kitchen table math, the sequel: Teacher's Union Opposes Salary Increases

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Teacher's Union Opposes Salary Increases

In Washington D.C. a strange thing is happening. A proposal to improve the educational cesspool that is the public school system in the Nation's Capital is being torpedoed by the national teachers unions (despite support from the local union leaders and teachers).

I haven't seen the story reported in any US newspapers, and I wonder why not, since I read education columns quite regularly. If I were any more cynical than I already am, I might think there is a plot by the national unions to keep this particular proposal quiet. Or perhaps I just missed the US press stories due to summer vacations and what not. Anyway, the British news weekly, The Economist, had a short story two weeks ago.

The story begins with a typical indictment of the District's schools -- hugely inefficient, extremely high cost, abysmal test scores, and outrageous student behavior. And then the teachers:
Teachers are virtually unsackable and paid by seniority. Such incentives attract the lazy and mediocre and repel the talented or diligent.
But here's where it gets interesting, the solution is somewhat novel in education reform:

Ms Rhee [Michelle Rhee, School Chancellor] is thrashing out a deal with union leaders that would raise teachers’ wages dramatically. Starting salaries would leap from about $40,000 to $78,000, and wages for the best performers would double to about $130,000 a year. In return, teachers would lose tenure and be paid according to merit, measured in part by their students’ results. Current teachers would have a choice: they could join the new system or stay in the old one. New hires would have to join the new system. Over time, the quality and morale of teachers in Washington should soar. “Imagine the kind of talent the hard-pressed system could attract,” drools the Washington Post.

But wouldn’t all this require a huge expansion of the school budget? Perhaps not. The current system is staggeringly inefficient. The city employs an army of educational bureaucrats and has twice as many schools as it needs. It pays to heat and air-condition some schools that are only a quarter full. Insiders reckon that, within a few years, the new pay deal could be wholly financed by cutting waste. And in the short term private donors are willing to shoulder much of the cost.

The plan’s boosters call it revolutionary, in that it applies to public schools a principle—reward good work and you get more of it—that every other employer has known for centuries. But it will be still-born if the Washington teachers’ union does not agree to it. Local union leaders rather like the idea of higher pay, but the big national unions are appalled at the notion that any teachers might give up tenure. Fearing an unwelcome precedent, they are leaning on the local union to kill the deal.

I can imagine the union drooling all over the pay hikes, but like most behemoth bureaucracies, they'd like the cake too, please. Big pay hikes, no accountability, lifetime tenure. Still, it is disheartening to see the difficulty the District is having getting this approved. If merit pay is a nonstarter in a district performing as badly as Washington D.C., what hope have we in a nominally high performing suburb?

9 comments:

SteveH said...

Still the ed school pipeline? Still no choice for parents? Better teachers (via ed schools) will still select Everyday Math. they might be smart enough to supplement, but they won't fix the underlying problem.

LynnG said...

If you can't reward good work by good teachers, then you are doomed to be saddled with a disproportionately high number that are 1) losers that can't find a better job or 2) people that view teaching as a "calling" or that have some kind of martyr complex.

I want neither. I'd love parent choice. Let me choose where my children are educated and by who. But if not that, then at least let's take the first step of putting the incentives in the right place.

ElizabethB said...

Here's the article:

http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11707298

Anonymous said...

I wonder what the rest of the proposed compensation package consists of? The union here negotiated a sweet deal this spring after threatening a strike (which is illegal in this state)...app. 5% /yr salary increase in addition to automatic step increases, which more than offset the app. 4% of medical insurance premium that the individual would now have to pick up. Only gov't jobs in this area reward so well.

I'd like to see the unions allow teachers to move more easily from district to district and across state lines without the major impact on the retirement.

LynnG said...

The thing is -- existing teachers are allowed to choose which system they'd like to be in -- if you are happy with tenure + no accountability -- you can remain in that system at the same pay level you currently get.

If you want to dramatically increase your pay, you can choose to switch to the performance based system. Only new hires are forced into the new system. Plus, only part of the evaluation criteria is aimed at test scores. You'd think the options for teachers would alleviate many of the concerns.

After all, we parents have no choice at all.

Anonymous said...

I heard about this on NPR at the end of last week, so it wasn't completely unreported. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92663976

-m, not mark

Catherine Johnson said...

I don't think we get much coverage of DC schools up here (TriState area) at all, do we?

Education journalism....we need more & better.

Maybe merit pay for education journalists?

Catherine Johnson said...

My feeling about merit pay is that, like everything else, the implementation will be awful & the whole thing will be a mess. iirc, Pissed Off Teacher wrote a crisp post a while back about why it will never work in NYC. (I'll have to find that and re-read.)

I don't see it working here, either. What I've seen here is that the best teachers get treated badly, while some of the worst teachers get their pictures in the paper.

They do what they do.

Nevertheless, I support merit pay on grounds that the very fact of merit pay changes the "narrative."

That's one of the aspects of NCLB I like best. At this point, it looks like NCLB is having some tangible effect on student achievement, more good than bad. Which is great.

But I think you could pretty easily show through content analyses of newspapers & the like that NCLB has had a strong effect on the narrative.

If you think about it, we don't hear nearly as much about "more money for the schools" as we did 7 years ago when NCLB was enacted into law.

That's true in my own cirlces.
NCLB, I think, created a robust genre of news stories about State Test Scores that constantly focuses people on the outputs of schools instead of the inputs.

That alone has had a huge impact (I believe).

If you compare news coverage in the NY TIMES, which frequently covers the results of schools, with the coverage in the little local papers, you see a paradigm shift. The little papers are still covering inputs: every week we read a glowing article about the wonderful new implementation or extracurricular "opportunity" our district has purchased for our lucky children. Inputs, inputs, inputs --- Look at all cool stuff we bought at the edu-mall!

You don't see a lot of those stories in the Times these days.

Speaking of "news" stories about stuff my district bought at the mall, the glossy, two-color district "newsletter" arrived yesterday with word that our teachers are attending Technology Camp this summer.

Catherine Johnson said...

After all, we parents have no choice at all.

We need a parents' union.

I'm pretty serious about that.