I’ve had some informal discussions with some of my teacher colleagues on Senator Mike Johnston’s draft bill titled “Principal and Teacher Effectiveness.” The section that brings up the most concern among teachers has to do with a teacher’s evaluation being based on 50% of their student’s growth over a year. Their concern is captured in an Education Week article “Tying Teacher Evaluation to Student Achievement.”
Factors other than an individual teacher’s efforts affect student performance in any given year. These include the efforts of other teachers involved with a student, the extent of support the student receives outside of school in completing homework and learning the material (tutoring, parental help, and the like), and other family and societal factors that might influence student achievement.
Is it “fair” to judge the effectiveness of a teacher based on factors outside of their control? A specific example is student attendance. If I teach in a class where 30% of the students attend on an irregular basis, should I be evaluated on their growth? How do we take factors beyond a teacher’s control, skipping, for the moment, just what is and is not in a teacher’s control, into consideration if we are to use student performance in teacher evaluations?
I think one of the strengths of the draft is that principals are also evaluated on the growth of students (65%) as well as being evaluated on the quality of teachers in the school building. This allows for whole-school approaches to problems that have been traditionally not addressed or left to individual teachers. By evaluating principals in this manner, I think the concern over what is in the control of a school versus an individual teacher’s control is addressed. But what about those factors outside of a school’s purview?
Popularity: 46% [?]
So, Johnston used to be a Principal…of the Mapleton Expeditionary School of the Arts. It got all kinds of mad press, including Obama to come visit. Why? Because all 44 seniors got into college. So, that is how he got elected. Fine.
Curiously, his school now has a School Accountability Report of LOW.
Curiouser still is that the good Senator wants to promote his bill tying student growth to whatever at 50% of something. Anyway, the point is in his school, from what I can tell, he didn’t get to be all famous because of this kind of program for his teachers. No, he got his numbers the old fashioned way–by furious promotion and hard work. There is no big secret to making a school or a senior class work their butts off. Jaime Esclante, if nothing else, showed what is possible if you really focus on one small area of academics and work like heck.
Sadly, over the long run and in other venues, such superhuman approaches to student success just don’t seem to translate. So I find it curious that Johnston is pushing a bill that he himself never used in his own school as a prescription for the success of others. Ah, but then there is the part where the Race to the Top actually wants this kind of accountability or at least a plan for it in place in states. And I note on Johnston’s website that he turned down a job in the Obama administration just so he could continue to work for Colorado, er, Race to the Top. I bet he was surprised when for all his good work and connections, we ranked 14 out of 16.
If I am in error, I welcome rebuttal. But it seems to me Johnston is just trying to capitalize on being at the right place at the right time with a bill suited to the powers that be in Washington which have deep pockets. And come on, now–50%? Now where did he get this number from? Is 50% based on academic research? Experiential data from real schools and districts? He’s only 35 years old. I’m sorry but being a teacher and a principal by 35 and then elected to the State Senate…I think I see where this guy is headed.
It’s good to hold teachers more accountable than they are and DPS has made some headway with ProComp but come on, you have to create credible, research-based plans and create realistic benchmarks that aren’t pulled out of thin air and a thin resumé.
I have not read through all of the replies yet, but one question I have is ” How do we hold students accountable as well?” I hear students make comments such as : “I don’t feel like trying on CSAP because it doesn’t matter anway.” “I want my teacher to look bad, so I didn’t try.”
How do you account for the zeros a school receives when parent choose to not have their student take the test?
As a teacher, I am always reflecting on my own performance and effectivenss. I don’t mind be accountable for doing the best job I can with what I have to work with (resources, etc.). I do mind not asking our students to be accountable for the free public education they are receiving as well. Parents and students need to be partners with teachers in working towards achieving their potential and succeeding.
Yikes, talk about character assasination. (BTW he was not elected to office he was appointed, which I guess you would add to your ad homiein attack) A debate over the merits would be welcome.
