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The divide between the teachers unions and the charter-school crowd often seems unbridgeable. At an education-reform forum in Denver last month, on the eve of the Democratic Convention, Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark and a member of the pro-charter Education Equality Project, spoke out against the unions, noting how "vicious" they can be:
Ten years ago, when I started talking about school choice, I was tarred and feathered. ... I literally was brought into a room by a [teachers] union [representative] ... and threatened that I would never win in office if I kept talking about school choice, if I kept talking about charter schools."
When collaborations—or even kind words—between the two sides do come along these days, they can seem all the more startling. Take the new Green Dot school in the Bronx.
Green Dot Public Schools is a charter-management organization that runs 12 charter high schools in Los Angeles. It's different from other successful charter groups, like KIPP, Achievement First, and Uncommon Schools, in three important (and challenging) ways: Green Dot runs high schools instead of middle schools. The group specializes in "transformations" of existing failing public schools instead of starting their own from scratch. And their schools work with unionized teachers, unlike most charter schools.
Two weeks ago, Green Dot opened its first school outside of L.A., a charter in the South Bronx. What's unusual about the school is that it is run in a partnership with the United Federation of Teachers, the New York City teachers union. The ceremony marking the school's debut was a lion-lying-down-with-the-lamb moment: Joel Klein, New York's school superintendent, stood next to his frequent adversary, Randi Weingarten, the president of the UFT, as they cut the ribbon.
It's hard to know if the new school will be the beginning of a trend toward unionized charters—for now, there doesn't seem to be much enthusiasm for this kind of arrangement on the part of any charter provider but Green Dot. But at the very least it's a model for a new type of relationship between old enemies. And if the reform folks really want to scale up their no-excuses model to a point where it's big enough to change things for a significant number of kids across the country, it couldn't hurt to have the unions on board.
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Today's paper brings the news that Michelle Rhee, the superintendent of the D.C. public schools, has come up with a Plan B to use if the D.C. teachers union refuses to accept her proposed new contract.
Plan A, as I wrote last week, was a contract under which teachers could give up tenure in return for large pay increases. Plan B, essentially, is a system in which teachers lose tenure and don't get large pay increases. Rhee says she and the state superintendent could also change the licensing requirements for the district's teachers so as to require them to demonstrate classroom performance—the kind that would have earned them big bonuses under the contract—merely to keep their jobs.
The story in the Washington Post suggests that Rhee is not only aware of the city's generation gap among teachers, she also plans to take advantage of it.
Rhee's ultimate goal is clear: to weed the District's instructional corps of underperformers and remake it, at least in part, with younger, highly energized graduates of such alternative training programs as Teach for America, where she began her career. Unlike many tenured Washington teachers, those emerging from such programs are unlikely to invest their entire working lives in education. But they will, in Rhee's estimation, be more inclined to embrace her core message: that children can learn no matter what economic and social conditions they face beyond the classroom and that teachers should be held directly accountable for their progress through test scores and other measurements.
What we're hearing from Rhee and other superintendents is that urban school systems as they are currently constructed simply can't be made to work for the disadvantaged children who need their help the most. They need a complete overhaul.
In New Orleans, they had Hurricane Katrina to wash the old system away. In D.C., Michelle Rhee is trying to do it herself.
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Last week's posts on teachers, compensation, and unions provoked a lot of mail from readers, and I thought I'd kick off this second week with two suggestions.
One reader, K.B., wrote in with a few more examples of what she thinks are promising experiments in teacher pay:
In your discussion of teacher quality and merit-pay programs, I was disappointed that you talked about the failed Florida bonus program but didn't talk more about some of the innovative "second generation" merit-pay (or performance-pay, as they're more often called) programs that are being tested in school districts all over the country. These programs, which include Minnesota's QComp, the TAP program, Oregon's CLASS Project, and many of the individual TIF sites, as well as the Denver ProComp program you cited, are attempting to learn from the mistakes of programs like Florida's. Instead of basing compensation on test scores alone, they are working to develop more nuanced measures of teacher quality, often in collaboration with both individual teachers and teachers' unions.
