Public School Teachers Can't Ever Get (Or Deserve) High Pay/Prestige w/ This Going On

[brickbacon]

@Marley23

I don’t see how that’s the case when (at least in New York) the union contract mandates that a suspended teacher can only meet with an arbitrator a few days a month.

I cannot find any corroboration of that fact anywhere aside from that article. Evey other piece of information I have seen does not indicate that the unions are the ones sufficiently slowing the process. The one thing related document I found from the UFT states the following:

Any arbitrator who agrees to serve on the rotational panel must agree to the following terms:

a. Each arbitrator selected to serve on this rotational panel must agree to provide five (5) consecutive hearing dates per month for the months of September through June and two (2) hearing dates for the months of July and August. Consecutive days may be construed to mean five (5) dates within two (2) weeks unless otherwise agreed.

b. Arbitrators must provide three (3) dates, within ten (10) to fifteen (15) calendar days from the date the case was assigned to him or her, for a pre-hearing conference. One of the dates shall be at 9:00 a.m. Advocates must accept one (1) of the three (3) dates offered or it will be assumed that the date or dates offered at 9:00 a.m. is (or are) acceptable. Said dates must be in compliance with Education Law Section 3020-a (within 10 to 15 days from the date selected to serve).

c. At the pre-hearing conference, arbitrators must provide and parties must accept five (5) consecutive hearing dates within the statutory timeframe as delineated in Education Law Section 3020-a. Consecutive days may be construed to mean five (5) dates within two (2) weeks unless mutually agreed.

d. The parties are committed to having these cases heard in an expeditious manner. For this reason, absent extraordinary circumstances, arbitrators are not to adjourn hearing dates. It should be noted that normally attorney or party scheduling conflicts are not extraordinary circumstances.

e. In all cases, as delineated in Education Law Section 3020-a the final hearing shall be completed no later than 60 days from the pre-hearing conference and the written decision must be rendered within 30 days from the final hearing date.

Assuming I understand this correctly, it seems the delay occurs because the administration is delaying the pre-hearing conference because they would have to fully adjudicate the issue within the subsequent 60 days. The union rules seems to require a speedy resolution once things begin. Feel free to correct me if I misunderstand things, but I don’t see how it could take years to fire a teacher due to union rules.

@Marley23

94 percent of New York City teachers get tenure after three years. I do not think they are all deserving.

Ok, what are you basing that on? The administrators themselves deem a greater number of them satisfactory based on an in-person evaluation. What makes you think your analysis is more accurate?

@Marley23

The bell curve if nothing else. It is essentially impossible that 98 percent of all the teachers in such a huge system are satisfactory, and don’t forget that a few years ago, the percentage who got unsatisfactory ratings was even lower.

This makes no sense. The bell curve has no basis here at all. First, there is no guarantee that teaching ability follows a normal distribution. Second, people choose to be teachers, presumably, based on their relative ability to do so. Even if teaching ability followed a bell curve, most of the small percentage of people who choose to do it as a living could very well occupy one side of the curve in the same way it happens in other professions (sculptors, NBA players, pilots, etc.). Everyone in the NBA is a satisfactory player relative to the general population (the group occupying the entire bell curve). They may be good or bad relative to one another, but they are all great relative to the average person. You act as if “satisfactory” is such a high bar that we can’t statistically have enough people meet that standard. This is just wrong.

@Marley23

It indicates the evaluation process is meaningless. And you’re right, it also speaks to minimal effort from administrators. Perhaps they don’t want to have to go to the trouble of documenting bad work, or think it will reflect badly on the school. Or maybe they just don’t care; I certainly saw some of that in school. It’s unacceptable regardless.

Again, in Florida, where they have what would seem like your ideal system, they still don’t fire teachers more often. Either way you can’t just assume that since the evaluation process finds more competent teachers than you like to believe there are means the process is meaningless. It may be as you believe it is, but you should produce at least some evidence of that. While doing so, keep in mind that half of teacher voluntarily quit within 5 years, meaning that many incompetent teachers leave the profession. There is a natural attrition that may account for high satisfactory ratings too.