There is not much longitudinal evidence to use since this is a new approach. Using student performance data to evalaute teachers has been, or was recently introduced in Florida, Tennessee, and just yesterday it was announced that Washington D.C. schools has put forth a proposal that includes teacher evaluations being based on student performance. So much for thin air.
Teaching is not about super human efforts. If it is we are all doomed.
Mark,
Is there any assessment of student performance to which you would be open? Or do you disagree with the principal of teachers being accountable for student performance?
There are lots of ways one could correct for SES, grade level and other factors. No system out of the gate will be perfect, but I can’t tell if your opposition is of degree or of kind.
I approve of the use of student performance in the evaluations for pincipals, as well as teachers. The current student growth model used by CDE would work. There are issues though for courses (music, social sciences for example) and grade levels (first,second, juniors and seniors) that are not assessed with CSAP. What student data could we use?
As to my original question: is it fair to use student data when some factors that impacrt a student’s performance are outside of the teacher’s control? How can we control for attendance, poverty, etc.? Would SES control for this?
Well, one way would be to create groups of schools/teachers by FRL / SES / etc and evaluate within these smaller pools (which DPS has done with schools). I agree that the teacher at a magnet school with 12% FRL should probably have different standards than a teacher at an open-admissions program with 90%FRL. And clearly there are numerous subjects that fall outside the current tools. But I think there are ways to account for many of these factors. And if we are serious about closing the achievement gap, it is exactly the high-risk SES cohort that we need to measure to see who is being effective and how we replicate that success.
I don’t know that [Alexander Ooms] used the words ‘standards’ correctly in the above post:
“I agree that the teacher at a magnet school with 12% FRL should probably have different standards than a teacher at an open-admissions program with 90%FRL.”
I hope you meant that student progress might be analyzed a little differently, but that would also create an even more divide between teachers and start targeting them against each other. It comes back to PROGRESS. Students at ALL ability levels should be showing progress. For example, a student might be deemed “not proficient” when the come to me and when the leave at the end of the year. With this label, yes, it sounds bad for student and teacher. But if you look at the student came to me a year behind and that student was able to make a gain equal to a year-and-a-half while they were with me, then that student made a HUGE amount of growth packed into one year. The next year they would need to make an additional year-and-a-half growth to be completely caught up by year end and be on target grade-level. That is what the longitudinal model at the CDE is supposed to be measuring.
Successful process can not always be “replicated”. It is all about timing, opportunity with the child, and the environment in which the teacher and student work together to make this happen. The question should be how do we match all of that up in a case-by-case situation? What works for one group most often does not work for another.
in reference to the below:
- I meant that teachers in the two cases should probably be measured differently (or against different standards). I don’t think that is hard at all, and I don’t think teachers would be positioned against each other any more than doctors who work with different demographic populations.
- I agree that students at all ability levels should show progress, and that a simple binary divide between proficiency and NP is not sufficient to measure this progress.
- I don’t know why you have a problem with the word “replication.” Good teachers have methods, curricula, best practices, and a whole range of tactics that can be shared. Are you arguing that teaching is only innate? One of the primary reasons to measure teacher effectiveness is precisely to see which teachers have students making the most academic progress, and try to learn from them. If you can’t tell if any one group (classroom) is “working” better than any other, how are you going to make any progress at all?
It is hard to improve things you cannot measure. If we are serious about improving academic growth for students, we need to measure that growth. The single biggest impact on student learning is teacher quality. If we want to improve student learning, we have to measure teacher quality.
The ProComp system in DPS has both enrollment and attendance thresholds below which a student’s test scores will not count toward the “Exceeds CSAP Expectations” award. This can cut both ways. I’ve met students who generate Advanced test results who have become so bored with school that they don’t bother to show up much of the time. I have also met kids who show up everyday in order to demonstrate their highly refined not-learning skills.
