If Colorado’s teachers unions are so powerful, how come teachers here are the worst paid in the 50 states (relative to other occupations, which is the best adjustment for cost-of-living, local labor markets, etc.)?

(Note: These data are from Ed Week’s 2010 Quality Counts – and unlikely any Colorado interest group, Ed Week has absolutely no stake in where Colorado ranks.)

Since Colorado teachers are the worst paid, when the economy and budgets recover, couldn’t there be a deal of more money for more accountability – more meaningful tenure earning, meaningful “4 point” evaluations rather than “satisfactory” for nearly all, no forced placements, being able to fire poor teachers, etc.?

In another sign that antiquated and harmful education practices once thought sacrosanct are starting to fall, Denver’s “Dance of the Lemons” — the process by which the teachers no principal will hire are forcibly placed into a classroom somewhere in the public school system — may finally change.

Last year, the Denver Post noted:

Nearly three-quarters of unassigned veteran Denver Public Schools teachers who have not found jobs are forcibly placed into schools with the poorest students… Under union and district rules, these direct placements are made without regard to the desires of the teachers, school principals or parents.

On Friday, DPS superintendent Boasberg announced his intention that the District’s lowest performing schools — almost all with high poverty student demographics — become exempt from receiving any of these teachers.

A new study out today from UCLA’s Civil Rights Project finds that charter schools across the nation “continue to stratify students by race, class, and possibly language, and are more racially isolated than traditional public schools in virtually every state and large metropolitan area in the country.”

This study will have the anti-charter camp cackling with glee, and it raises some legitimate areas of concern. But I think it misses the boat in some key respects.

First, a little background. I know CRP co-director Gary Orfield, and respect him a great deal. In fact, when I worked at The Piton Foundation, I hired the Civil Rights Project — then housed at Harvard — to conduct a study of the resegregation of Denver Public Schools after busing. Part I is here, and Part II here.

While the group did excellent research, I found the partnership frustrating in one regard. As regular readers of this blog know, I am an ardent believer in socio-economic school integration. I believe socio-economic integration is a more valid frame for school equity than is racial integration. But despite repeated effort to get CRP researchers to focus on socio-economic integration, the study still ended up heavily weighted toward racial integration. This as caused in part by the nature of available data, but it also reflected Professor Orfield’s abiding commitment to racial integration.

My district is facing huge budget cuts for next year. $24 million in cuts to be exact. Since our district is like most, where more than 70% of the budget goes to personnel, we are talking lots of jobs here.

Tough decisions will be made in the next few months. Decisions about which teachers will lose their jobs are based on our Master Agreement. Usually, non-tenured teachers are the first to go. Then, if you have all tenured teachers, you go to a special appendix in the agreement.

Here there are various formulas that you apply to teachers after which you assign points for each tenured teacher; low points=lost job. Points are given for years of service; you receive points for your level of education; and more points are awarded for extra-curricular activities that a teacher may sponsor, like hip-hop club. What would you award points for?

Does it matter? We are going to cut support personnel from the classroom. We will increase class size. Increase the duties that teachers will have to perform as in hall duty and so on. All of this will require the best teachers possible in the classroom. Yet, we won’t make our decisions as to who these teachers are based on their ability to handle the increased work-load. We will use longevity and levels of education to decide which teachers stay.

Perhaps our dire economic and budget situation will force to rethink how we assess teachers.

I just hope Joe Klein never gets ticked off at me.

“When school children start paying union dues, that ’s when I’ll
start representing the interests of school children.” – Al Shanker

When it comes to money and public education, I am of two minds. On the one hand, I do not believe that pouring more money into dysfunctional systems will by itself solve the underlying problems that plague education.

Some members of interest groups were ready to string me up last year when I used inartful language to suggest that federal stimulus money could be wasted if it was used only to prop up broken institutions.

On the other hand, I found a story by Mike Booth in Sunday’s Denver Post about crushing budget woes in Colorado Springs to be shocking and disturbing. Although the story dealt with city government rather than the school district, it gave me a canary-in-a-coal-mine feeling. In case you missed it:

More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday.

The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.

The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.

Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two weeks. If that.

Water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead, brown turf by July; the flower and fertilizer budget is zero.

The issues reported in the Denver Post this weekend related to drug licenses at the University of Colorado’s Dental School as well as Mark Sass’ recent blog, remind me of how little we compare teaching to other professions or occupations. I have studied state-level regulation of several industries, and occupational regulation is one of the most fascinating areas. (See this link for my favorite review of my regulation book).

Occupational regulation is often cited as an extreme example of the “Chicago School” idea that public policy benefits mainly private actors. Professions often either “capture” the state legislative process, getting essentially self-regulation or easy regulation that makes it hard for competitors to enter their domain, or they tend to dominate the regulatory boards or agencies that are supposed to oversee their ongoing occupational practice. (The political logic here is simple – the large numbers of consumers each have very low stakes in how hair stylists, for example, are regulated, while those hair sylists care a great deal and thus organize to influence the political or regulatory process). Some 800 occupations are regulated by at least one of the United States today.

(On a local note, Colorado’s Department of Regulatory Affairs, until recently headed by Rico Munn, has a long history of being one of the better state agencies in the country for regulating professions).

One result of occupational regulation is that very few professionals lose their licenses, or face other disciplinary actions, via oversight boards, often because these boards are dominated by members of that same profession. For example, less than 1% of MDs and other health care professionals typically face disciplinary actions, compared to much higher rates of malpractice allegations (these lawsuit allegations could be over-inflated, of course, but it is hard to believe that only 1% of professionals are creating problems). Either these professionals see it in their self interest to protect each other or they are truly serving the public interest quite well.

The education reform community finally has an award winning documentary with a powerful message. “Waiting for Superman” won the Audience Choice Award last week at the Sundance Film Festival. It will be fascinating to see how it plays with the same audience that loved Davis Guggenheim’s last doc, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

I wonder if liberals will heap praise for it given the content and whether conservatives will embrace it given its bona fide liberal director.

I can’t wait to see it.

One of my purposes for writing this blog has been to encourage or provoke educators to view their profession differently. As we struggle to reform our K-12 system, teachers have been comfortable dealing with new challenges through their traditional reactionary approach. It is the “yeah, but” syndrome. “Yeah, you could use student achievement to evaluate my performance, but teachers can only control what goes on in their classroom.” “Yeah, we should use standards based grades, but how is the community going to react?”

I’ve written in the past about how the community at large tends to see teaching as a “calling” versus a profession. I think the community will view teachers differently as soon as teachers view themselves differently. I have run across a passage in a book which I think articulates this concern quite well. The book is called Instructional Rounds in Education by City, Elmore, Fiarman, and Teitel.