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Teacher pay
Some teachers in wealthy suburban Chicago earn six-figure salaries. How much should districts pay top teachers? Should teachers be paid more to work in struggling, high-poverty schools?
Some teachers in wealthy suburban Chicago earn six-figure salaries. How much should districts pay top teachers? Should teachers be paid more to work in struggling, high-poverty schools?
I believe good teachers should received adequate pay for what they do. A highly qualified dedicated teacher especially those working with students with challenges and social economic issues should received the top pay. What wealthy suburbs pay their teachers is what they can afford and poor communities need to ensure that their pay scale is equitable to those of wealthy communities.
At the risk of nepotism charges (hey, it's the Chicago way), I'm turning my space over to my brother Fred. His blog post today, speaks volumes about our question of the week:
The teacher-bashing Tribune. We’ve had enough.
July 19, 2010
by Fred Klonsky (PREAPrez)
Public school teachers have gone through some tough times the last couple of years. Oh, Sure. Except for the big guys on Wall Street who always find a way to make money out of every crisis, especially one of their own making, most folks have been going through tough times for a while.
But teachers. This past Spring thousands lost their jobs and union-bashers claimed it wasn’t so. These right-wing pundits, job-loss deniers, argued that it was just a trick for teacher unions to get more money. How has that being going, exactly?
Salaries have been stagnant for years as union locals are forced to settle contracts at zero increases, or less. But the Trib features front page investigative reports about six figure teacher salaries. As if the profession is made up of Wall Street Gordon Gekkos with greased back hair driving black beamer convertibles.
By the way, an Illinois teacher gets on average $58,000 a year.
Next year, any new teacher coming into the profession is no longer eligible for the current pension system and will be enrolled in a new, much lousier one. This is in part because of the anti-teacher pension campaign of the Chicago Tribune.
This campaign of teacher bashing has many impulses: A perfect storm of union haters, school privatizers, Tea Party anti-government ideologues, and traditional political conservatives who are using the problems in public education for their narrow electoral ends. With the Chicago Tribune leading the way. Teachers have been quite clear about a financial solution. 15,000 of us were in Springfield just last April with a simple and clear plan. Reduce the dependency on local property taxes. Raise the state income tax by a couple of points. End the practice of basing the quality of an Illinois child’s education on their home address or the color of their skin.
To this the legislature said no. And the Trib said no. The Trib said the solution was to fire teachers.
This past week, Charlie McBarron, Communications Director of the IEA, wrote a letter to the Trib, canceling his subscription of 40 years. Charlie writes that over 800 teachers responded to his post over just a few days. If you have a sub to the Trib, cancel it. Don’t go to their website. Web hits are calculated for ad rates. Don’t link to their site. Write them and tell them why. Blog it. Tweet it. Email to your friends.
We’ve had enough.
Back in the early 2000s, I cancelled my subscription to the Trib for basically reporting the "Teacher's Union Line" on every education story and refusing to report on district corruption and pension greed.
Now that they've realized that our education system is failing to produce a generation that can read their product, they seem to have gotten smart.
I think I'll try to get a few people to conditionally re-subscribe.
__
On a more serious note, I think every teacher should be paid what the market says they deserve. If $20/hour is a good wage for a young teacher to facilitate Spanish acquisition using a Rosetta Stone system, then they are worth $20/hour.
If a dedicated and talented teacher conducting the best Physics AP class in Illinois is worth $150,000, let's pay them that wage.
There is no intellectually sound reason to maintain the dead and expensive hand of Unionism in education. Sure, it's great for the closed class of people who have jumped through union hoops, but it is time to stop caring about unions, and start caring about children, parents, and creating the educated populace we are paying so much for.
Lastly, the existing pension system (even AFTER the tepid reforms), is completely unsustainable. There comes a point where you attain so much political power that you can get your purchased class of toadies to shower unsustainable benefits on you...
..up until reality re-asserts itself. The notion that you can pay a few 10s of thousand into a pension system for 25-30 years, and suck out a net present value of over $1,000,000 from 55 until death (often 30 more years) is an obscenity.
Early retirement and "end-of-career" bumps are examples of the politically powerful extracting unwarranted and unsustainable benefits from a pliant and purchased legislature. It had to end sometime.
Mr. Klonsky writes:
"This campaign of teacher bashing has many impulses: A perfect storm of union haters, school privatizers, Tea Party anti-government ideologues, and traditional political conservatives who are using the problems in public education for their narrow electoral ends."
My response:
Indeed, "narrow electoral ends" like getting education results we are paying for.
How about a little context here? "Problems in education?!" That has to be one of the best euphemisms I've seen in a long time.
