A lot of news has been made recently by the labor-bashing group Center for Union "Facts" and their anti-education group "Teacher Union Facts".
They have been in the news recently promoting a contest to name the worst teacher in America. Nice.
Their website is full of disinformation about teacher tenure rights. See below.
Here's probably the worst example:
So why don’t districts try to terminate more of their poor performers? The sad answer is that teachers unions have made the process prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. In Illinois, Reeder found, it costs an average of $219,504 in legal fees alone to get a termination case past all the union-supported hurdles. Columbus, Ohio’s own teachers union president admitted to the Associated Press that firing a tenured teacher can cost as much as $50,000. In New York State, the average is $128,941 (Education Week reports that in New York City, the average is $163,142). A spokesman for Idaho school administrators told local press that districts have been known to spend “$100,000 or $200,000” in litigation costs just to get rid of a bad teacher.
I'm interested to know how teachers unions have made the process expensive and time consuming. Do unions set the rules for teacher dismissal, or do school boards and state legislatures? Do unions impose their contracts on helpless school boards, as though there is a gun to their heads? Of course not. Teachers and school boards agree on terms of their contracts. That's what negotiation is about.
How do teachers get tenure? Does the union force it on school boards?
Are administrators and school boards completely helpless in the face of unions' overwhelming power?
As I've said on this site many times, it's not the union's fault that bad teachers don't get dismissed. Or that they ever are granted tenure in the first place. Why blame the unions because their members don't get fired? Is it the unions' job to fire their members?
The liars at this site say, "everyone cares about public schools." Nothing could be further from the truth. These people, for example. Their operation refuses to release any information about their donors, and they don't accept comments on their blog. So not only are they liars, they're cowards too, afraid of any scrutiny or criticism.
This anti-education group is simply a front for right wing critics of the public education system, most like a combination of voucher proponents and right wingers who fear the political clout of the NEA. They're not reformers, they're political hacks out to make cheap points at teachers' expense.
Friday, March 14, 2008
Shadow Organization Promotes Myths About Teachers, Tenure
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Time Cover Addresses Merit Pay
A Time Magazine cover story this week addresses the issue of merit pay, one of Into My Own's pet issues. For some reason they didn't quote us. Funny, isn't it?
Anyway, the story provides a good overview to the issue, including some background on why the merit pay plans in Houston and Florida have flopped, while the plan in Denver has been very popular. (I'll give you a hint: one of the three proposals was developed by teachers.)
Time also explores the presidential candidates' positions on merit pay, even though none of the group has spelled it out clearly. Obama unfortunately has opened the door to merit pay (I bashed him for it here, and have become more forgiving of Obama since), but at least he says merit pay shouldn't be based on standardized test scores. Don't know what he will base it on then, but we'll see.
Excerpt below. Click on the "merit pay" tag to see the full extent of my obsession with this issue. Traditionally, public-school salaries are based on years spent on the job and college credits earned, a system favored by unions because it treats all teachers equally. Of course, everyone knows that not all teachers are equal. Just witness how parents lobby to get their kids into the best classrooms. And yet there is no universally accepted way to measure competence, much less the ineffable magnetism of a truly brilliant educator. In its absence, policymakers have focused on that current measure of all things educational: student test scores. In districts across the country, administrators are devising systems that track student scores back to the teachers who taught them in an attempt to apportion credit and blame and, in some cases, target help to teachers who need it. Offering bonuses to teachers who raise student achievement, the theory goes, will improve the overall quality of instruction, retain those who get the job done and attract more highly qualified candidates to the profession—all while lifting those all-important test scores.
Friday, February 15, 2008
Teacher Salaries, Again
Teacher salaries are always a hot issue. When I wrote a post about it yesterday I received several comments, including a few from my loyal reader Paul, who always has good things to contribute to my education posts.
Paul raises the excellent point, missed by most taxpayers, that teachers often receive two raises--one for moving up the experience ladder, and another annual increase on the base salary. So the base salary might be $32,000. But with each additional year there is a step increase. So a second year teacher might make $35,000, third year $37,000 and so on. In the case of Paul's district, he said that steps increase from 0-15 years, with another step at 20 and at 23.