Another reader, R.C., suggested an intriguing inverted approach to a teacher's traditional career path:
Here's the situation now: a new graduate comes out of ed school and is looking for a job. It is very hard to get into the good suburban districts without experience, so she ends up in an urban or urban-ring district with high-needs kids. Let's say this teacher is a reasonably decent teacher. In three years (about the time when studies say teachers really start to know their stuff), the odds are she is going to either quit teaching altogether or hop to a suburban district that now values her experience - because the high-needs school has burned her to a frazzle between the demands of the kids and the incompetence of the system.
Here's what SHOULD happen: a new graduate comes out of ed school and finds a job in a good suburban district. In three years, this teacher is good and is hitting her stride. Wouldn't it be nice to have her in an urban school? Why not come up with a program that allows her to go to an urban school, with merit pay, for a few years with a guarantee that she will have a job in her old district? There are VERY few good, dedicated teachers who can put in an entire career under the conditions found in most urban districts right now.
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For the debut week of this blog, I concentrated on teachers,
in part because that's where much of the political debate seems to be focused
right now. (Last night, John McCain told
his fellow Republicans, a little menacingly, that he wanted to "help bad
teachers find another line of work," to raucous cheers.)
But as Slate readers have commented in the Fray (here, for
example) and in the email
messages they've sent me, there are some issues that are difficult if not
impossible for teachers to deal with alone. Funding inequities often
shortchange the school districts where low-income students live, and after the
last bell rings, those students often return to chaotic communities and
troubled home lives, both of which make it harder to succeed in school.
That's the other big political debate in education right now
- what can and should schools do differently in order to improve the lives of
disadvantaged students - and that's what I'm hoping to get into next week. For
now, thanks for reading, and to all the teachers, students and parents out
there, congratulations on surviving the first week of school.
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One striking phenomenon revealed by the Denver negotiations was a generational split among teachers. Younger teachers were generally in favor the deal being offered, and older teachers tended to oppose it. (Some veteran teachers told the Denver Post that they felt "dissed.")
A similar generational divide has appeared in D.C., where, as the Washington Post reported last month,
many of the District's 4,000 public school teachers are locked in a heated debate over Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee's proposal to offer salaries exceeding $100,000 for those willing to give up job security and tie their fates to student achievement. ... The split in the teaching corps largely, but not exclusively, is occurring along generational lines, with younger teachers more willing to accept the risks and older ones often questioning the proposal.
The Post story mentioned an anonymous young teacher-blogger, "D.C. Teacher Chic," who is a fan of Chancellor Rhee and is decidedly in favor of her new deal (under which teachers could choose a "green plan" that would trade tenure for a higher salary or a more traditional "red plan"). Her blog—often funny, usually outraged—offers a great insight into the mind of a teacher on the young side of this growing generational divide.
At the beginning of August, when it seemed that George Parker, the president of the D.C. teachers union local, was going to turn down Rhee's offer, D.C. Teacher Chic blew a gasket:
I am going to cry. Seriously. And then I am going to start looking for another school system.
I cannot believe George Parker is supporting scraping this entire contract and going for a more "traditional agreement." Clearly, not only does he not represent me, but he is also taking money right out of my pocket!
I understand that shitty teachers who have been working in the system since 1952 don't want to give up tenure. Fine. I get it. So choose the red plan! I don't understand opposing the entire proposal, unless you just haven't read it.
On a school-by-school level, a generational war can't be very productive. (Why are all the young teachers sitting together in the cafeteria?) But the split is important in the big picture. According to a recent study, incoming teachers now are better educated than incoming teachers were 10 years ago. (In the mid-'90s, only 27 percent of prospective teachers taking a national licensing test had a GPA of 3.5 or higher; by the mid-'00s, the figure had jumped to 40 percent.)
So: a new generation of better-educated teachers interested in reform? That's a powerful force, one that in the coming months and years might push both management and labor toward a new kind of arrangement, one in which teachers really are treated like professionals.
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There’s another city that spent the summer locked in high-stakes negotiations over teacher compensation: Denver.
