$125,000 teacher salary Charter School: advice for Katie Couric

I just caught last week's 60 minutes story filed by Katie Couric on the NYC charter school that pays teachers $125,000 in salary.  I expected the piece to be a total disaster, but in the end it wasn't all bad -- in fact with a tiny bit of help Couric could have done a really good report.  It amazes me, by the way, that none of the big time network journalists can find anyone --even a relative who teaches -- to prep them on education issues so they can ask even elementary questions about how a school functions.  But to Katie, Lindsay Crist and all the other journalists out there who won't be reading my article -- I offer these observations and questions for free.

First the observations:
1.Does anyone believe that if this model is successful, even wildly successful,  that districts across the nation would start paying teachers $125,000?  Some places wouldn't so it simply out of spite.

2.  The Principal struck me as someone looking to create a business model for duplication in a for-profit scenario rather than an educator.  I tend to think this is what a good many charter schools are about -- in fact, one of the only ways this model makes sense is for privately run schools to use the higher pay to poach talent from public schools and leave a wrecked system behind.  Well, that's just the cynic in me talking -- I suppose if we really wanted to do things right in education in this country the highest paid and, hopefully the best, teachers would be working with the most challenging students.  We have virtually the complete reverse of that situation now -- and it probably will never change.

3. I actually loved the fact that much of the teacher evaluation was done by the other teachers in the school and that they seemed to have time scheduled into their day to work together on teaching methods and management techniques.  This virtually never happened in any of the schools I worked in and would have been invaluable.  Why?  Because all teachers face the same sort of management challenges with students, and seeing particular situations or personalities being handled by another teacher is an incredible learning experience.  Also, being evaluated by a peer is far more productive than by an administrator.  First, people tend to perform unevenly in front of an administrator because of the naturally stressful atmosphere generated by an official evaluation performed by someone with supervisory (and firing) authority.  But second,  administrators have often not spent enough time in the classroom, may be trained in a different subject area than the teacher or are so many years removed from the classroom to have much useful information to impart to a classroom teacher.  At any rate, having planned-for teacher interaction should be part of  any serious reform, this too will probably never happen.

4.  Underlying the whole piece is the tacit assumption that a regular teacher neither makes nor should make anything close to $125,000.  As far as I know, a lot of wealthy suburban districts top out in this range -- all you have to do is hang around for 25 years...

Lingering questions any educator would want answered:

1. I worry about the practical application of this model beyond a tiny number of schools.  It is fine to have an "American Idol" style hiring process to populate one boutique school but what would happen if there were a lot of these schools? If a thousand school districts in the US decided to adopt this model are we to assume that in addition to the giant sucking sound of superior teachers from around the nation switching to these districts, that thousands of recruits from the private sector would also rush in? How else could the whole staff be "above average"?  Also -- the main thing keeping people from teaching isn't the pay, its the extremely difficult workload and awful working conditions.

2. Does the school get to boot or not accept kids who have behavioral problems?  Any model seeking to improve the performance of America's worst schools has to answer this question.  Having taught one year with virtually no students with real behavioral issues and six years with a normal distribution, I can tell you that the year without the behavior problems was exponentially easier than every other; and it showed in the kids' performance.  This is a basic question that should have been asked right up front.

3.  What happens if the school gets to its 5th year and can't show any improvement in testing?  Does this mean that having a great teacher for every class makes no difference? Or does it mean that student performance hinges on many more variables than teacher alone? Or does it mean that, maybe, student learning and development can't be measured with test scores alone?

Laughable Media Double Standard on Nuclear Power

I don't know anything about the safety of nuclear power plants, not really, but what I do know is that the entire New York Metro area lives within the potential danger zone of the Indian Point plant. Should we consider decommissioning it in light of the disaster in Japan?  Seems like a legitimate question, so what do I hear on MSNBC this morning?  Nothing but serious warnings that we can't make policy based on a panic reaction to a crisis.  Great idea!   Maybe we should have used the same reasoning with regard to the financial crisis or the Patriot Act or the invasion of Iraq.  Stunning that a station part-owned by GE would take such a tack...