[UltraVires]

@brickbacon

This line of thinking only works if the incentive or disincentive is enough to cover the costs of providing it, or to induce the behavior you desire. The problem is that we likely cannot financially or politically sustain a merit pay bonus that is high enough to induce the behavior we desire. As we increase our standards, say X amount of extra hours worked, we would need to increase the pay bump. I see no evidence that there is that kind of flexibility in most budgets to do that. More to the point, once you link money to extra work or better results, you will ensure that people will rarely do those things for any other reason.

I would take the money that the teachers’ unions wish to use for across the board pay raises and distribute it in a merit based system. And, I would agree, if the reward isn’t significant enough, you won’t get the desired results. Businesses know that as well. If my boss promises me a $200/yr raise if I put in 10 extra hours per week, that won’t motivate me. And for whatever altruistic reasons and work ethic that I might put into doing my job, money talks and bullshit walks. Teachers are no different in that respect.

@brickbacon

Consumers may win. That’s the problem. When business norms predominate, the consumer wins when things are cheaper, more efficient, etc. It doesn’t follow that it will be better. If the goal is to produce more capable and knowledgeable students, business concerns are secondary to good educational practices. Ikea makes cheap furniture, which is good for the consumer. However, most will concede it is not better. We can run schools in an business like manner, but don’t be surprised when you get all the bad things that come with it.

Why is Ikea the only choice? In furniture, you can go from top of the line on down. Ikea works for some consumers the way a vocational education might work for some students. Other students might want the Macy’s brand and become a doctor. Why do we try to hammer home a one size fits all in education when you have students of differing abilities and different outcomes expected?

@brickbacon

It’s the first negative consequence they cited. These are, presumably, reasonable people. Granted, I don’t think you will see much outright backstabbing, just an aversion to sharing materials, ideas, and lesson plans. Say, Teacher A has a killer lesson plan, but they are saving it for their upcoming review. Do you think they will share it with other teachers before that point?

Business norms have already bled into the system. Right now you have teachers selling their lesson plans to other teachers. When there are economic incentives to make information and teaching practices proprietary, you will see fewer people giving it away for free. That hurts the profession as a whole.

A poorly designed system will cause disappointment. It happens at work. The guy next to you that makes more than you but has fewer skills. You even see it in traditional education pay. Why should the 12th grade advanced calculus teacher get the same rate of pay as the guy who scratches his balls and reads the newspaper while he pretends to watch his gym students play kickball? That causes resentment and is unfair as well. This means the system is bad, not the concept of pay for performance.

@brickbacon

Because the situation is often not zero-sum as it might be in merit pay situations. Also, most competitive programs do not have many students sharing notes or studying together in substantive ways. Most students in those situations do a strict cost-benefit analysis. You might see people working together in minor ways, but you also see active sabotage. A rising tide doesn’t raise all boats when there is a strict bell curve either. You might see some people working together, but you will rarely see type of cooperation you would hope to find in a group that shares collective goals.

First, no one said that the system had to be a strict bell curve. Second, why don’t all other industries have epidemics of non-cooperation? If this were true, then surely the evil corporate geniuses could see this and institute a single pay standard for everyone.

@brickbacon

Fair enough. I am all ears. Honestly, do you not think there are plenty of people on both sides looking to do just that.

You are not all ears. You, and teachers unions, have stated why you are opposed to a merit system in principle. Your side isn’t “looking to do” just that. You are arguing against it.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@jtgain

Why is Ikea the only choice? In furniture, you can go from top of the line on down. Ikea works for some consumers the way a vocational education might work for some students. Other students might want the Macy’s brand and become a doctor. Why do we try to hammer home a one size fits all in education when you have students of differing abilities and different outcomes expected?

First, folks, is there any chance y’all would be willing not to do those line-by-line rebuttals? They’re pretty hard to follow for anyone not directly being responded to.

Second, I want to oppose the idea that a consumer model is the appropriate one for schools. The reason is that the beneficiaries of schools aren’t the ones making the purchase.

Society pays for school because society benefits. Children are educated such that they can continue our society, becoming productive and competent and ethical and informed citizens. Therefore, we as a collective are the primary beneficiary of education.

The secondary beneficiary is the kid. That kids gets a heckuva lot from 12 years of public education.

The tertiary beneficiary is the parent. The parent has some of their duties relieved.