That's fairly typical. It's important to understand that teacher salaries in most districts are structured just this way. As a result, teachers have a fairly low starting salary, but the pay catches up to many other professions after time. Eventually, for experienced teachers, the salary ends up being somewhat competitive. It's also important to remember that those steps are negotiated, as are the rates of increase at each step. It's a compromise between the board and the bargaining unit.
So when Paul says that teachers get a fairly large increase from year to year, he's right. For example, a teacher may get a 3% increase on the base salary, as well as a 3% increase. It has to be that way, or else the low starting salaries would also equate to a pretty low average salary for the entire profession. But in most cases, the average teacher's salary districtwide isn't going to increase by 6%.
That's because every year, teachers at the upper end of the scale retire, and are replace by teachers at the bottom end. And because the teachers at the top part of the scale don't see the same rate of increase as the teachers at the bottom of the scale.
The benefit of this system is that it rewards experienced teachers for staying in the district. That's a good thing. As in anything else, experience is important in teaching, especially when there is a need for some instructional consistency from year to year. Teaching is a hard job, and the hope of regular increases helps keep people in the profession when things get stressful.
The alternative, some say, is a system of merit pay. But whatever alternative, consider the following. I recently saw a figure of about$43,000 as the average teacher salary. Any salary structure is going to have to keep that average--unless you think the average teacher salary is too high. Obviously the teachers above the line--the most experienced--don't want a pay cut. And they aren't the teachers you want to get rid of.
So... how do you do it? Not an easy question to answer. Personally I think the system works fine, except, as I've said before, starting salaries need to go up a little to attract college students to the profession.
Now, I haven't even touched the issue of health care. The rates of increase for health benefits are much higher than rates of increase for salary. There's no solution to that locally. Health care is going up and up. Obama and Clinton have plans to deal with rising health care costs... you might want to vote for one of them in November.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Teachers working two jobs
I've seen this Miami Herald story out a couple of times now, and I have to admit to having mixed feelings about it. The gist is this: 16% of teachers have a second job. The story goes on to talk about teachers in Florida who work two jobs, and the reasons why they do it.
Now, I may be under attack from my fellow educators for saying this, but I don't really think teachers are underpaid. Ok, maybe a little.
The starting salary, the article explains, is around $38,000 for teachers in Dade and Broward counties. To say that a young person entering the field needs to work a second job is a bit of a stretch. There are, obviously, plenty of people out there who work two jobs and don't manage that much in salary. It's not a lot of money, for sure, but it is enough to live on, to have the basic necessities and even a few luxuries.
The problem is that teaching attracts people who have a reasonable expectation of a certain quality of life. They are college graduates, after all, and college graduates expect a higher salary than that. They work a second job, some of them, to get them out of college debt or to get themselves to a certain standard of living. If they stick with it, educators have a pretty regular system of increases that make their salaries more lucrative over time.
But there's another trend I've noticed, that more and more first year teachers are entering the profession from other professions, having started off in another career where work wasn't as stable, or where they couldn't find happiness. That's great for schools: they get a more mature, experienced, and worldly person in the classroom, someone who has a greater separation from the students if they are working in a high school, and generally better decision making. They are probably also more likely to stay put.
The flip side is that these older entry year teachers need higher salaries. They have families, quite often. But they also have made a realistic assessment of their financial situation before they entered the classroom. They are ready to accept the salary they're given. Working in the public sector means that you aren't going to get rich. It's a given. No one in public education is really getting superwealthy--name another industry where the top of the scale is most likely under $200,000. Aside from a few superintendents in urban and wealthy suburban districts, there aren't many people in education making over, say, $110,000, and those are all administrators. What about sales, insurance, banking, and manufacturing? Are the tops of those fields making over $200,000? Of course. You think a guy running a bank that employs 200 people makes more than a guy running a high school that employs 200 people? You take it as a given that in the public sector, you're going to make less. That's how it goes.