Three years ago, voters there passed a levy to fund something called the Professional Compensation System for Teachers, or ProComp, designed to increase teacher pay and to reward the best teachers doing the hardest jobs. So far, ProComp has pumped $50 million into the city’s education system.
In May, Denver’s ambitious and reform-minded young school superintendent, Michael Bennet (the subject of an excellent piece by Katherine Boo in The New Yorker in 2007), proposed changes to ProComp that, he said, would make it more attractive to teachers, especially to the young teachers whom he wanted to bring into the system.
The leaders of the local teachers union didn’t like the changes. The basic dispute boiled down to this: The union wanted to take the extra ProComp money and distribute it more or less evenly throughout the system, so that every teacher would get a generous raise. Bennet wanted to use it to increase bonuses for teachers who taught in a high-poverty school, took a hard-to-fill job teaching math or science, or boosted their students’ test scores significantly. Under the old contract, teachers could receive $1,000 bonuses for each of those categories; Bennet wanted to increase each bonus to $3,000.
So if you were a successful math teacher at a high-poverty school, under Bennet’s proposal you could make an extra $9,000 a year. The problem, as the union saw it, was one of fairness: If you were, say, an English teacher at an affluent school, you would have no shot at two of the bonuses.
Which, Bennet replied, was the whole idea: to convince those teachers that they should come teach where they are really needed.
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A reader who spent the last five years teaching in Los Angeles and Chicago writes,
You’re right that the next fight in education is all about the teachers. We need to pay them better. But there are so many ineffectual teachers out there that it is difficult if not impossible to weed them out.
What you have yet to mention is the difficulty in weeding out those teachers. You have talked about rewarding teachers who are “successful,” but on what grounds will that success be measured? Testing can only measure so much, and some subjects (the phys ed teacher for one) aren’t tested in any meaningful way anyway. If testing cannot or does not measure the success of a teacher, then that puts power into the hands of the principals, which can be incredibly dangerous.
I agree, it’s a difficult question. But some useful answers are emerging. The best research I’ve read about teacher quality is a paper from 2006 by Robert Gordon, Thomas Kane, and Douglas Staiger.
They make five points:
1) We don’t know yet exactly how best to measure teachers, and the federal government should give R&D money to the states to test out some different methods.
2) That said, it seems that some measure that combines growth in test scores—how much a teacher raises his students’ scores over their scores the previous year—with more subjective measures like principal evaluations will actually give us a pretty accurate picture.
3) How can we tell it’s accurate? Because teachers who do well in one year by these measures tend to do well the next year, too. In other words, in any given school, there are teachers who consistently do well and teachers who consistently do poorly, and it’s not all that hard to figure out who’s who. (Though it is hard to predict ahead of time, at hiring.)
4) We should offer bonuses to teachers who perform well by those measures—in the top quartile, say—though only if they’re willing to teach in schools with a lot of low-income students, where they’re needed most.
5) Even though bonuses are nice, the more effective way to use the evaluations is to fire the bottom quarter of teachers. This is less politically palatable. But these teachers are the ones, Gordon and his co-authors say, who do real damage to the students they teach, and they tend to do that consistently.
The authors have a neat firing idea—they make it the default. So a principal simply couldn’t continue to employ a second-year teacher who performs in the bottom quartile without sending a note home to parents explaining why this low-performing teacher deserves to keep his job.
It’s not a solution we’re likely to hear on the campaign trail any time soon. Pro-layoff politicians don’t last long. But, politics aside, what these authors are proposing is a valuable and natural flipside to a bonus system. What good is paying the high performers more if the low performers are still hanging around, mishandling another classroom of kids every year?
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It’s one thing to talk hypothetically about merit pay for teachers. It’s another to actually put a merit-pay system into practice.
Under Gov. Jeb Bush, Florida became one of the first states to experiment with merit pay. In 2006, after years of negotiation, the state created a new compensation system to reward successful teachers. Each district was offered additional state funding if they opted into the plan. Districts were given some flexibility in how to measure student success, but standardized-test scores had to make up at least 60 percent of the formula. In February, a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times found that in one urban district that had opted to take the deal—Hillsborough, which includes Tampa and its suburbs—“merit” checks were going in overwhelming numbers to teachers at affluent schools.
