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ProComp at 5: A ‘decorated box?’

Tuesday, May 10th, 2011

Editor’s note: Jeff Buck is a math teacher at Denver’s East High School and a cofounder of the Denver Green School. He was a member of the task force that designed Denver’s landmark ProComp teacher compensation system, which recently marked its fifth birthday.

In Denver in 2002, the Joint Task Force for Teacher Compensation (JTF) designed the Professional Compensation System for Teachers (ProComp).  We worked in a seminar-style format, which gave me the opportunity not only to consider deeply many of my own beliefs and assumptions about teaching and pay, but also to explore openly those of the other nine members.

I cannot speak for the others but at the end of it all, I could verbalize two core beliefs that I saw reflected in ProComp as we designed it:  I understand teaching not just as a profession but as a career, and I believe that supporting the intrinsic motivation of people (or at least staying out of its way) offers the best chance we have for making positive change.

A teacher should not have to leave the classroom completely and permanently in order to approach or even exceed administrative pay if they have the knowledge and skills and do the work to justify it.

These two beliefs form a mutually reinforcing feedback loop that lies at the heart of my work on school reform and now, school creation.

On the first point, I know that 50 percent of new teachers will quit before their fifth year.  I do not believe monetary compensation, as salary or as bonus, will solve that problem.  Whether or not ProComp has done anything to retain teachers past this stage of their career remains an open question in my opinion.

I have not seen the program evaluation reports myself but I have heard from people who should know that it has improved retention and that it hasn’t made any significant difference. Apparently your results may vary.

This does not eliminate the need to think about the other 50 percent, many of whom will make teaching a career. I understood part of the problem and the seed of a solution when I realized I couldn’t think of another profession in which you know you will do substantially the same work at the beginning and the end of your career, no matter how long you work.

God bless those who can keep their steam up for 20 or 30 years, and I know several who have, but it would seem far more inviting if teaching had a career ladder offering access to a variety of activities with escalating responsibilities and pay while providing for continuing direct contact with kids.

Members of the JTF agreed that a teacher should not have to leave the classroom completely and permanently in order to approach, or even exceed administrative pay if they have the knowledge and skills and do the work to justify it. I have managed to craft (or stumble onto) my own sort of ladder but we have a long way to go toward an institutional response.

We discussed this but in the end, we recognized it went beyond the scope of the JTF’s mandate. We understood a compensation system could not by itself create it but we wanted the core elements of ProComp (Student Growth Objectives, Comprehensive Professional Evaluation, and Professional Development Units) to provide the hooks for a career ladder in teaching. We had to leave the details of the key feeder systems to someone else.

We talked a lot about the balance between bonus and salary. I think most of us doubted we had enough money to actually change people’s behavior ($10,000 came up in that context). And I personally think that the motivation for bad behavior increases with the dollar value of the potential reward. The evidence I have seen supports this belief.

Since then, I have read more about human motivation.  For example, I came across the work of Deci and Ryan (Self Determination Theory) and “Drive,” Daniel Pink’s synthesis of decades of research. Both put words to my long held belief that “autonomy, competence, and relatedness … foster the most volitional and high quality forms of motivation and engagement for activities, including enhanced performance, persistence, and creativity.”  (from second paragraph of link above, italics in original)

I had also studied complexity, emergence and chaos for a couple of years and during the time the JTF met, my reading pile included “The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture” by Mark Taylor.  In his first chapter, “From Grid to Network,” Taylor develops an architectural metaphor that I still think about. He uses the work of Mies van der Rohe, Robert Venturi, and Frank Gehry to illustrate a progression from grid thinking to network thinking.

Mies worked in grids and blocks to express the efficiency of modernism. Venturi wanted to push beyond simple geometric forms and ended up with what I describe as decorated boxes.With the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, Gehry tries to network interior and exterior spaces with the surroundings to achieve a very different architectural effect.