After a few years, though, teaching salaries even out, and the average salary of a teacher with five or ten years experience is generally less than what professionals might make in the private sector (see above), but not bad, and is generally worth the trade off for having time off in the summer and the holidays--it's nice not working between Christmas and New Year's, for example--and the enjoyment that comes from working with young people.
Yes, some young people work two jobs to get the lifestyle they want, and that's not generally good for the school or the people trying to develop as teachers. But it's a reality that I think we have to accept. I would love to see starting salaries increased, but the political pressure from experienced teachers is always going to make sure that increased funding finds its way into the pockets of the upper end of the teaching ranks. So it goes. For those willing to endure those first few years of, not poverty, but lower-middle-classness, teaching has been and remains a pretty good life. Let's not shed too many tears for these young people who are willing to work hard and take a few lumps to build the life that they want. Good for them. They're exhibiting the work ethic and love of service that most of us would love to see modeled for our children. I'm not sure I'd really want that to change.
Monday, December 10, 2007
Teacher experience and student achievement
Discussions of merit pay invariably bring up the question of whether teachers should be paid according to experience and level of educational attainment (i. e., degrees earned).
Part of the reason for paying teachers this way is certainly market based. Teachers who have entered the second half of their teaching career need to see regular increases or else they would be more likely to seek more lucrative careers in other fields. Teachers with long histories within their district are valuable, and high turnover coupled with a lack of veterans certainly wouldn't be good for any school or district.
The other reason teachers earn more based on experience is that, well, intuitively we would think, and hope, that more experienced teachers are better at what they do and there would be increased student achievement as a result.
Now there appears to be some new evidence that experience in the classroom leads to achievement gains. I would caution readers, of course, that any kind of educational research should be taken with a grain of salt: sorting out the various factors that make up student achievement and isolating them from other facts so that they can be measured... well it's an arduous task. I'm speaking not as a researcher, but as someone who's read and studied a lot of such research. Sometimes it seems that you can find educational research both for and against nearly every educational practice one might want to investigate.
So, with that caveat in place, the study out of Washington suggests that there are marked increases in achievement associated with the first few years of teaching--no surprise there--then levelling off.
Teacher experience, and not advanced degrees, has a greater effect on how well students succeed, a new state report says.
"In the first few years on the job, a teacher gains considerably in her or his ability to improve the academic performance of students," said the report, issued Sunday by the Washington State Institute for Public Policy.
Combining the results of 15 studies on teacher pay, the researchers found a dramatic improvement in student achievement between one and five years of teacher experience and a more gradual boost in the years following. Student achievement in these studies was mostly tracked through scores on standardized reading or math tests.
A similar analysis of studies concerning teachers getting graduate degrees found that the degrees seemed to have little or no effect on student outcomes.
The report makes a preliminary recommendation that any changes in the way teachers are paid should emphasize financial rewards for experience rather than higher pay for teachers with graduate degrees.
Now, I'm skeptical of the last part... I'll never believe that advanced degrees don't lead to gains in teaching performance. But nonetheless, that's the study; take it for what it's worth.
You won't find any argument from members of the teaching profession that growth occurs rapidly in the first few years of teaching. It takes at least five years, and sometimes more, to get organized, and to learn what really works in the classroom, what keeps students engaged and what doesn't, how to weed out the ineffective parts of your instruction and keep the better parts. Then there's just the struggle with classroom management which may take a few years to learn.
After those first five years, good teachers still make a lot of room for growth. I know that some of the best adjustments I made as a teacher occurred in my last couple of years, after I already had ten years of experience. I'd be interested also to see if there is a study--and there probably is, somewhere--of student achievement when teachers hold a Master's degree in their subject area (not an education degree). I always felt that my content area Master's degree was critical for my teaching, especially as I taught upper level high school courses, where content area command is most critical.
Monday, October 01, 2007
US teacher salaries compared
Interesting piece in Ed Week on teacher salaries (link not available).
Teachers in the United States spend more hours at work than their counterparts in 29 other countries, but are among the lowest paid, according to an annual survey comparing the education systems in some of the world’s leading economies.