In our current system, the primary beneficiary–society–is the one who makes the decisions about school. Under the consumer model, it’s the tertiary beneficiary who makes the decisions.

The thing is, sometimes the primary and tertiary beneficiaries don’t have similar interests. A parent may really want their kid to go to a school that puts all its emphasis on basketball, or whole language, or algebra–but society is footing the bill, and it’s sensible that society gets to choose as a whole how the money is spent.

Of course, when parents are willing to foot the bill themselves, it’s a different story: they rightly get more of a say in things.

[UltraVires]

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

First, folks, is there any chance y’all would be willing not to do those line-by-line rebuttals? They’re pretty hard to follow for anyone not directly being responded to.

Sure thing.

@Left Hand of Dorkness

Second, I want to oppose the idea that a consumer model is the appropriate one for schools. The reason is that the beneficiaries of schools aren’t the ones making the purchase.

Society pays for school because society benefits. Children are educated such that they can continue our society, becoming productive and competent and ethical and informed citizens. Therefore, we as a collective are the primary beneficiary of education.

The secondary beneficiary is the kid. That kids gets a heckuva lot from 12 years of public education.

The tertiary beneficiary is the parent. The parent has some of their duties relieved.

In our current system, the primary beneficiary–society–is the one who makes the decisions about school. Under the consumer model, it’s the tertiary beneficiary who makes the decisions.

The thing is, sometimes the primary and tertiary beneficiaries don’t have similar interests. A parent may really want their kid to go to a school that puts all its emphasis on basketball, or whole language, or algebra–but society is footing the bill, and it’s sensible that society gets to choose as a whole how the money is spent.

Of course, when parents are willing to foot the bill themselves, it’s a different story: they rightly get more of a say in things.

I would contend that you are trying to make it seem that there is some sort of innate difference between education and any other industry, and I fail to see the difference.

Let’s take food service just as one example. In our country, you can get everything from fine dining all the way down to fast food. The primary beneficiary to having this system is society as a whole. Society can rely on a nice selection of differing foods depending on your preference and your budget.

Just because a few of the secondary beneficiaries, the consumer, may make an ill-informed and terrible choice, say eat cans of chocolate frosting for breakfast, doesn’t make the system a failure. It also doesn’t mean that the free market is incapable of handling the situation because some people might not make the approved choice.

I don’t see why education is different. Parents, as a whole, will have the best interests of their kids at heart, and make decisions which will better benefit society than having a administrative board make rules to handcuff them.

It’s basic central planning v. free market. Nobody is saying that society doesn’t have the primary interest or that they shouldn’t look out for the public purse. It’s just that in this, and most everything else, what is best for society is letting the market sort out what is needed.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@jtgain

Sure thing.

I would contend that you are trying to make it seem that there is some sort of innate difference between education and any other industry, and I fail to see the difference.

Let’s take food service just as one example. In our country, you can get everything from fine dining all the way down to fast food. The primary beneficiary to having this system is society as a whole. Society can rely on a nice selection of differing foods depending on your preference and your budget.

Thing is, society doesn’t pay for food: individuals do. And individuals get huge choices thereby.

When society does pay (e.g., school lunch programs), choices are sharply curtailed: society figures that if it’s on their dime, they’re going to make sure that the eater can’t gorge on cans of chocolate frosting. WIC follows the same pattern.

Food stamps don’t, to my knowledge–and you often hear criticism of the program for just this reason, that people get frustrated that society’s dime can be spent unwisely.

[CrazyCatLady]

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

Job security is nice, absolutely. But I’d prefer to keep my job security through being awesome, through teaching the shit out of my subject, through constantly learning about new pedagogical techniques, through improving my teaching community by sharing my own skills with other teachers. I work my butt off at my job, and while I don’t work as hard now as I did during my first year, I intend to keep working hard until I retire.

Yes, I could get a principal that hated me and that fired me for some dumb reason. That’s the risk in any profession. In fact, even before I get tenure, I have some protection. If it’s merely an issue of incompetence, the principal would need to put me on an “action plan,” saying specifically what’s wrong with my performance and documenting measures put in place to correct it, and then I’d have a few months to work on these areas. I think that’s fair, and that’s all the protection a teacher should need.