At the time I had hoped we could jump from the salary grid to a set of parts that interacted with each other (forming a network, in other words) allowing the emergence of new system behaviors and characteristics. What we ended up with, especially after rebalancing the system in favor of more and larger bonuses, amounts to a decorated box.  I have learned not to look at this as a failure. After all, who am I to shortcut the succession of thinking?

But now almost 10 years later I can draw a fairly solid line between my experiences on the JTF and my contribution to the governance model of the Denver Green School.  ProComp has become complicated rather than complex and it does not really provide the tools I need to figure out how to allocate a fixed budget for compensation in a democratically managed partnership such as we have dreamed right into reality.

It does give me a pretty good idea of which holes need fixing first and it tells me that we may need to think farther outside the box about revenue.

Popularity: 18% [?]

Posted in featured, Reform, Teacher pay | 1 Comment »

Let’s not repeat agribusiness errors in education

Thursday, October 21st, 2010

NPK – Nitrogen, Phosphorous, Potassium.

As a result of the so-called “Green Revolution” in agriculture starting in the 1940s and continuing through the 1970s, that’s the recipe for all the food the majority of people eat in this country.

Simple, right?  Just dump unnatural quantities of these macronutrients onto scientifically hybridized plants, feed much of the resulting “food” to protein production units (aka, animals), chemically process and reprocess most of the rest and voila, we have a staggering array of visually attractive and comfortingly uniform product available year round throughout most of the country, except in places no longer served by grocery stores, of course.

Unfortunately, a growing number of people find that food produced this way doesn’t really taste all that good.  Evidence continues to mount that it lacks something in nutritional value and contributes to a variety of serious health problems.  And our industrial approach to feeding ourselves leaves us more susceptible to catastrophic failure than most people seem to realize.  Oh, I should also mention the unfathomable damage we’ve done to the planet in the process.  Some say that’s just the price of progress.

But I don’t mean to write about food.  I mean to write about education.  I only bring it up because we have set off in earnest down a similar path in our schools.  We have identified the macronutrients literacy and math, which someone has standardized and individually packetized so we can use them in a way surprisingly similar to how we use fertilizers.

For example, we apply them in double blocks when the standard application fails to produce “growth” and we statistically process and reprocess the output (test scores).  To the casual observer and to most serious observers this apparently seems eminently reasonable. Some have even suggested we can have “teacher-proof” curricula, I guess in the same way we have chef-proof snacks.  Cheese puff anyone?

As in agriculture, when we turn our backs on the micronutrients and the living soil of education, I’m concerned we will find that what looks good (increasing test scores, for example) will bring us unforeseen and unpleasant consequences, much as our food system has.

But what the hell, we have choices. I do not oppose choice but I do not believe it always plays the positive role in the economy that market advocates claim. Americans tend to choose based on short-term considerations (first cost, convenience, annual test scores) rather than long term ones (total cost, sustainability, end result of an education).

In modern, over-scheduled life, choice often goes to convenience well ahead of other considerations. How many people choose to stop for coffee on the way to work at a place they don’t even have to turn off the car and get out? What are the consequences of growing numbers of people making that choice?

Will it ultimately benefit the economy, our health, air quality? If the choices we make turn out to be counterproductive or even destructive, do we have the right to keep on just because we want to? What if the choices we make restrict the choices available to others or eliminate choices for future generations, maybe even for our living children?

And if we choose schools the same way we choose food, for example, what will be the educational analogues of obesity, diabetes and the unimaginable environmental damage our choices cause? If we fail to consider dynamics like these when creating choice in education, in the end we will do far more harm than good.

Market derived ideas like “vote with your feet” applied to educating our young signals the final abandonment of Place as a consideration in our decision making.  If I have that right, we have made a grave mistake.