BTW I hear Governor Cuomo's position is that the plant's safety should be reviewed and denied an operating license eventually.  I agree, but his position seems nuanced enough to never actually come to pass...I hope I'm wrong on that. 

A slightly different Take on the Kruger / Boyland Mess

Another year, another couple of New York State pols going down on federal corruption charges.  It's an increasing disgrace and annually brings calls for "tossing all the bums out" and more ethics reform.  I'd like to explore both parts of that annual cry and ask the further question: would any of the proposed reforms do any good? It was obvious to me during my time working in the Assembly that certain legislators played the game for their own self interest or perhaps for a very narrow, influential slice of their constituency.  In my own mind I had placed Senator Karl Kruger among these and it always struck me as strange that his community would return him to office with huge margins, put up weak (if any) opponents and stir up little hullabaloo.  I know where I live there are tons of people who would claw their eyes out to get an Assembly or Senate seat and I can't see why Kruger's turf would be any different.  If we assume that many in Kruger's own community knew that he was self-interested and unprincipled -- if not corrupt -- why was he re-elected so easily?  Some would have us believe that all of the special interest campaign cash is the answer, but so many elected officials get reelected without needing to spend anything that I'm left wondering.  Supposing for a moment that campaign cash isn't the answer (some say that drying up the money would actually be a further advantage to incumbents); that would leave only the inherent advantages of incumbency as the outstanding variable. If true, what can be done about it?    I read the Brennan Center's recommendations and, on the subject of generating more competitive elections, I felt their suggestions were weak.  To break this down further, lets look at the substantive advantages of incumbency: name recognition inherently generated by public appearances and press coverage, the two or three taxpayer-funded annual mailings allowed all state legislators, relationships founded on member item contributions, and the knowledge that more senior elected officials receive more member item funding and staff with which to address community needs.  When you look at the list, one item is not changeable, one (the franking privilege is as old as the republic and the others are rules of the legislature essentially changeable only by the speaker.  Suddenly -- one starts to see the allure of the "term limits" opiate.  But,  term limits are undemocratic and a bad idea for reasons I will explain in a subsequent post.  So we should be pressing to change the rules which gives legislators added powers based on longevity, but does anyone believe this would make the difference in who we elect? I worry that so many of the proposed reforms are simply trying to make up for the fact that voters often don't care about choosing their state legislators and are shockingly ignorant of the process and important issues.  Voters only seem to engage on certain hot-button subjects -- most of which are already off the table in a democratic primary.  Ultimately, I'm saying that unless people are engaged in a different way, we will continue to have a predominance of ... ethically questionable legislators.  How should this engagement done?   I'll get back to you....

On to the movement for reform:  I read carefully the suggestions made by the Brennan Center and the Governor on this subject and mostly liked what I saw: better disclosure of financial information -- good.  Certainly would have helped catch Boyland and Kruguer sooner.  Disclosure is always a good thing, but who is reading the forms and what would be done with the information? Is it left to the press to pursue or what? The second proposal is for a unified ethics commission with the power to oversee the legislature and executive branches of government.  OK, I'm fine with that, but I'd really need to see the mechanics of how it works -- I get nervous when I see an apparatus for destroying legislators created without a clear picture of who controls this new-found power of destruction.  Prosecutorial positions like the Attorney General's Office have an incredible power to wreak havoc on people's lives and I think its appropriate that such positions are elected and that the people working under the A.G. are bound by a well defined ethical code.  We need to know more about this commission and who will populate it before we create something other than what is intended.

Pat Kiernan takes the mask off.

I've felt for a long time that all of NY's commercial media is far more conservative than its audience and I think the rightward drift has become even more noticeable in the last two years.  We all love NY1 and many New Yorkers have had a crush of one kind or another on Pat Kiernan, the network's morning host. But, the time has come to accept that it is not an accident that Pat is constantly boosting right-leaning stories from the NY Post during his daily "in the news" segment.  This morning he really ripped of the mask as he glowed over the Wall Street Journal's (Newscorp property) story about the NPR executive who was caught on tape supposedly calling the tea-party "racist".  Oh, he tried to pass it off in his cutsy way, pretending that he just liked the use of language in the headline, but the truth is he spent nearly 30 seconds making sure that a New York audience got to hear the Post/Fox story of the day attacking NPR.  Leaving aside the fact that the source of the story is the reprehensible and ridiculously unreliable James O'keefe -- most people watching NY1, I suspect, believe that the tea party IS motivated by racism and believe that the right is attacking NPR because it is one of the few news outlets not controlled by corporate cash.  How about a story about that Pat? Am I wrong?