As for charter vs. public schools, and why some charter schools perform better, lemme tell you a little story. In my short career so far, I’ve retained one student, and it was a wrenching decision. I hated doing it. He missed about 20% of school days, way over the allowed level; he was low in all subjects. His mother never gave me a working phone number. She showed up for one conference all year, despite repeated letters home, and that was because she was facing criminal truancy charges if she didn’t show up.

Lemme ask: does that mom sound like the sort who’s going to go the extra mile to send her kid to a charter school? Or is she the sort who will do less than the bare minimum necessary to keep her ass out of jail?

If public schools are the default, then they will always be the ones who get the kids with the least involved parents. Set aside money, location, busing, any other issue you might be imagining is a barrier to participation in a non-default school: a signature on a single page asking to send a kid to a non-default school is going to be a sufficient barrier to keep kids like the one I described out of the non-default school. It sucks, but there it is.

So public schools will ALWAYS end up with the kids with the most academically-challenging home lives. You simply CANNOT do an apples-to-apples comparison unless you randomly assign kids to a public or charter school without requiring additional parental input.

You sound a lot like my mom, who taught at the same elementary school for 35 years. And, unfortunately, your reward will most likely be about the same as hers–20 years of classes specially loaded with kids like the one you retained (and worse) because the administration knows you’ll damn near kill yourself to keep them from falling through the cracks. Those kids will never, ever get the kind of grades and standardized test scores that kids who have more involved parents, more motivation, or just plain old more brains. In a merit-based system, you’ll rate worse than teachers who don’t get those challenging students because they wouldn’t go the extra mile.

That, imo, is the big problem with merit-based salaries for teachers. “Merit” is defined as “gets good results” which is defined as “kids getting good grades and test scores,” and that’s just not an accurate method of assessing how good a teacher is at all. As Mom always said, “You can lead the child to the fountain of knowledge, pinch his nose shut, pry his mouth open, and hold his head under, but you can’t make the little booger learn a goddamn thing.” There are four factors in how well a student does–the teacher, the administration, the parents, and the kid–and only one is typically held accountable when things go poorly. That’s the other big problem with merit-based pay.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

Can I simultaneously thank you for the compliment and curse you for the nightmarish future you suggest? I may eventually move into AIG (academically/intellectually gifted) certification, because although I’ll bust my butt for every student, I feel like I have something extra to offer to the kids for whom school comes naturally.

I’d be okay with merit pay, if it were based on the “value added” to each individual kid, based on a profile of that kid. That is, figure out some way in the first couple of years of school to establish a baseline for a kid: does the kid learn the equivalent of two grade levels a year? A third of a grade level a year? Each year thereafter, a teacher needs to at least meet that kid’s success so far in order to have that kid’s success contribute to merit pay.

Thing is, I cannot figure out how to remove fatal flaws from such an idea. There’s really no way you could give kindergarten teachers merit pay under this proposal, for example. K-teachers would therefore be under some peer pressure to underrate their students’ academic potential, so that first-grade teachers can get merit pay. Teachers would want to get kids who had shitty kindergarten teachers, because the crappy teaching would be reflected in the kid’s learning potential assessment.

But if there is a way to track what value a teacher adds to an individual kid, recognizing that some kids get every advantage at home and others get none, then I could be for merit pay.

The analogy I’ve heard is the idea that Medicaid/Medicare would pay doctors based on how healthy their patients were. You’d never do that in medicine, because of the very strong incentive it’d create for doctors to refuse to serve communities with a lot of unhealthy behaviors. Paying teachers based on how well their students do creates exactly the same sort of incentive.

[CrazyCatLady]

I dunno, Mom didn’t find it so nightmarish. She seemed to view it the same way I looked at working in the emergency clinic–it was a lot harder, and often heartbreaking and frustrating, but also a lot more satisfying because you know for a fact that you’re making a demonstrable difference. Working with smart, motivated kids with involved parents is fun, but you never really know if you’re actually doing much for them because those kids were almost certainly going to be just fine with you or without you. But the kids that have fallen an extra few months behind every single year they’ve been in school that you actually make up some of that lost ground, you know you’ve done a hell of a lot for them.

