether or not anyone calls it that.

Staff weren't told the answer. They were part of building it.

The research behind this wasn't limited to market benchmarking. It included a network-wide staff survey asking how teachers, school leaders, and network staff actually prioritize base salary, bonuses, and stipends, not how leadership assumed they would. That input, plus market and EdFuel network-comparison data and cost-of-living figures, became the raw material for the model.

Then, before finalizing anything, the draft model went back to staff. School-based staff saw the findings first and worked through them in focus groups before the revised model launched for their group. Network staff went through the same process afterward, using updated comparisons specific to their roles.

This sequencing is easy to skip when you're in a hurry, and it's exactly the part that determines whether people trust the number they end up with. A pay structure staff had no hand in will always feel like something that happened to them, even if the math is defensible.

Equity work that expires is just a delayed version of the old problem

The structure includes an annual cost-of-living adjustment and a full market-and-equity refresh every three to four years, built in from the start rather than left for someone to remember later. Without that, even a well-built equitable structure quietly drifts back out of alignment as the market moves and the org chart changes underneath it.

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