We have skyrocketing property taxes and falling values. We have government employees getting rich while everyone else's wages are either frozen, cut, or gone. We have a political class that showers powerful unions with job protection and pension largess, all while Illinois is running yearly (unconstitutional) deficits between $5-13 billion. We have a completely irresponsible and un-serious political class that is fiddling while Illinois, along with our kid's human potential, burns.
While you rage against the Trib's change in editorial policy, take a moment to reflect on a greater view. When NY's Bloomberg can say things like, "I don't see why I should lay off some teachers so others can get raises," you have a self-created PR problem on your hands. You can't blame us 'union-haters' for that one.
Further, your solution (raise taxes) is doomed to fail. While IL is not an absurdly high tax state, it is right at the precipice of a) becoming one, and b) spiraling down faster, as its wealthiest people and companies are incentivized to leave for better business climates.
[Script for Quinn's Economic Development commercial...."Relocate to Illinois to help us pay our $160 billion of pension debt, unpaid bills, and deficit. Really!]
Tax increases fed into the maw of public employees absent steep cuts in payroll and pension costs will destroy the IL economy. As more leave, those few remaining will be called on to pay even more, triggering their leaving as well. It's a recipe for an economic death spiral.
Mr. Klonsky writes:
"Reduce the dependency on local property taxes. Raise the state income tax by a couple of points. End the practice of basing the quality of an Illinois child’s education on their home address or the color of their skin."
Here, I'm with you 95%. Let me add the other 5%. Zero/phase out ALL property taxes for education. (50-65% cut for all IL property owners). Raise Income and Sales taxes to HB750 levels. That's a real tax swap, not the fake shill pushed in 750. Abolish/phase out all school districts (Chicago included).
With all the $ coming from the state, individually fund each K-8 child with $6/7K, and HS kids with $9/10.
Charterize all schools, and develop a testing system that measures kids yearly for specific, sequenced content mastery that builds on itself overtime. Let schools redeem scholarships. Let teachers and others open new schools.
Lastly, separate all testing from the schools (too easy to scam or game).
You are 100% correct on the immorality of the current "district-based" system. It can't be reformed, so just kill it. The students and the dedicated teachers and principals are the "baby." Everything else (and yes I mean everything) is the "bathwater."
I was frankly sorry to see the recent Tribune piece suggesting that $100,000 is too much to be paying teachers. (They don't come right out and say that, but that was how most readers will have taken it.) Personally, I am neither shocked nor outraged that teachers are being compensated at levels comparable to other hardworking professionals. We all know plenty of teachers and principals who deserve at least $100,000 for what they do to prepare and motivate the next generation - and there are almost certainly more than 4% that fall into that category.
As we all know, teaching is a demanding profession that requires a high level of acumen and skill. Done well, teaching requires deep subject matter knowledge, creativity, patience, humor, collaborative skills, and the ability to relay concepts to many different kinds of learners in myriad and compelling ways.
Given how critical they are, the fact that some districts are able and choose to pay some teachers at this level is far from outrageous. In truth, given the relationship between a well-educated citizenry and economic and social health and vigor, we really cannot pay good teachers what they are worth...with one caveat.
Understandably, taxpayers want and deserve to know that salaries (especially at this level) reflect talent and impact. This will involve a significant shift in practice, given that currently most teachers are rewarded based on seniority and degrees or licenses - things that are wildly unreliable predictors of actual classroom practice. (On a related note, in Illinois, school districts spend over $240 million to reward teachers for earning Masters degrees, despite evidence that such degrees rarely add value to what happens in the classroom. I'm in favor of keeping that money in teachers' hands, but would rather see it distributed based on things that advance student learning - extended day activities, mentoring, etc.)
New teacher evaluation methods that dig more deeply into instruction and impact will help with this and are beginning to develop around the state, which is promising news.
At its core, education is an investment in our future. In these hard times, spending public dollars should be careful business. Not all teachers may deserve $100,000 salaries. But there are plenty that do, and it is good for the profession and our kids if effective teachers are paid closer to what they're worth.
It's interesting that the Tribune would focus on teachers who make more than $100,000 when less than 1 percent of Chicago teachers receive that level of compensation. The suburban schools who rely primarily on property taxes (the state contribution to education has declined by nearly 6 percent over the last 20 years) can afford to pay educators a premium, Chicago cannot.
Though I am not certain that the extra pay is the main factor that explains why the 6 schools mentioned in the Tribune article are in the top 40 of Illinois schools (according to test scores), it surely doesn't hurt. Clearly, it is not teacher unions that are the problem here -- it's a regressive tax system. After all, those top performing schools with highly paid educators are union districts. So, let's focus on the issue, not our pet axe to grind.