It is important to note that this element of ProComp is only available to about 1/3 of the teachers in the district (4th through 10th grade teachers of math and language arts – 3rd grade can’t get it because growth measures require baseline data and they’re it).
In the context of the conversation about fairness, utility, good practice, etc., I will say that from a practical standpoint these questions seem almost irrelevant to me because the data systems required to actually make the connections from kids to teachers via large scale, state level test data either do not exist at the district level or the process turns out to be so convoluted and prone to error that it requires more than the available resources to do a proper job in a timely fashion.
Conceptually I can imagine how a system like MAPS might be used to do a better job than what we’re doing with CSAP but then I’m one of the people who conceptually imagined using CSAP in the first place. Imagining it and making it happen usefully are very different things. And making it happen when we have about $0 to pay for it … well, I just don’t see it.
This problem is hard in the sense that a mathematician would use the word – as in, we’re pretty sure it has a solution but we don’t really know how to get there (again, knowing the equations and making computers correctly and reliably apply them to real data are two different things). If someone reading this has the solution, please demonstrate it. I personally spent 6 years of my professional life working on this and related problems and I have to wonder if there isn’t a more efficient and cost effective way to ground a new accountability system. That’s what market oriented reform is all about, quality with efficiency and cost effectiveness, right?
Given that a test score is just a proxy for actual learning (and one that we like since we get numeric results that we can feed into our hyper-complex statistical models), it seems to me that all the brain power we’ve got hanging around this blog could be put to good use thinking up better proxies instead of more complicated ways of getting around the flaws with the ones we’ve got.
And we might also consider the possibility that a focus on individual behavior will not ultimately solve system level problems such as quality of outcome.
I am all for the assessment of students and tying in performance pay, IF there is at much at stake for the students as there is for the teacher. The saying goes….you can lead a horse to water. Most of the arguments for teacher evaluation leave out any mechanism to get an accurate assessment of students. Those who believe it is CSAP, are deluded. I have watched students fly through the test without a care about how they perform. There are parents who keep their kids at home for the assessments, which also counts against the schools performance score, and I would assume the teacher if such an exam structure is kept.
This bill has merit in that it addresses both teachers and administrators. What is missing is the third member of the team, students. Institute a regents type exam or some other assessment that has real meaning for students.
Actually, he was NOT appointed. He won a vacancy committee election. I was there.
Hey Mark, my attack wasn’t ‘entirely’ ad hominem. I think it is reasonable to ask questions and if I dress them up with too much snark well, sorry. You know, I’m just tired of politicians trying to fix the system and take political advantage of children. I’m tired of it. And really, Johnston pulled 50% from somewhere, his former school is not doing so well, he seems to take credit for Mapleton and seems to use that clout to force other educators to make changes he himself cannot professionally lay claim to, and the one place I should be able to go to get his side of the story and some rationale for his legislation–his website–has nothing. Call me frustrated.
And even if we could develop the kind of system Jeff would like to see, it would take years of trials to tweak the complex system. And then still more years to get reliable results and begin to make sense of all that data. Politicians don’t think in terms of a dozen years or more. They and apparently much of a hoodwinked public expect results next year. Ultimately, politicians and policy makers rule what happens in education with unions sometimes going along and sometimes not but uniona do not make policy or fund the schools.
Even if we did find Jeff’s proxy, what would we get from it? What do we really want from educating our children? No, I don’t mean high scores or meeting the high bar of the math standards for 4th grade. What do we ‘really’ want of education, from teachers, for our children? And let’s even say we find the most holy grail of education…what would it look like? And doesn’t it get into kind of iffy moral and ethical territory when we say that we can almost totally control the education of a human being?
Just making teacher pay or preservation of a job contingent on test scores will only go so far and we are left with what goals are the prodded teachers supposed to reach for? Perhaps it would be wiser to spend some time getting people acquainted with the concept of ambiguity in human existence than trying to find some magic metric.