The boundaries we have set for thinking about the problem substantially define our thinking about solutions.  We’ve all heard the Einstein quote – it has been variously rendered and absent original material, I will paraphrase:  We cannot solve the problems we face with the kind of thinking used while creating them.  Almost everything I hear and read about the education reform “debate” sounds an awful lot like the thinking that got us into this predicament in the first place.

For the past 400 years the reductionist paradigm has brought knowledge (but not wisdom, unfortunately) to the human race and we have converted that income into fabulous wealth for less than 10 percent of the world’s population.  We have “advanced” our civilization right to the brink of a multi-dimensional, global catastrophe.

And still we waste our time arguing about whether it is unions or for-profit charter management organizations that are the problem.  I hope at least one person out there feels as desperate as I do at our failure to do any better than that.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Posted in Reform, School choice, Teaching and learning | 2 Comments »

Countering the culture of violence

Thursday, December 17th, 2009

This is one of those teacher diary type blog posts.  At this moment, policy seems to me about the least useful tool in education reform. (I’m having one of those days).

It’s finals week and since most of my class finished their test on Monday (it didn’t take them as long as I had imagined and I’m happy to report that most of them did pretty well), I spent our scheduled time today talking with the few kids who turned up.  The main theme of the conversation was the culture of physical violence in which they have grown up.

I find it most striking that they appear to revel in it.  People getting hurt badly is “hilarious.”  I don’t know enough about their internal experience to tell but I suspect such a response is a form of psychological armor.  Of course, I’m a math teacher and not a psychologist so I’ll leave it to better trained professionals to make that determination.

I hasten to add that I don’t think these are bad kids at all.  In fact, I quite like them and that they’re sitting in my room in a school after the experiences they describe (and being assured that, “oh, Mister, that’s nothing …”) says something about their strength.  These kids did not drop out, made it to their junior or senior year, and most of them will probably graduate.  They clearly get that they need a diploma but they don’t show a lot of interest (outwardly anyway) in the expectations of school.  Their grades certainly don’t reflect their obvious intelligence and resourcefulness.

Immediately following this conversation another student of mine, one who most probably did not grow up in a violent household, walked up to me in the hall and handed me a holiday gift with a smile.  He’s a 9th grader in an honors class and doing well.

The contrast between this “thank you, you’re very kind” experience and the “oh my god” experience of minutes before hit me hard.  Without the second experience, the first would have been just another reminder of the challenges many of my kids face.  Instead, it has created a dissonance in my head that I’m not sure what to do with.  And so here I am at the keyboard.

Now, I know perfectly well that not all lower income people grow up or live with violence.  And I am also aware that physical, verbal and emotional abuse takes place in wealthy households too.  However, I have worked with economically disadvantaged kids my entire career and I know the experience is common enough that I think any conversation about reform must explicitly include the supports to develop non-violent and productive ways to solve problems and to help students transfer what they learn to settings outside of school.

And honestly, most of the kids who did not grow up with violence could use some support in learning these skills too.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Posted in Poverty, Small schools, Teaching and learning | 3 Comments »

Pondering the role of school governance

Sunday, December 13th, 2009

We’ve heard a lot about publicly elected boards of education lately.  OK so it was just one, but I’m also curious about charter boards of directors.  Maybe some charter school folks would comment.

As the Denver Green School Partnership took shape, we considered applying for a charter.  There were several reasons we decided on a different path but among them was our concern about recruiting and retaining a productive board of directors.  We’ve heard stories about boards turning and driving a school into the ground or turning it into something alien to its original purpose.

On the other hand, I have to imagine that high functioning charters have a productive, or at least not destructive relationship with their boards.

Maybe some of the stories are overstated or even apocryphal.  Maybe it happens rarely enough that it need not dominate planning for probable futures.  We are involved in defining our governance model and I’m very interested in how different approaches play out in practice.  I guess my interest is mostly academic since, as I mentioned, we’re already well down another path.

But it’s something I think it’s very important to wonder about.  I believe the quality of the adult interactions around a school and the quality of the interactions between adults and kids have a profound and mutual impact on each other.

