Editor’s note: Doug Tuthill responds today to a post I wrote yesterday about the failure of school districts and teachers unions to enact meaningful differential pay plans for teachers – and how that’s indicative of a bigger failure to help low-income students.
Ron, you raised some excellent points in your blog post about the unwillingness of the Pinellas County, Fla. school district to provide each student with equal access to a quality education. For nine years, I received supplemental pay to work in a magnet program that served the district’s academic elite, and for 11 years I was a leader in the local teachers union, which was complicit in the district’s refusal to provide equal opportunity. So your criticisms stung, but they were accurate.
This may be self-serving, but I’m convinced the cause of this leadership failure is not bad people, but an organizational structure and culture that favors the politically strong over the politically weak.
Growing up in Pinellas, I attended segregated public schools. When the federal courts finally forced the school district to desegregate, the focus was on ratios and not learning. The district closed most of the black neighborhood schools and bused those children to schools in the white neighborhoods because busing white students into black neighborhoods was too politically difficult. But white flight meant some forced busing of white students was necessary, so the district created a rotation system that bused low-income/working class white students every two years to schools where the black population approached 30 percent. (The court order said no Pinellas school could be more than 30 percent black.)
While working-class white neighborhoods lacked the political clout to prevent their children from being bused every two years, their protests were loud enough to force the school board to look for alternatives. In the early 1980s, the district started creating magnet programs to entice white families to voluntarily attend schools that were in danger of exceeding the 30 percent threshold.
These magnet programs were designed to provide white students with a superior education. Class sizes were small, textbook and materials budgets seemed unlimited, professional development opportunities were extraordinary and special pay supplements to attract the best teachers were impressive. In my case, when I quit my job as a college professor to teach in the International Baccalaureate (IB) at St. Petersburg High School (SPHS), my annual salary increased 28 percent.
The magnet strategy worked - especially the IB program. Affluent white families began voluntarily busing their children to attend our program, and in many cases students got on buses at 5 a.m. and rode over 50 miles per day to attend.
Unfortunately, desegregation via magnet schools increased the resource inequities that desegregation was suppose to reduce. (more…)
Years ago, the powerful director of a local teachers union told me in no uncertain terms: Differential pay for teachers in high-poverty schools wasn’t a good idea and wouldn’t help poor kids. He called it, and I quoted him, “a glitzy solution.”
So what a jolt it was to learn, after the union leader’s passing, that the big school district he helped shape for decades actually had a differential pay plan – a lucrative benefit he signed off on for a handful of teachers in the district’s elite magnet programs.
I bring this up now because of a new report that touches on teacher views about differential pay. And also because of the backdrop it brings into focus on so many ed reform issues, including expanded school choice. Too often – and I say this as respectfully as I can - school boards and teachers unions appear to lack the will to do the right thing for low-income kids.
Differential pay obviously isn’t all that and a bag of chips. But it is a tool that can be used to attract and/or keep high-quality teachers in high-needs schools. Survey after survey shows the vast majority of teachers agree.
In the latest, an Education Sector report that asked teachers about all kinds of things, 83 percent said they supported more money for teachers in low-performing schools. That’s up from 70 percent in 2008 and 80 percent in 2007. With young teachers, the results were even more lopsided: 88 percent of them liked the idea.
And yet, with few exceptions, school districts have not tried differential pay in a meaningful way. In Florida, this has been true even though state laws and rules have required it. Many districts abide by the letter of the law, offering minimal amounts that don’t make a difference, and so the vicious cycles that could be mitigated instead swirl on.
The district in Pinellas County, Fla., is no exception. That’s the district whose longtime union chief, Jade Moore, I was referring to above. (more…)
As you know, we keep tabs on what’s written and said about school choice and ed reform, particularly in Florida. This week has been a doozy when it comes to head-scratching statements. Today we highlight a few and offer a quick response …
In just a few years, Orlando-based Fund Education Now has become the leading parent group in Florida. Aggressive. Media savvy. Super effective. I respect its members for their passion. I sometimes agree with them. But there are times when the rhetoric is at odds with reality.
After this week’s FCAT fiasco, the group wrote in an action alert to members: “These abysmal FCAT Writes scores are proof that Tallahassee’s ‘education reforms’ are an unmitigated disaster.” I agree the state raised the bar too fast and too fast on some of our standardized tests. But have the state’s policies as a whole flat-out bombed?
In the past four years, Florida has ranked No. 11, No. 8, No. 5 and No. 11 among all 50 states in Education Week’s annual Quality Counts report. And contrary to some critics’ claims, that’s not just because of policies on paper that sound good; it’s also because the state has moved the needle on student achievement, particularly for low-income kids. On the K-12 achievement portion of EdWeek’s rating – which considers performance and progress on NAEP, AP and graduation rates – Florida finished at No. 7, No. 7, No. 6 and No. 12 over the past four years. In 2011, it finished in the Top 10 in eight of nine progress categories. It finished in the Top 3 in six of them.
The reason Florida tumbled out of the overall top 10 this year is because of budget cuts, and because its NAEP scores have stalled in reading and math. That’s troubling when the state is still nowhere near where it needs to be. I think that’s what led the state Board of Education to be too bold in raising the bar.
But Florida’s policy makers, like them or not, have been more right than wrong in the past decade when it comes to standards and accountability and school choice. To deny there’s been progress is good for stoking fury and mobilizing troops. But it’s unfair to the teachers who made it happen. And it could undermine changes that really did make things better for kids.
In an op-ed Sunday, syndicated columnist Bill Maxwell describes what he sees as another round of teacher bashing in Florida and blames “conservative lawmakers who dominate Tallahassee” and are gunning to privatize public schools. The prompt for his outrage: A cost-cutting decision by the Pinellas County School District to curb the use of individual printers by teachers. (more…)