10 Reasons to think twice about dumping LIFO.

I’ve heard a number of comments regarding the discussion about teacher layoffs which seem to be .  Below I will briefly lay out ten potential real-life scenarios, listed in descending order of moral defensibility that might make you think twice about killing LIFO outright.  First a couple of preliminaries --  everybody wants to be rid of bad teachers and find a way to retain good young teachers, but making determinations about good and bad are highly subjective and personal.  Most classroom teachers will tell you that they know a good teacher when they see one, that good teaching is an art rather than a science and that much of what makes a teacher successful cannot be taught.  I don’t know if I agree with all that, but I do know that the most obvious ways one would think to measure teacher effectiveness, such as test scores, probably can’t work and are so subject to manipulation by administration that they are virtually useless as an evaluative tool.  I also know from experience that Principals want teachers out of their buildings for personal reasons that have nothing to do with effectiveness, performance or student well-being.  If you are skeptical about the difficulty in putting teacher performance on a measurable scale you should really read the wonderful post by teacherken at Daily Kos on this subject and/or the research that provided the data for it.   My own personal journey from a newbie teacher with shaky exam results to being a vet with great results is illustrative of the problem.  In my “breakthrough year” I had: changed my curriculum, revamped my review process, got one year better at classroom management, was given an entirely different population of kids and partnered with other teachers to create a flexible schedule.  Two years after that, the state changed the test and made it significantly easier. Which variable was the most important in turning around my results? I don’t know and neither did my Principal. 

OK – that said, let’s look at some of the things that will be taking place if Bloomberg gets his way on LIFO and see what you think…

1. Rubber room guy:  Everybody has heard of this one, a guy believed to be so incompetent that no Principal will actually let him near their building, so he sits, killing time in an office somewhere collecting a salary.  This is the guy Bloomberg wants you to think of when he talks about ending LIFO.

2. Burn out: 20 Year veteran has seen it all and just doesn’t care anymore.  We all had one of these back in school and it would have been satisfying to see them booted out to another profession.  Supposedly really hard to fire, but remember, that lazy 20 year burn-out was once a lazy 2^nd year and some Principal gave him tenure.

3. Slow developer: 4^th year teacher who still doesn’t have it down, has a hard time either with management or really communicating with kids and maybe should be thinking about doing something else.  But, what has administration done to support this person?  Should anything be done or do they just get added to the huge list of new teachers that end up leaving the profession for easier careers?

4. Bad team player: There are a lot of these – people who may or may not be a very effective teacher but who see things differently than the administration and refuse to go along with the program.  These people are often hated and feared by administration because they undermine their “authority”.  But, from a different perspective, many of these folks have been effective teachers for years and don’t want to change their successful practices based on the whims of administrators who often come and go.  The two absolute best classroom teachers I ever saw fell into this category.

5. New Mom or Dad: Many of the reforming schools around the city have created a culture that pushes teachers to stay for many (uncompensated) hours after the contractual day has ended.  This strikes me as entirely appropriate for new teachers and for anybody during busy times.  But after the fist few years it is certainly possible for most teachers to take work home and leave the building earlier.  This is especially true when a teacher is starting a family as the responsibility for caring for young  children typically falls on the parent that can leave work earlier.  Under the kill-LIFO scenario there would be nothing to stop a Principal from laying off busy parents in favor of unattached twenty-somethings in order to maintain a go-go culture regardless of performance.  This despite the fact that staying after school is not a criterion of effectiveness recognized in the teacher's contract with DOE or anywhere else.