The report, released Sept. 18 by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, says that primary-level teachers teach an average of 1,080 hours each year in the United States—well above the average of 803 hours for all countries surveyed.
The average salary of just over $40,000 for a U.S. primary teacher with 15 years of experience ranked the United States 12th among the countries surveyed. In Luxembourg, the average salary for a teacher with similar experience was $88,000 in U.S. dollars. In Hungary, it was $16,000.
Frankly I think teacher salaries are adequate. The real issue is starting salaries, which are low in education, and which creates a disincentive for top college students to enter the field. But teachers who stay in the field can make a comfortable enough living. Also there is too much of a gap between experienced and inexperienced teachers which makes it nearly impossible sometimes for veterans to change districts, since they become too expensive.
But what's interesting in this data, to me, is the difference in hours put in by teachers. Even though teachers are often criticized for not working as much as other professionals, this data shows that teachers in the U. S. work more than teachers in many other countries.
The article continues:
Although the average U.S. teacher salary is above the OECD average of $37,603, the report points out that relative to the gross domestic product, “per capita teachers’ pay in the United States is among the lowest in OECD countries.”
The report ranked the United States 10th for its efforts to control class sizes, with 23.1 students per classroom at the primary level, higher than the OECD average of 21.5.
The United States also appeared to lag behind on participation in preschool education. The report found that while spending on U.S. prekindergarten students is among the highest of all OECD countries, the United States has one of the lowest participation rates for children younger than 5. In 2005, the rate of participation for 3- and 4-year-olds in the United States was 50 percent, compared with the OECD average of 68.5 percent.
The report includes a host of other education statistics on factors such as education spending, graduation rates, higher education, and student attitudes about mathematics.
For instance, in the United States, 87 percent of the population between the ages of 25 and 34 had completed high school, the report said, while in Mexico, only 24 percent of the population in that age group had completed high school.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Are kids different than they were thirty years ago?
I owe this to Westender, who found it. And a quick plug--Westender finds all kinds of fascinating news pieces, especially on the medical front. Put his site on your favorites.
The Findlay (Ohio) Courier posed the question to several local retiring educators: are kids worse or different today than they were 30 years ago? Now this is good small town journalism. I like it.
I love being in the education business. If you read through the article you'll see why: these people are the salt of the earth. They care about kids, and they understand that whether it's 30 years ago or now, Detroit or Cleveland, Findlay or Upper Arlington, that kids are kids. You could throw a group of third graders from all parts of America into a classroom together, and despite their educational differences, they would all try to get away with stuff, and they would all become thick as thieves in a matter of days, if not hours.
A couple of excerpts below.
First grade teacher Cynthia Metzgar, and I'll bet she was a pretty good one:
"Years ago it was corporal punishment, possibly a trip to the office principal or removal from the classroom to the hallway. Today, it's more of a discussion tactic that helps the students understand and learn how to deal with their actions, ultimately leading to the ability to make better choices. The students learn early on that they are responsible for their own actions and what the consequence is going to be," she continued.
"Yes, student behavior is different today, but we handle student behavior in a different way as well. Kids are kids, and we love them just the same," Metzger pointed out.
I only disagree a little with the viewpoint I hear a lot from educators today suggesting that parent support was better in the past. I don't really agree with that although teachers (even young ones) say it all the time. I've not seen a change in my career from the standpoint of parental support. Some parents support the school and some don't. It was the same when I was a kid, and I don't think anything's changed. It's a matter of parenting styles, not a generational issue.
But discipline has changed, as Mrs. Metzgar pointed out above. It's generally more of a bureaucratic discipline (suspensions, loss of priveleges, and so on) and corporal punishment pretty well gasped its last breaths about 15 years ago. RIP.
I like what Gail Malloy had to say also:
Teaching "continues to be what it was when I started teaching 30 years ago ... the most rewarding, frustrating, challenging, time-consuming, exhausting, invigorating and important career a person could ever choose. I'm thankful that it chose me," Malloy concluded.
