Thursday, August 14, 2008
Birth of the Cool (New Teacher Pay Policy)
One of the fun things about living in Washinton, DC is watching the Fenty/Rhee school reform juggernaut in real time. After decimating the bloated central office bureaucracy, closing low-enrollment schools, and generally bringing a sense of urgency, leadership, and strategic thinking that DCPS has long lacked, the chancellor is now moving directly to the teacher workforce, proposing a new pay system that's frankly pretty audacious. Here's where things stand:
Less than two weeks before classes begin, many of the District's 4,000 public school teachers are locked in a heated debate over Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee's proposal to offer salaries exceeding $100,000 for those willing to give up job security and tie their fates to student achievement. The rift is playing out in a blizzard of cellphone messages and e-mails, Facebook entries and posts on teacher blogs such as D.C. Teacher Chic and Dee Does the District. Some of the teachers who want "green tier" salaries plan to demonstrate this morning at teacher union offices on L'Enfant Plaza.
The split in the teaching corps largely, but not exclusively, is occurring along generational lines, with younger teachers more willing to accept the risks and older ones often questioning the proposal. Jerome Brocks, a special education teacher with 34 years of experience in D.C. schools, seethes when he talks about Rhee's salary proposal.
"It's degrading and insulting," said Brocks, to ask that teachers give up tenure and go on probation for a year if they choose the more lucrative of the two salary tiers under the plan, which is at the center of contract negotiations between the city and the Washington Teachers' Union. He said that Rhee wants only to purge older teachers and that for instructors to sell out hard-won protections against arbitrary or unfair dismissal is unthinkable. "For Michelle Rhee or anyone to ask that is like Judas and 30 pieces of silver," Brocks, 59, said.
Julia Rosen, putting her classroom in order this week for her third year as a second grade teacher at Key Elementary School, said she would have no problem with a system in which her pay, and maybe her job, was tied to her students' academic growth. "At this school, I think any of us could excel in that kind of a scenario," Rosen, 25, said.
The proposal is the linchpin of the chancellor's quest to overhaul public education in the District, a way to attract and retain high-quality instructors who would be held accountable for growth in student achievement. It would make them among the nation's best-paid public school instructors, enabling those with just five years of experience to make more than $100,000 in salary and bonuses.
Under the proposal, teachers who want to accept lower, but still significant, pay increases can keep the job security that comes with tenure. Those opting for top salaries, however, relinquish that protection. Those coming into the D.C. system would be required to enter the so-called "green" plan.
"Judas"? What is this, Free Trade Hall? It's very hard to square words like "degrading" and "insulting" with a pay system that teachers would only enter of their own volition. There's a certain infantilizing quality to this vision of teacher work, where individuals can't be trusted to make up their own minds about their relationship with management and shouldn't be allowed to make the tradeoff that virtually all well-compensated professionals make: more accountability and less security in exchange for more recognition and compensation.
If Rhee manages to make this stick, the key may very well be this:
One sentiment that seems to bridge the generational divide: The teachers union has done a dismal job in responding to concerns and questions about the plan. "You don't respond to emails, your voice mail is full, the website is not updated and you release no statements to let teachers know where we are in this negotiations process," Breipohl wrote to Parker yesterday.To be clear, Parker is by most accounts a good, well-meaning guy who is trying to work with the chancellor while dealing with a lot of internal dissent from some truly reactionary elements within the union. But that doesn't change the fact that his whole job is responding to teachers, while Rhee seems manages to be much more responsive to teachers and pretty much the whole rest of the world all at once. I spent some time in the central office earlier this year (doing research for a Washington Monthly article that's not on-line but is, of course, so great that you should run to your nearest library to track it down) and I can tell you that the above is true: Rhee really does respond to all her emails personally. She's also set up a whole "critical response team" whose only job is to fix problems and respond to questions as quickly and well as they can.
Some said Rhee, a prolific text-messager, has been far more responsive. "Pardon my ignorance, but why is the Chancellor able to e-mail me back with a multiple sentence response, but George Parker cannot send a one-word reply?" asked "Dee," author of Dee Does the District, who identifies herself as a first-year special education teacher.
Parker said he is trying to keep up with what he described as an enormous volume of calls and messages. "The numbers have just made it impossible to respond in a timely manner and carry on the day-to-day operations of the union," he said.
And here's the thing I think people don't really understand. Many if not most of those problems are being solved on behalf of DCPS teachers. Here's what I wrote about Margie Yeager, at the time the head of the rapid response team:
Yeager understands the importance of the HR office intimately; from 2001 to 2003, she taught second grade in DC's Simon Elementary School, back when their was no critical response team. At one point the district stopped sending her paychecks. Later, it accidentally cancelled her health insurance. Phone calls to HR were ignored, meaning that Yeager had to find time to come here to the central office--or, as she referred to it then, "this horrible, crazy place." The experience was so traumatic that when the district failed to refund her union dues (which had been embezzled by the union president and squandered on, variously, furs, handbags, shoes, Tiffany place settings, and a double-barreled shotgun) Yeager didn't both to call anyone. Now, many of the people who e-mail Yeager are tecahers dealing with the kinds of problems she once faced.
So on the one hand you've got an uber-responsive chancellor who reformed the bureaucracy to better support teachers and wants to give them the option to voluntarily enter a system that would pay them a whole lot more money. On the other hand, a union that can't return emails and is notable chiefly for a history of theft and venality so outrageous that it's memorable even by the highly attentuated moral standards of DC municipal government. As I said, it's interesting see what happens next. -- |
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