6. Future Mom:  Same as above, but as an enterprising Principal why not just try to populate my staff with teachers not likely to disappear for months at a time to have kids?  Seems like a good idea to keep more dudes around anyway -- they stay late, never have kids, shoot hoops...etc...
7. Union activist: Everybody hates the gal who knows the rules...in every profession.  The rules can be so annoying!  Why not dispense with such pests by simply saddling them with a class of low performers, give a few unsatisfactory ratings and...bingo: just lay her off based on "merit".  Not too likely that that the newbies will either know the rules or have any desire to make sure they are followed after that.
8. The age-old grudge: In 1993 teacher X called Assistant Principal Y an "asshole".  In 2011 now Principal Y finally gets his chance to do away with X, plus X costs twice what a young teacher does -- see how well that works for everyone?
9. The anti-hottie: It's a tough choice for Mr. middle-aged male Principal -- 30 year veteran battle-axe or 26 year old hottie who wears a truly meritorious tank-top every once in a while.  Hey the battle-axe had her chance, she should have saved her money for retirement. No?
10. The earnest grader: Parents come to Principal to complain that Ms. Tough Grader is unfair to their kid and is jeopardizing promotion or graduation.  Tough Grader has copious documentation to prove that the student's low grades are justified.  Principal grows tired of parent complaints year after year, but Tough Grader refuses to budge on standards.  Parents don't complain about good teachers, right? I guess Tough Grader just isn't performing like they should be...adios!

It is fair to say that much of this comes off as a slur against Principals and, well, there's no denying that that's true.  In seven years of teaching (including student teaching, subbing, summer-school, etc.) I served with one great Principal, about 4 mediocre Principals and one absolutely horrible one.  Some of the lesser one's probably would not have taken advantage of the ending of LIFO in the way I'm suggesting, but a couple absolutely would have.  What makes me nervous about this, is really two things 1) That the practical and financial incentives lean heavily toward booting veteran teachers regardless of how that would effect education and 2) changing this policy has the potential to undermine all collective bargaining between the city and its employees -- which is what I suspect has been the goal of this administration all along.

Advice to Media: Here is a clue on how cover the fight over teachers and the "Last in First Out" issue.

Without getting into my opinions on the substance of this issue which I will do in subsequent posts, I'd like to comment on the press coverage of the LIFO issue and how it could and should be presented with more balance.

I think it's inarguable that the overwhelming majority of the coverage among New York media outlets is supportive of the Mayor's position that LIFO should be done away with.  The clearest evidence of this is that papers, blogs, and television news happily report on a daily basis on the DOE projections of what possible layoffs would do to individual schools.  It has been far less noted that this speculation is a rather obvious way of dividing Union members and parents who are rightly frightened by the DOE's scenarios. It seems to me that if a reporter is  going to follow the DOE lead and report their version of what the future may look like, it is incumbent upon an objective reporter to also discuss the implications of how layoffs would be handled should LIFO be eliminated in the way the Mayor is suggesting.  If an objective standard is to be used as has been suggested, what is it?  Is it logical? Is if fair?  Is it what the public wants? If no standard exists in a publishable form, then how will layoffs truly be conducted?

Next, and I know reporters hate this, but we need a little historical research to bring some clarity and context to this issue.  Was this policy collectively bargaining for by the Union and agreed to for several decades by the city?  If so, what did the teachers give up in order to get this policy?  Has the city been benefiting in the form of lower wages and benefits only to now discover they don't like the deal?  Also, why would a Union bargain for this right in the first place?  Or, if the right was created by legislative action, why would legislators have passed it?  Was it simply effective lobbying by UFT and NYSUT or did it intend to address a significant problem?

It is extremely easy to forget that measures like LIFO were created to solve problems -- problems we have forgotten because they don't exist anymore.  Our predecessors may have seen things differently for different reasons, but its likely that they were not idiots -- we need to explore why these things were done in the past to avoid reliving the problems again.  Forgive the analogy, but I see the same thinking in parents refusing to give their children vaccines.  They refuse to give their children shots to protect them from terrible diseases like whooping cough because they are more worried about nonsensical theories they heard on the internet than of the actual disease.  Why?  Because they've never seen the disease because the vaccine they fear has nearly wiped it out.

See one kid with whooping cough and, believe me, you get your kid the vaccine.  Maybe if you see one round of layoffs without a LIFO guideline you suddenly see why it exists.  Anyway, I'd like to know and I hope someone does some good reporting on this.