Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes:
Susan Troller had a typically good and very substantive article in the Capital Times this week about merit pay for teachers and other dimensions of teacher evaluations.
Merit pay is an issue that highlights the culture clash between the new breed of educational reformers and the traditional education establishment that finds its foundation in teachers and their unions.
Educational reformers nowadays frequently come to education as an avocation after successful business careers. These reformers, like Bill Gates and Eli Broad, believe that our approach to education can be improved if we import the sort of approaches to quality and innovation that have proved effective in the business world.
So, for example, let’s figure out what’s the single most important school-based variable in determining student achievement. Research indicates that it’s the quality of the teacher. Well then, let’s evaluate teachers in a way that lets us assess that quality, let’s put in place professional development that will allow our teachers to enhance that quality, and let’s have compensation systems that allow us to reward that quality.
Ed, thank you for your comments on teacher pay, and for your ongoing thoughtful feedback to the community on matters educational. The teacher merit pay issue is certainly a thorny one. Personally, I have always had some discomfort with rewarding all teachers with the same pay increases each year, regardless of ability and effort. I would like to offer up the following proposition, recognizing that changing teacher pay procedure is likely to be a most controversial subject, and that once increased benefits are paid for, little real increase remains to be added to teachers’ take-home pay anyway:
1. 50% of the pay increase is handled as before, uniformly distributed across all teachers according to tenure, grade, etc.
2. 50% of the pay increase is determined by the school principal, to be allotted as they deem appropriate.
Let’s face it, insiders know who the good teachers are and who the bad ones are. You don’t need tests, yet alone the extraordinary complexity of analyzing their results, to determine how well a teacher does. I’ll bet $20 to anyone’s $1 that most schools in this district would have at least one excellent teacher appear to be doing poorly according to the analysis of test results, (not to mention teachers of doubtful ability scoring well). Meanwhile, school principals (and/or assistant principals as needed, especially at the larger high schools) are clearly in a superb position to judge how well a teacher is performing. And they can do what computers cannot: consider non-objective criteria such as observed extra hours spent working with kids and developing new programs, classroom control, teacher-student and teacher-parent communications, etc., etc. What is it about the teaching profession that we seem so reluctant, indeed afraid, to exercise some human discretion and judgment in the allotment of pay increases?
Susan Troller’s article was well done. However, way more discussion and groundwork would be needed before moving forward with serious discussions of any kind of merit pay framework in Madison. Results of merit pay attempts are varied. The article did provide space for the various education players to draw their lines, which were no surprise.
Nearly everyone paying serious attention to education seems to agree teacher quality is very important to student learning. I’ve often wondered in which schools the District’s more experienced teachers are located? Are our more experienced teachers in our most challenged schools? Or does seniority enable those teachers over time to be more selective in the schools they teach in? Would we want our more experienced teachers working within the schools with the greatest student need? In the majority of instances, I would expect it to be so. What incentive does a teacher have to work in such a school in Madison – excellent principal, perhaps but variable; additional classroom resources – variable as well; financial – none, administrative support – slim to none and in some cases, negative.
All other things being equal, including pay, I’d select a work environment that allowed me to do my job with possibly less stress. Although, teaching any classroom takes considerable stamina and energy.
In MMSD, more senior teachers do have some choices. For example, if there is an opening in say Van Hise Elementary school for a third grade teacher, and two teachers apply with the “same” qualifications, the teacher who has met the “minimum requirements” for the position AND has more seniority will be offered the position. Yet, this teacher may not be the best match for either the school or the children.
The following is from page 54 of the Collective Bargaining Agreement between MMSD and MTI:
“Minimum qualifications shall be established by the “Employer” and equally applied to all
persons. Posted positions will be filled on the basis of qualifications as determined by the
Employer. When same are relatively equal between “teachers”, the senior teacher making
the transfer request for the position shall be transferred.
c. A teacher wishing to transfer applies to the principal of the building in which the vacancy
exists, or to such other person indicated on the notice. Upon request of said principal or
other appropriate individual, such transfer shall be made provided said teacher has greater
seniority than the teacher in the surplus pool (IV-O) who is qualified for the same position
for which the above mentioned teacher has applied. When granting such transfer request
causes the District to have an insufficient number of vacancies to which to assign staff
who are in surplus, the District may deny a teacher’s request to transfer.”
Would providing incentives for more senior teachers in schools make a difference? I don’t know. However, such a change to Madison’s Collective Bargaining Agreement would be a major, major change to that agreement at a time when fewer and fewer resources are generally available. Tricky, very tricky.
For what it’s worth, I took a look at the question of teacher experience vs low income student levels a number of years ago. Correlating teacher experience in years against the % of low income students by school in MMSD for the 2004-05 school year, I found there was only a very slight relationship between the two, which is to say the data was quite scattered, and schools with low levels of low income students (20-30%) had teachers perhaps only a year or two more experienced on average than schools with higher levels of low income students (70-80%) – a difference of roughly 17 years average experience vs 15 years.
On the other hand, there was a very high correlation between student-teacher ratios and low income percentages, with a student/teacher ratio of about 10-12:1 for schools with low levels of low income students vs a 6-8:1 ratio for schools with high levels of low income students.
Good to know – thanks. At the time, district teaching staff seems to have been fairly experienced (in terms of years) overall – don’t know how many have retired since then (given health insurance dilemma maybe not too many). Did you only look at classroom teachers? If so, data may imply not much room for movement based upon seniority – but hard to know w/o knowing number of openings, etc., and location. Since you did your analysis low income numbers overall went from 39-47%. Wonder what current experience level on average is and how your analysis would look today – FWIW, as you say, maybe not much?
Your latter point is about a policy decision (plus SAGE, etc.) put into place and continued to be supported by the School Board and the Superintendent. A high correlation in teacher/student ratios with low-income schools would be expected if the policies and decisions of the School Board are being implemented by the Superintendent with increased financial resources (through staffing allocations primarily) going to schools with higher low-income populations.
Have you followed how this has translated into improvements over time? If significant, perhaps merit pay would be too narrow a focus, giving “merit” to Dan’s comments in the Cap Times article.
But, in any case, I would just like to see broader based, substantive discussions such as this continue. More specifically, though, I would like to see more opportunities for substantive and meaningful input from the experienced teachers working with our students. Jim’s comment in Susan’s article touched on this issue, which is not insignificant.
I would also agree it’s good to hear from School Board members. I appreciate the time Ed Hughes and other board members take to comment in more depth on an issue.