[Huerta88]

@Zoe

I believe the quotation about children learning that you are attributing to one of the teachers if actually intended to be a reference to a George Bush flub made in Florence SC in 2000:

Wasn’t attributing it to a teacher, I know perfectly well who said that and was just getting a dig in at him (and, perhaps suggesting that getting the federal government involved in edumacation where it doesn’t belong as that idiot did with NCLB is at best deck chairs/Titanic as long as the unions are going to be glomming on to the money while rejecting accountability).

[Huerta88]

I found the below frustrating though I’m not going to say there are any clear villains here. I myself think it is a terminally moronic idea to take any kids, let alone inner city kids who may never have learned to swim, to go swimming at an ocean beach, and to forget to get permission slips. But equally obvious, they were trying to let the kids have a good time and never intended or contemplated this.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/15/nyregion/15drown.html?_r=1&hpw

The frustrating part is that the junior teacher gets fired, while the guy who planned the trip gets reassigned and the boss of it all, the principal, suffers nothing. How can that be the just answer?

What does smack of the union mentality is the senior guys’ willingness to hide behind the contract. Sure, I get it, that’s how the contract works. But your irresponsibility and poor judgment were a big part of what got a kid killed. No shame, guilt, remorse, or desire to make some symbolic amends by quitting?

[BigT]

@jtgain

Parents, as a whole, will have the best interests of their kids at heart

This is where you are going astray. Most parents absolutely do not have the best interest of their kids at heart. They their own best interests at heart. Yes, sometimes these interests are the same, but many times they are not

For example, quite a few parents only see school as a daycare center, that gets their kids out of their hair. Few parents actually get involved with their child’s education even now. What makes you think they would later?

Look, merit pay is based on using selfishness as a motivation. Why wouldn’t you expect the parents to have the same motives? Heck, why would you expect parents to know the difference?

There are parents that are highly motivated to help their kids–but they rarely do so by actually helping the child learn. No, they harass the teacher, and make it difficult to give the bad grade or punishment the child deserves. They may think they are working in the child’s best interest, but they are not. The relative powerlessness of teacher, and the amount of bitching they get from parents was the main reason I did not continue to pursue a teaching career, despite doing rather well with tutoring (helping even the “unhelpable”) and even having taught a few classes, and people saying they understood me better than the teacher.

On another note: I really don’t see academics as competitive at all. We’re each competing to get the best grades we can. Unlike money, grades are not a finite resource. Just because my friend gets a high grade doesn’t mean mine is going to be lower. Actually knowing the information is going to get me a higher test score than if I needed help, and that’s sufficient to keep me from not wanting to help anyone else. In fact, I actually got actual money for helping some people–something with immediate benefits.

I did do a cost benefits analysis, however: I barely turned in any homework, and shot for a straight 90%, as any higher level of work was not going to matter. Heck, in my AP calculus class, I didn’t even bother with the grade at all, since I knew the test would be the determining factor, and that my lowered GPA would not matter to the college at which I was already accepted. The only thing that made me make up a bunch of homework was when I realized I would have a D, and thus not be able to take the test. And, even then, I only took it to a C.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@Huerta88

I found the below frustrating though I’m not going to say there are any clear villains here. I myself think it is a terminally moronic idea to take any kids, let alone inner city kids who may never have learned to swim, to go swimming at an ocean beach, and to forget to get permission slips. But equally obvious, they were trying to let the kids have a good time and never intended or contemplated this.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/15/nyregion/15drown.html?_r=1&hpw

The frustrating part is that the junior teacher gets fired, while the guy who planned the trip gets reassigned and the boss of it all, the principal, suffers nothing. How can that be the just answer?

What does smack of the union mentality is the senior guys’ willingness to hide behind the contract. Sure, I get it, that’s how the contract works. But your irresponsibility and poor judgment were a big part of what got a kid killed. No shame, guilt, remorse, or desire to make some symbolic amends by quitting?

I gotta say, I agree with everything in this post. New York teachers’ unions have set up some really good stuff (I think of them every time I’m roped into yet another unpaid meeting outside of my regular work hours, further extending my week past 40 hours–in NYC, you can be required to attend just one such meeting per month, and after that it’s overtime, baby). But they also have set up some ridiculous stuff.

I can say that without thinking that the NEA in general is a bad organization, or thinking that public school teachers don’t deserve pay or prestige.