Hi Mark,
Thank you for your incisive piece. You ask some good questions, and it’s essential that policymakers (and educators) are clear about the proposals in the Johnston legislation. First, it’s important to note that while the Johnston bill does stipulate that 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation will be based on “teacher effectiveness,” the bill does not explicitly define the term. Instead, the bill allows the Governor’s Council on Educator Effectiveness (four of whom are required to be teachers) to promulgate the metrics that will measure teacher effectiveness and academic growth. A number of ideas have been bandied about (CSAP, peer-reviewed portfolios, CDE’s student growth model, etc.), but note that the bill allows master teachers to craft the metric instead of slavishly tethering teacher evaluations to test scores.
Second, without speculating as to how the Council will define teacher effectiveness, it could be broadly stated that there is nothing inherently unfair about gauging teachers against some external factors. To be sure, there will be some factors (attendance, for one) that can be completely beyond the control of teachers. Still, teacher’s can’t (and shouldn’t) expect to be sheltered from all “family and societal” factors; given that the ultimate aim is to close the achievement gap for underprivileged students, a measurement that excludes students with broken families or fewer resources is no measurement at all. Again, the Council will ultimately shape the measurements, but can we agree it’s not inherently unfair to judge teachers against some external factors?
As for JJ’s curious critiques, it might be a good time to clear the air about Johnston’s record:
(a) A closer look at Johnston’s school actually reveals a system quite similar to the reforms he’s proposing in his legislation. Teacher evaluations at MESA were based on multiple measures of student academic growth (as opposed to the binary “Satisfactory-Unsatisfactory” evaluations that give scant notice to any sort of student performance).
(b) It’s widely recognized that Colorado fared poorly in the R2T application process in part because Democratic leadership was unwilling to make meaningful reforms in the area of teacher effectiveness. Colorado was never banking on Johnston’s “good work and connections” to win R2T money, but it certainly would have had a better shot if Gov. Ritter and others had been willing to implement his proposals. Indeed, Colorado probably placed 14th in spite of, not because of, Johnston’s work.
(c) A “thin résumé”? Really? How much do you know about Johnston? That he went to Yale undergraduate, Harvard graduate, and Yale Law? Or that he co-founded New Leaders for New Schools, a nationally recognized innovator for principal effectiveness? Maybe that he was a respected advisor for the Broad Foundation, the Obama administration, and a plethora of local nonprofits and education institutions? Perhaps that he has long had a hand in crafting policy for Colorado leaders, from Strickland to Bennet to Ritter? It’s clear you disagree with him. But, please, let’s at least be intellectually honest in our disagreements. Agree or not with Johnston’s ideas, he brings a substantial background (and résumé) to the table.
a) So, the legislation is just like MESA? And those teachers had to write their own curricula. Not bad. But Johnston’s legislation still has this terrible idea imbedded within–it seems vague and arbitrary. Politicians should not be involved in planning educational measurements as nothing good can come of it. Well, seriously, the reason is political landscapes shift and unless students are sheltered from politics, there will never be a long-term, stable, coherent educational system. Feel free to disagree, I just want to put the ideas out there.
b) And Republican leadership was where in the effort? You say teacher effectiveness was important–I disagree. That category was 10% of the total points and we were not that different from the winners.
c) I don’t care where he went to school, it doesn’t matter. But I’ll bet it does matter he attended Vail Mountain School before Yale. Is that too snarky?
NLNS is a good thing and still I see MESA is not doing so well now that he is gone. Too bad he did not leave a legacy. He works with Obama only because of his association with Schnur and his old ties to Gore. If his NLNS program catches fire, good; until then, he seems to me to be another Jaime Escalante without the scolding of kids. Johnston does work his butt off and has enormous enthusiasm and we will see how he does. Some small urban schools have always been turned around and made great successes and what he did is no big mystery. No matter what I think about his career path, he is going to be a player. I wish he could devote all his time to NLNS or MESA or being a politician rather than jumping from one thing to another; maybe he would be more effective and I would be less suspicious.