An important finding from complex systems theory shows that analogous patterns of interaction appear at different levels of organization.  That suggests that if we want teachers and students to have respectful, differentiated and optimally developmental relationships, we should establish the same conditions in our adult interactions.

To say that it’s the culture I think misses the opportunity to investigate a variable we don’t know a whole lot about.  Governance should provide structure to facilitate the desired culture rather than demand it and create an uphill battle to get it.  It should be the path of least resistance (that’s not to say it’s not work to move down that path) rather than pushing a rock up a hill.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Posted in Governance | 2 Comments »

Like it or not, we are all teachers

Monday, December 7th, 2009

This honestly is not directed at anyone.  I wrote it in response to events outside the blogosphere.

I want to ask that as we go about our business, we remember that kids learn how to behave by watching adults, until puberty convinces them we’re stupid, of course.  When adults bicker and act belligerently, kids absorb that as part of our cultural construct for resolving conflict.

Those of us working in schools can help young people to learn alternatives but at some point, societal norms will have to reflect the belief that we have more productive ways to solve our problems; otherwise the dissonance will probably favor the status quo.

I think formal recognition of this has been made.  The array of 21st Century Skills people talk about includes things like collaborative problem solving.  Every example of productive civil discourse, engaged and dynamic problem solving, etc., gives us more to work with in the classroom and improves the chances (a step in a 1,000 mile journey) that kids will be exposed to the same outside the classroom.

I know some students were at the board meeting last Monday.  Assuming that most of them are probably pretty concrete/linear thinkers who have not fully developed a sense of the future or planning for it (the reason we don’t charge kids as adults), think about what they may have taken away from that experience.  Kids often do not learn what we think we teach.

If we are serious about “what’s best for kids”, then we need to think about what they take away from our behavior based on what we know about their development.  I try to do this and it can be very uncomfortable, embarrassing even.  But I find value in cultivating such awareness and so I do it anyway.

Like it or not, we are all teachers.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Posted in Teaching and learning | No Comments »

Can we, and DPS, unlearn old habits?

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

Editor’s note: Jeff Buck has worked as a teacher for 12 years, most of that time in Denver. As a teacher on special assignment he worked on the design and implementation of ProComp and currently teaches math at East High. He is a founding member of the Denver Green School Partnership.

My understanding of complex systems theory leads me to believe that organizations (such as school districts) and people (such as you or me) share some interesting characteristics.

For example, both learn and unlearn behavior patterns – conscious, sub- and unconscious. Unlearning seems practically though not theoretically rare, especially the deeper you go.

Think about a time you have tried to unlearn some behavior or belief – breaking a habit, for example, or overcoming a stereotype of some category of people.

Now scale that experience to involve the believing/thinking/behavior of more than 100,000 people – way more in DPS, actually, because the district involves vastly more than administration and the teachers union. Just in terms of district employees, teachers represent less than 1/3 of the work force, which I believe is around 15,000 – someone please correct me if I’m off). Teachers are without a doubt the business end of the operation but all of the rest make it possible. They are part of the system.

So are the 70,000ish kids and their family/social systems.

That’s a lot of people and since I was originally trained as an engineer, I understand that to deal with such complexity we usually first make a series of simplifying assumptions. They are more explicit when we think we know what we’re doing. They are not explicit in theories of school reform. Maybe this signals an opportunity to look at the situation from a different angle.

I claim that DPS behaves in ways that have been learned over the past hundred years or so, to a large extent despite the efforts of individuals and even groups of individuals. Organizations evolve in response to their environments, which includes those individuals and so much more.

What does it take to redirect the behavior of a person? Can we learn anything from that when we wonder what it takes to redirect the behavior of an organization? I believe that we can but I’m not sure what that is. If you have any idea, or if you think I’m just confused, please comment.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Posted in Reform | 1 Comment »

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