[O]nly three percent of the educators deemed worthy of the $2,100 bonuses worked in the low-income schools that struggle most, where at least nine in 10 students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. And almost two-thirds taught in A-rated schools, where they arguably were least needed.
That wasn’t how it was supposed to work.
Indeed.
But just because merit pay didn’t work in Florida doesn’t mean it can’t work, period. A more effective merit-pay program wouldn’t reward every successful teacher, it would reward teachers who succeed with those students that are hardest to teach. And it also might define “success” in a more creative way than Florida does. One thing most teachers seem to agree on: they hate being judged on their students’ test scores alone. If you ask current teachers about a deal like the one in Hillsborough, most of them say no thanks. In the teacher-compensation study I mentioned yesterday, researchers surveyed teachers in Washington state and found that 83 percent of them opposed merit pay, including almost 60 percent who “strongly” opposed the idea. But the survey defined merit pay very narrowly, as a system that gave bonuses only for standardized-test gains. If we could come up with a more flexible system, the number of teachers opposing change might start to fall.
I got an e-mail yesterday from a reader, a former New York City teacher, making the case against judging teachers by standardized tests alone. (She asked to remain anonymous, “in case my old principal actually learned how to use the Internet.”)
In the school where I used to work, I would be alternately canonized and demonized each year, as we compared not how each student had progressed each year, but how one eighth grade compared to the grade in front of or behind it. The year our eighth grade went from 400 motivated kids to over 500 “challenging” students, test scores fell, and I was told not to be creative in my classroom, “at least until after the test.”
The next year, the eighth grade shrank to 250 students, and a good group of them, at that. When test scores for that class were higher than the previous eighth grade, I was praised to the heavens as if I had actually had anything to do with the increase. If my performance review and job security were tied to that kind of a measure, I’d be terrified, and would demand a salary equal to two or three years what I actually deserved just to build in security for my inevitable firing.
Accountability nuts get nervous when teachers say they want to be judged by more flexible standards than test scores alone. And for good reason—without some kind of objective measure, it would be way too easy to design an accountability system that could be gamed, where teachers were rewarded based on “parental satisfaction” or some equally vague measure, or where sub-par teachers received bonuses along with high-quality teachers, out of a sense of “fairness.”
Still, the Florida system—bonuses based only on test scores, and no extra compensation for working in high-needs schools—clearly isn’t working.
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The fight over the compensation of teachers is in many ways a fight over the nature of teaching itself. Is it a skilled profession, like law or medicine or finance, in which those who succeed in a competitive marketplace receive high compensation? Or is it a public-service job, like being a police officer or a firefighter or a civil servant, in which the exchange is job security and ample benefits for a commitment to serve the public? Right now, most teacher contracts are like civil-service contracts: You get gradual and steady raises based primarily on how long you’ve been in the job. Most of the benefits come on the back end, in retirement and in the years leading up to it.
But the “army of new teachers” that Obama has pledged to bring into the system may not be so crazy about a civil-service job.
Earlier this summer, a research group in Seattle called the Center on Reinventing Public Education came out with a new study on teacher compensation. The graph below, taken from the study, shows the results of a simulation for “what a single white woman with a technical degree from a selective college would earn inside and outside of teaching at three points in her early career.” When this imaginary woman graduated in 1994, she would have earned $3,561 more as a teacher than outside of teaching, because of a starting salary guaranteed by a union contract. By the time she was nine years into her working life, though, she would have fallen behind her peers, making $10,203 less as a teacher than if she had followed another career path.
So, how do you restructure compensation to make teaching more attractive to that archetypal selective-college graduate? Do you pay all teachers more? Provide other benefits to compensate for a smaller salary? Or do you restructure teacher pay so that high performers earn more than their colleagues?
In Washington, D.C., right now, the fight over teacher quality is being debated at the negotiating table. Michelle Rhee, the schools chancellor, has been in office only a little more than a year, but already she has become one of the most important education officials in the country. Not “important” in the sense of “powerful”—D.C. is a pretty small school system—but important because of the sweeping reforms she is trying to put in place.