Jeffco has been studying alternative compensation models for 2 1/2 years now. we are trying to design a pilot. The complications around tying student achievement to an individual teacher are huge. The 1/3 of teachers that can be tied to CSAP is obviously not enough for a district wide system. The sugggestion to “account for SES” is pretty vague. How would that happen? How about mobility rates?
The problem with this bill is that it is not well thought out; we don’t have the data systems needed to implement it; we don’t have the capacity in the system to require principals to evaluate every teacher every year; and it is yet again another unfunded mandate on school districts.
I wonder where all the good teachers are hiding that are going to step forward to work in classrooms when all the “bad” teachers are thrown out?
I do not know Sen. Johnston, but I am tired of politiicans trying to pass a silver bullet law that creates more problems that it solves. Democrats or Republicans–they all are guilty of that.
The data points are really key here. Obviously using just one data point like CSAP is not reasonable nor is it fair to the teachers or the principals. All of us can only work with the students we have. Those with better zip codes generally speaking tend to see greater measurable success as the result of their efforts. I have seen this for myself. When I taught in another district my CSAP proficiencies were all around 90%. At the 90/90/30 school where I teach now, that is not the case.
How about the student who appears in your 4th grade classroom reading two years below grade level? This child has, on average, made only a half year’s worth of growth in reading per year. Is it reasonable to assume that this student will make a year’s worth of growth? It can happen, though not with all students. Out of my 20 students I would say only about 25% of them have good academic support at home.
Now let’s throw language into the mix. In my classroom I have 13 students for whom English is an L2. All of them read at or above grade level in Spanish, but only three of them are at or above grade level in English. Each person acquires language at a different rate, which affects growth rate.
Though I agree that something must be done to further educators impact on their students I’m not sure it could be done through success rate unless it is dumbed down to the point as to make it useless as an evaluation tool, rather like ProComp.
Then let’s look at curriculum. If a curriculum has proven itself not to work why continue with it? If we were to evaluate teachers on the growth their students make, then they should be able to use a curriculum they know works, instead of continuing to limp along with a dead horse.
There has to be careful consideration re: performance data with regard to students on IEPs and their respective case manager/teacher. Performance growth needs to be based on a student’s IEP goals if they are in special education.
Article in Denver Post this week re “teachers from 17 Denver schools who signed up to have their lessons analyzed during a two year project funded by a $878,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation”:
http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_14849181?source=rss
With this line of thinking, as a special education advocate, I am wondering if anyone is aware if DPS is using this project in sped classrooms?
This has been a great dialogue so far. Responses seem to reflect that our current system needs reform.
I think Senator Johnston’s bill challenges what Michael Fullan calls the “inertia of the status quo.” While we debate the merits of any proposal to education reform we remain mired in the morass of the present. There is no silver bullet, there never will be. Education reform is a complex endeavor.
What we can do is to commit to an idea, prepare for the inevitable implementation dip, and make changes as we go. The authors of In Search of Excellence refer to this as the “ready-fire-aim” approach. Bottom line for me is that “[o]ur whole effort is not about discussing change but about getting into it (Fullan).”
FYI a great book on how leaders can take on large-scale change is Fullan’s Motion Leadership: the Skinny on Becoming Change Savvy. It’s a quick read by an educator that has experience with bringing about large-scale change to education systems.
Evaluation teachers on their effectiveness should not be that big an issue. They are paid to teach, and the bottom line is how much their students learn.
Many professions have to navigate around outside influences beyond their control. That is not a unique characteristic of the teaching profession. Airline pilots have to deliver their passengers regardless of the weather they encounter. Police are charged to keep civil order regardless of the circumstances. As professionals, we have tools and systems at our disposal to mitigate the uncontrollabe outside influences, but those influences are never eliminated.
To suggest that is impossible to fairly judge teachers based upon the growth of their students over the course of a year is dodging the issue of professional accountability.