Go read the whole article. Very enjoyable.
Saturday, March 31, 2007
Teaching the Bible
Stanley Fish wrote a column in the Times today on teaching the Bible, and the idea that the Bible can be taught as a secular text. Fish was responding to the recent Time Magazine story on teaching the Bible in school. (It's behind the Select wall, so I have no link):
The truth claims of a religion--at least the religions like Christianity, Judaism, and Islam--are not incidental to its identity; they are its identity.
And then:
The difference between the truth claims of religion and the truth claims claims of other academic topics lies in the penalty for getting it wrong. A student or a teacher who comes up with the wrong answer to a crucial question in sociaology or chemistry might get a bad grade or, at the worst, fail to be promoted. Those are real risks, but they are nothing to the risk of being mistaken about the identity of the one true God and the appropriate ways to worship him (or her). Get that wrong and you don't lose your grade or your job, you lose your salvation and get condemned to an eternity in hell.
Of course the "one true God" stuff is what the secular project runs aw from, or "brackets". It counsels respect for all religionsa and calls upon us to celebrate their diversity. But religion's truth claims don't want your respect. They want your belief and, finally, your soul.
I guess I see Fish's point, but the classroom isn't the place where students ultimately have to decide whether they accept those truth claims. In other words, teachers can present the truth claims made by various religions and texts, but utimately it isn't the teacher's job to decide whether the student has accepted them, and the school is not a church, and the teacher is not a confessor or a vessel for divinity.
I think Fish's argument is that to the true believer there is no "secular" reading of a text like the Bible. Or, that when a teacher attempts to teach sacred text, he or she can't really do it in a secular way, because no matter how the teacher tries the text itself is making a claim to divine truth that the student has to either accpet or reject in his or her own heart. But in that case it is the text that is making the claim, not the teacher. If Fish is trying to argue that we (schools, teachers) are proselytizing simply by bringing the sacred text and its arguments forth, making it available to discussion, then I have to take issue with him.
We present texts in schools all the time that make various sorts of claims, and part of educating a child in how to read and think is teaching him or her how to think through those claims and make judgements about them. In the case of religious claims, of course, educators have to tread lightly--we can't teach a child how to accept or understand a particular claim of truth in the Bible. That's the job of parents, church, synagogue, and so on. But often we present Biblical text as a means to other kinds of literary and historical understanding. In fact, it's absolutely vital to do this in order to teach history and literature in a fundamentally honest way.
In teaching early American literature for example, you simply cannot teach the subject of Puritanism (Calvinism) without some discussion of the claims of sacred truth made by writers and thinkers of the time. I've had long, exhausting conversations in class, for example, about Jonathan Edwards and pre-destination. In his famous sermon (excerpted in most American lit textbooks) "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God", Edwards argues various truths about man's relationship to God, about God's foreknowledge of our lives, about our ability to know God and our worth to him. These questions make claims of truth, certainly, but my presenting them to students does not amount to an endorsement on my part. In fact, my experience is that students tend to reject Edwards' aruments out of hand, in spite of my attempts to say, "not so fast: let's think about what Edwards is really saying." They respond so negatively, as most modern readers do, to the idea of pre-destination that they do need some coaxing from me to think about the ways it could be true, and how contemporary readers might have understood it. But ultimately the truth claims Edwards makes are for students to evaluate against their own experience and the religious traditions they've learned on their own. It hardly amounts to proselytizing on my part.
I would argue that these kinds of discussions in are absolutely critical to understanding our country's intellectual history, and even for my Protestant Christian students to understand the history of their faith. We come up against the same need to understand Christian thought when we read The Crucible, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Scarlet Letter, Paradise Lost, and a wide range of other works of literature that most teachers find to be critical parts of our shared intellectual and cultural heritage.
Even when we aren't teaching the Bible, we are teaching the Bible. It can't be avoided. I don't like the idea of an organized campaign to promote teaching the Bible, but that's another point. We don't "bracket" truth claims when we teach them, but we don't endorse them either. Fish suggests there is no middle ground, but teachers have been treading on it for years.