If the state of Illinois were serious about providing a high quality and equitable education system to all the children in the state, they would eradicate property taxes as the basis for funding our schools and instead raise taxes on wealthy Illinoisans and corporations.
In the meantime, Chicago teachers face the most difficult assignments and yet the most draconian attacks by the state legislature. The Illinois School Code and recent decisions by the Chicago Board of Education specifically target our district for 1500 lay offs, firing teachers without regard to tenure, restricting our ability to bargain class size, for preventing our bargaining unit from rejecting the creation of dangerous and unproven charter and turnaround schools.
Change is needed downstate first and foremost. We need politicians, like Heather Steans, to speak out against these gross disparities.
I'm willing to have my tax dollars go for hefty salaries, including "whatever the market will bear" for teachers who have to teach reading to 9th-graders who come in with 5th or 6th-grade reading skills. Which job is more difficult--teaching AP physics to well-prepared and motivated young people from middle-class families who support them, or teaching reading to frustrated, unprepared teens from low-income families in which they might be the first one to even make it past 8th grade? The first job takes little more than content knowledge, the second, a whole array of skills beyond that.
In 1882 the State of Illinois passed a compulsory education law following behind Massachusetts, the first state to pass this law in 1852. Currently children up to the age of 16 MUST attend school or parents will be subject to the consequences of this law, which can mean jail time. Now with this in mind let us consider that until this law is changed there will always be a need for teachers. This does not mean “good or great” teachers, it simply means those who have passed a set of state exams designed to gauge their knowledge on the rudiments of teaching. Let us be clear, if a teacher can pass this test it does not mean they are good at teaching, it simply means they have learned the foundations of teaching. Knowledge is very different than an applied skill, which is knowledge applied. To gain applied knowledge one must practice a learned skill over and over in an effort toward mastery. Everyone who sets out on this journey does not become a master, but a master should not be in the same category as the novice on a tenured or “lane” track of pay because of time.
A system that rewards exemplary teaching is merit-based. We should certainly pay more for those teachers who have proven their mastery of the curriculum and successful relationship building with students. This money should not be given to those teachers who have taught 15 or 20 years because they have put in the time. In many cases, as evidenced by the need for school reform across the country, many teachers have put in the time and wasted the lives of hundreds of students. A child’s hunger for knowledge in kindergarten has dwindled to mental malnourishment by 8th grade. There is much wasted time spent listening to elementary school teachers in communities where poor students at low performing schools must hear the mantra of tired teachers singing “I got mine, you better get yours or I am just here for the check” when his or her knowledge of classroom management failed to transform into an applicable skill. This is spirit killing for the student. The teachers journey, in these cases, toward mastery have taken a wrong turn when that song is bellowed.
Visit communities like Englewood and Roseland. Look into the faces of those students and tell me what you see. Right before the urge emerges to blame the parents consider that the students had to be in school 6-8 hours a day (just like their parents before). This is the law. Teachers who understand their role in a young person’s life and dedicates every sinew of their being to their students and craft should be paid well. Not because they have been “playin’ the game” for 15 or more years, but because they realized long ago educating young people is not a game and prove it consistently through the success of their students. This is mastery and the master must be paid well. Not only because our students deserve this, but also to influence a new crop of dedicated neophytes to take the journey toward mastery.
As a newer teacher who graduated in the midst of a recession now working for the Chicago Public Schools, I am actually surprised at how much teachers make. I think my view is purely generational, but among friends that I graduated from high school and college with (decent schools too) there are few that have the salary and benefits like a teacher with two or three years or service right now. Even among my older friends who have been in the workforce five to ten years, our salaries seem to be on par with each other.
I did not expect to make this much money going into eduction. I am sure if I was raising a family in the city my opinion would be quite different. Our jobs do require much more time that the hours between school day bells and we are professionals. It's not that I don't believe we deserve it, but I feel that because tax dollars are paid in the rears, only now is education feeling the crunch of the recession, and our industry demands the same sacrifices so many across the country have had to make. Unfortunately, just like elsewhere, those sacrifices will not be felt evenly.
We are always being forced to contend with "market-based" or "business-based" solutions as reforms to our public services, especially schools. The authors of the Tribune article seem to forget that time and time again, their newspaper promotes these "market-based" reforms as the only types of changes that will work. In this article, their analysis seems to ignore their stated principles. The most successful businesses invest most in the assets that produce the best products. The schools' assets are the teachers and what they teach is the product. Wouldn't it make sense then to invest most in teachers? This investment should include the most competitive salaries and benefits, professional development, mentors, and additional resources and supports. Not doing so would contradict the "business-based" solutions that the Tribune always touts as the only way to save our schools.