It may be difficult, within the current system, but it certainly is not impossible.
Instead of basing teacher evaluation on solely upon the results within their classrooms, those results should be blended with results for the entire school. Prinicipals and other school Administration should be evaluated based upon the effectiveness of their teaching teams. For this to work, teachers should become free agents within their districts and Principals should be free to hire only those teachers that they want on their teams.
Some teachers won’t get hired. Those folks should consider moving on to other careers. Some Prinicipals will hire folks that they like but that are not effective. Those schools will not perform well against others in their peer group and will be closed.
Students should be able to apply for enrollment in any school of their choosing. Not free to attend, but free to apply.
Some schools will certainly suffer under this free market approach. So what? Close them. There is nothing in our Consitution that guaranteees schools will be available within a block or two of every house in the country.
If parents are upset that schools in their neighborhood are being closed, require them to step up and get involved. No involvement? No school.
Harsh? Certainly. Effective? Most likely more effective than the insular system currently in place. Unequal outcomes? Most definitely, but only detrimental to those that want everything given to them with no accountability; hugely beneficial to those that apply themselves and the benefits would transfer to all invloved – students, teachers, principals, administration, parents, taxpayers.
Teachers, Principals and Administrators should not be exempt from evaluation based upon student progress. That is what you are paid to do.
…just thoughts from the West Side
Ah, the Darwinian approach.
it is interesting that you compare police officers to teachers. Do we blame the police for an increase in crime? How do we judge the effectiveness of the police department? If crime goes up, should we fire police officers? How many police officers were fired last year in Denver?
Education is a unique public service that will take unique approaches.
Mark,
Every profession has unique characteristics. That fact doesn’t allow most to circumvent accountability.
Police Officers are public servants that work in an environment that is often outside their control. If crime rates increased, the leaders of the local police department would most certainly be held accountable and the public would ask for their replacements. What is so outrageous about that?
Educators should also be held accountable for the results of their efforts (not for their efforts alone). To claim ‘uniqueness’, or that there are just too many variables outside the realm of control, as a defense for less-than-acceptable results is weak and baseless.
The “darwinian” approach, as you label it, is not draconian. Cut the weak players and the team improves. An improved team delivers better results. Education is a team sport.
Our children are going to function in a competitive world and need to be prepared to excel. The current system isn’t delivering results commensurate with the inputs. Small, comfortable changes to the inputs will deliver no measurable delta to the outputs.
The current systems coddles the status quo, and that is no longer good enough. Think boldly.
If we’re going to continue using “other professionals” as a yardstick to measure teachers, let’s at least be honest about them. Police, pilots, doctors, lawyers, etc. are very highly trained in a variety of settings and gradually take on more responsibility before they start working on their own. If you have a college degree, the desire and enough time to attend an intensive the summer before you start, you can teach. Given recent press, it looks like even those of us coming through university preparation programs (which I assume is still a majority) probably don’t get the training we really need to succeed in the current environment.
The conversation around tenure often feels a lot like “do better or else.” And it is; after all, that’s what accountability boils down to. Absent a conversation of equal volume and passion about the conditions and tools necessary for us to succeed, it should come as no surprise that some teachers come with skepticism and even hostility. If accountability advocates continue to characterize this as an unwillingness to change or to be held accountable, then we will never get anywhere and another generation of kids will go through a school system that is far less than they deserve.
Jeff,
Where do you think we will get if accountability advocates either pack up and go home or characterize the pockets of resistance to any measurement by student academic data in a different way. Will that drive improvement in our schools?
It’s not the “do better” that troubles me. it’s the “or else” if we don’t.
Alex,
Great question. We will not get anywhere if we only consider the two responses you have outlined, or the corresponding responses from the “other side” of the debate. I used quotes there because in reality, we’re all on the same team. That so many actively refuse to believe that and behave accordingly lies at the heart of our problem.