Back in July, Rhee proposed a new contract for the city’s teachers. As the Washington Post reported at the time,
Under the proposal, the school system would establish two pay tiers, red and green. … Teachers in the red tier would receive traditional raises and would maintain tenure. Those who voluntarily go into the green tier would receive thousands of dollars in bonuses and raises, funded with foundation grants, for relinquishing tenure.
In other words, red for traditionalist civil servants, green for merit-pay rebels.
The bonuses and raises Rhee proposed were unusually large. Even teachers who chose the safer option would do pretty well. But not as well as the greens. As the Post noted, in the red tier, “a teacher with a bachelor’s degree and 10 years of service who makes $56,000 could receive $73,800 by 2012.” If that same teacher chose the green tier, she could be making as much as $122,500 in that year. (Currently, the average teacher salary in the country is $47,600.)
The downside of choosing the green tier: You give up tenure and spend a year on probation. If at the end of that year the principal decides that you haven’t proved yourself, you’re fired, no matter how long you’ve worked for the system.
It’s a revolutionary idea—last week, a columnist for the Post wrote that the proposed contract, if accepted, “would be a watershed event in U.S. labor history.” D.C.’s teachers are divided on whether it’s a good deal. The leader of the local teachers union seems to be leaning toward taking it, but other union officials are firmly opposed. The union local’s vice president, Nathan Saunders, told the Post in July that the deal would be “a tremendous step backwards for teachers as dignified professionals. … It is the purchase of valuable rights for cash.”
Of course, that’s kind of what being a professional entails: giving up the kind of job security and stability that you get if you’re a wage laborer in exchange for a whole lot of money.
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The new school year begins today in New York City, where I live, and in many other cities around the country. (Though no school this week in New Orleans, where I was reporting during the spring and summer, because of Hurricane Gustav.)
For many returning teachers, this is an uncertain moment, and not only because they’re facing a brand-new crop of students. There is a growing sense out there—in labor negotiations, at conferences, and on the campaign trail—that the next big debate in the politics of education is going to be about teachers: how to attract them, how to compensate them, how to evaluate them, how to fire them, and, perhaps most importantly, how to get good ones in front of the students who need their help the most.
Barack Obama, in his speech at Invesco Field in Denver last week, sketched out the broad outlines of a possible new deal for teachers. He said that, as president, “I’ll recruit an army of new teachers and pay them higher salaries and give them more support. And in exchange, I’ll ask for higher standards and more accountability.”
Beyond this basic tradeoff—money for accountability—Obama has been vague about exactly how a deal might work in practice. But others have plunged in. Jonathan Alter, writing in Newsweek in July, told Obama that he should
offer federal money for salary increases, but make them conditional on differential pay (paying teachers based on performance and willingness to work in underserved schools, which surveys show many teachers favor) and on support for the elimination of tenure. And the next time he addresses them, he should tell the unions they must change their focus from job security and the protection of ineffective teachers to higher pay and true accountability for performance—or face extinction.
Matthew Miller, writing in the Wall Street Journal in the same week, had similar advice for the candidate. Obama, he said, should
go beyond vague talk of modest pay reform and offer a bold new “grand bargain” to reshape the profession. He should make a $30 billion pot of federal money available to states and districts to boost salaries in poor schools, provided the teachers unions make two key concessions. First, they have to scrap their traditional “lockstep” pay scale. In this scheme, a physics grad has to be paid the same as a phys-ed major if both have the same tenure in the classroom, and a teacher whose students make remarkable gains each year gets rewarded no differently than one whose students languish. Second, it has to be easy to fire the awful teachers that are blighting the lives of a million poor children.
Miller’s language is perhaps over the top—teachers in low-income schools aren’t all “awful,” and even many of the substandard ones might well turn into above-average teachers with a little more mentoring and training and support.
But somewhere in there, the outlines of a new deal for teachers seem to be forming: more money for less job security. Will this deal appeal to teachers themselves? That’s a separate question—more thoughts on it soon.