I learned some important things while working on teacher compensation reform and honestly, not many of them have to do with pay.
So in outline, here’s how the conversation used to go, and largely still does:
We’re going to change teacher comp
Oh no you’re not.
Oh yes we are.
Over my dead body.
Well, we’re in charge so I guess you’d better just lie down.
etc.
Sometimes we get lip service and sometimes we get authentic effort at teacher engagement but if people don’t perceive authenticity, it can end up doing more harm than good (I hope the private sector grasps the importance of perception in our interactions). Some plan gets put into place through much sturm und drang and in short order, it falls apart. Advocates of change feel bitter and opponents say I told you it would not work. Everyone points fingers at someone else to explain the drama. It never occurs to anyone that defining ourselves in opposition has anything to do with the failure.
Rinse and repeat.
Here’s a different conversation starter:
People have wondered if we can improve the way teachers get paid but lets start by looking at the single salary schedule and the important roll it has played in improving equity in education. 50 years ago you could pay a woman or minority teacher less than a white male teacher just because. The single salary schedule has provided American public schools with a powerful tool to eliminate such abuse and inequity.
We have to go on to admit that this tool does not address the equity issues facing us today. In fact, unintended consequences of the system might be making them worse. So let’s celebrate the gains we have made and commit not to back track, but let’s also look very closely at the problems we need urgently to address and think about how we could change the system to get at them.
This is not a zero sum game so a win-win solution must the objective we keep before us – students win, teachers win. Or, as they say, a rising tide lifts all boats.
The complaint I hear most often is that we have such dire need and the process I advocate takes too long. I don’t think that charge holds up very well if you consider the full extent of all the time we’ve wasted through countless cycles of centralized, autocratic or just poorly implemented reform. We’ve been trying to “fix” teacher pay for decades and no one can argue that we’ve done it yet. Maybe if we try it just one more time, but this time with feeling, it could work, right?
Each of us should strive to believe that no matter how much we might disagree with another person’s position, ideas, or behavior these things originate in a human response to valid experiences. If we really want to solve problems, we’ve got to learn how to see past reactionary symptoms and have honest and open conversations about the root cause of the worry, fear and anger permeating the exchanges that we have.
Or in more systems oriented language, we have got to move way further upstream from the problems we can observe in order to solve them.
Jeff,
I agree with much of what you say, but (of course) I’ll write about the part where I don’t. Pay discrimination was a problem across most (all?) industries 50 years ago; however I don’t know any other industries that instituted a single-salary schedule, and I would argue have progressed much better in recognizing employee value. Personally, I think a SSS depresses the salaries of really outstanding teachers, since you cannot pay them more, and quite possible depresses salaries overall (although that is probably also a function of tenure).
I think many of the problems are because the system is one of dissent and negotiation between two powerful parties — a administration which has a virtual monopoly on jobs, and a union that has a virtual monopoly on workers — produces compromises that leave most systems half-built, and most ideas unfulfilled. A bit like our two-party government — it makes opposition the easiest reaction. I would rather see each group try 2-3 different approaches and see if one or two evolve as wins for both sides. My hope is that some of the ideas being tried in the reform camp (including NYC’s equity project school) will break this duopoly.
I’ll disagree further as I don’t think the solution is more observation even more detached. We approach so many problems in education in search of the single solution that we can immediately extend across a large enterprise. In virtually every context I know, progress is made by a number of enhancements that begin on a local (often single cell) scale. I think we need to stop trying to solve this problem for every school in the district (particularly since these schools are not uniform in any other way), and allow some schools to try their own solutions.
First I should say, I didn’t really mean to change the subject to pay. I realize that I have some assumptions about the transfer of learning (from pay to tenure and evaluation) that I should have made explicit. I’m trying to put the results of the unique learning opportunities I’ve had out there into the intellectual commons (the opportunities were largely publicly funded, after all)
But since we’re talking about it … I didn’t mean to suggest that the SSS does a good job of valuing employees in general (I will state clearly that I believe it does not). My point was about wage parity. Even in education we still don’t have complete parity because it’s still far more common for women to take unpaid family leave so career earnings are, on average, lower. If your claim is that men and women, for example, get equal pay for equal work in most industries, I would need to see some data to support such a claim. I don’t think that’s what you meant and I agree with your suspicion that the SSS has probably depressed wages, at least for some teachers.
I think I pretty much agree with the points in your second paragraph. If I read you correctly, that’s what I was getting at when I said we define ourselves in opposition. I don’t believe this helps our cause at all. We really are on the same team.
I’m not clear on what you disagree with in your 3rd paragraph because past the first sentence, I agree with you completely. Evolution proceeds through differentiation (trying lots of different things) and selection. I hesitate to say survival of the fittest because in the popular imagination, this is grounded in competition as the primary relationship. My limited understanding of modern evolutionary biology suggests this is at best an incomplete view. “Fittest” means the most adaptable, not necessarily the strongest and definitely not the biggest bully.
I don’t think more observation is the answer either. What I was trying to portray is a more open-minded, respectful and inclusive approach to the interactions we’re already having. Every one expects teachers to interact that way with students and, as I’ve said before, system coherence demands that the same patterns of interaction occur at all levels.
As usual, I think you and I have come to pretty similar conclusions viewed through two pretty different lenses which sometimes feels like disagreement but usually turns out not to be so much.
If teacher pay is the problem with the “accountability issue”, then the entire compensation program must be included.
When the “public” looks at benefits like guaranteed employment after 3 years of service (tenure), 3 months off per every 12 and full retirement at age 50 or 55, they see a pay scale that is difficult to replicate in the outside world yet all they hear is how poorly teachers thinks they get paid and how the school district constantly needs more money…every year.
Therein lies the big disconnect. Educators want more money. Taxpayers want measurable, consistent and high quality in return.
Accountability can start from within. The Denver Post ran a story on 04/12/2010 (Educator hiring at DPS freezes) reporting that there are 80 teachers on ‘direct placement” that don’t have positions but that will get paid anyway. Is that $4M in expense per year? $5M? $6M? Would that money provide $1,000 of supplies to 4000 classrooms per year? 5000 classrooms? 6000 classrooms? Every year?
That may be a “drop in the bucket” to district types who are used to thinking in big numbers, but when the average taxpayer puts it all together, it is a lot of money…from an organization that is constantly claiming financial catastrophe.
Where is the internal outrage? Why is this system allowed to exist? If you owned the company, and $4M was wasted every year on unnecessary expense, would you take action? Do you fire up your furnace at home during the winter and open your windows and doors?
This is your system. Take ownership. Be accountable.
…just thoughts from the West Side.
Actually, this does happen in corporations all the time. It is a myth that private companies are always 100% efficient. Sometimes, it is prudent to keep folks on the payroll to fight another season. I’m not saying it’s good to keep bad teachers just try to find another analogy. And it might just be that some few teachers who don’t currently have a job are really good but in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And the money would not go to supplies anyway, right
?
Let’s not change the debate to efficiency, from accountability. It has not been postulated that businesses are 100% efficient. I’m not sure what a “100% efficient” organization looks like.
Business systems are far more accountable than the current education system, and educators from all levels of the current system might learn something from that model.
If you don’t like the “Capitalist Business” model (moto: “Productivity rules”), perhaps we can pull from the Marxist model (moto: “From those who have it, to those who scream the loudest.”) or even the Socialist model (moto: “It’s for the Children. You wouldn’t deny the Children, would you?”).
Based upon this discussion and others around the state, it is obvious that the tide is turning. As an old waterman, I’d suggest that you don’t fight the tide. It’ll wear you out long before it dissipates. Use the tide to get to the place that want. It’s your system. Take accountability for all of it.
…just thoughts from the West Side