Tag Archives: teacher compensation

Getting the Best Teachers into the Toughest Jobs

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center for american progressEven though it has been known for some time that teachers and principals play the largest role in student success, it is only recently that districts and schools have started making requisite changes to their strategic management of talent. This is the central contention of Allan Odden’s new report, Getting the Best People into the Toughest Jobs: Changes in Talent Management in Education, which delves into detail about how those changes began, just what those changes are, and how that process of change is progressing.

Allan Odden is the director of Strategic Management of Human Capital, professor emeritus of educational leadership and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and co-director of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education. His recently authored  report was written for the Center for American Progress.

The executive summary states the following:

The issue of strategic talent management in education leapt onto the policy and practice agenda quite recently. Yet in a short time period, huge changes in policy and practice have occurred. From a set of disjointed policies and even-worse practices, a comprehensive and holistic view of strategic talent management in education is developing, supported by new and ambitious federal and state policies and rapidly changing local practices. Admittedly, policy design still needs significant calibration, and local implementation is far from complete. But the landscape of how teachers and principals—the education talent—are managed is dramatically changing. A once-haphazard mix of approaches is moving toward many more strategic systems that are designed to ensure that only effective teachers and principals are recruited, tenured, retained, and well-compensated—particularly in urban and poor rural communities.

This paper examines the evolving landscape of talent management in education, broken in five sections:

  • Section one: Talent management, or lack thereof, in education at the close of the 20th century
  • Section two: Educational change that began at the dawn of the 21st century
  • Section three: Rumblings of change that evolved into comprehensive new federal and state human-capital management policies and local practices
  • Section four: Rumblings of change that coalesced into a foundation of change across the country and the new world of talent management
  • Section five: Why the focus on talent evolved and quickly assumed such a prominent role in the nation’s education policy and practice agendas

In part, due to positive state and local response to federal requirements for new education programs such as Race to the Top, School Improvement Grants, the Teacher Incentive Fund, and No Child Left Behind waivers, states and districts are identifying and using new channels for recruiting better talent into the nation’s schools, especially high-poverty schools in urban and rural areas. States and school districts are also developing new ways of evaluating teachers—methods that use a measure of instructional practice and evidence of student learning, and in some cases student surveys on the academic environment. States and districts are then using these new metrics to determine whether or not to tenure teachers, as a condition for promotion, to implement new salary schedules, and for dismissal—instead of seniority.

Though there is steady progress toward designing and implementing all these new policies and practices across the country, there is also opposition, and the road forward will certainly be bumpy. To be successful, these initiatives need to solve some major challenges such as making the new evaluation systems affordable; ensuring that the scores that teachers receive on their evaluations derive from “cut” scores that are set at rigorous levels in order to accurately identify the most effective and most ineffective teachers; deciding where to put the toughest requirements for entering the teaching professions so the talent that flows from the new recruitment sources are not shut off; and embedding all this in an effective school improvement strategy that is linked to the new Common Core State Standards Initiative.

Among the recommendations is adjustment of entry standards to the profession to ensure that only the top talent meets the entry standards—based on rigorous assessments of content knowledge and by implementing a rigorous “bar exam,” which should assess both instructional expertise and impact on student learning—as well as standards for full professional license to be required of every novice teacher at some point after three to five years of teaching. This approach supports both traditional and alternative pathways into the profession, while also ensuring that only demonstrably effective teachers earn the full professional license and then tenure—whatever their pathway into the profession.

For access to the full report, see: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/report/2013/04/04/58474/getting-the-best-people-into-the-toughest-jobs/

Related video from the Center for American Progress is available at the following link: http://www.americanprogress.org/events/2013/03/26/58049/getting-the-best-people-into-the-toughest-jobs/

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Is the Teacher Incentive Fund a Good Investment?

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edThe Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF), created in 2006 as a $600 million plan to “support efforts to develop and implement performance-based teacher and principal compensation systems in high-need schools” and bolstered in 2009 under the Obama Administration, has now been functioning long enough to evaluate some of its results.

Five districts are nearing the end of their initial grant periods: Algiers, Louisiana, Amphitheater Unified School District #10, Arizona, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, North Carolina, Guilford County Schools, North Carolina, and South Carolina TAP. Jonathan Eckert, former employee at the U.S. Department of Education, praises TIF as a “good investment.”

The following is from a related press release:

Approaches spurred by the federal Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) to change the ways that educators are trained, supported, evaluated and compensated are “good investments” to strengthen teaching and learning.

Based on Eckert’s expertise with the TIF program from his work at the U.S. Department of Education, “Increasing Educator Effectiveness: Lessons Learned from Teacher Incentive Fund Sites” examines the federal program’s impact on teachers, students and policy-at-large in nine different locations.  Five are nearing the end of their grants: Algiers, Louisiana (TAP: The System for Teacher and Student Advancement), Amphitheater Unified School District #10, Arizona (Project EXCELL!), Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, North Carolina (Leadership for Educators’ Advanced Performance  [LEAP]), Guilford County Schools, North Carolina (Mission Possible), and South Carolina TAP.  Four are newer grantees, having received TIF funding in 2010: Henrico County, Virginia (Learning Leaders), Indiana Department of Education (TAP: The System for Teacher and Student Advancement), Knox County TAP, Tennessee, and Louisiana TAP.

This is a follow-up to Eckert’s 2010 report, “Performance-Based Compensation: Design and Implementation at Six Teacher Incentive Fund Sites”, funded by the Joyce and Gates Foundations.  The new report monitors many of the same sites as they completed their five-year grants.

“With a growing body of research illustrating the importance of effective teachers and principals in driving increased student learning, TIF is an important federal commitment to more fully understanding how to use compensation systems and other supports to increase effective teaching in high-need schools,” said Eckert in the report.

“At the first five sites we have found states, districts, schools, and teachers who are adding significant value through increased collegiality, improved teaching practice, better professional development, and most importantly, increased student learning,” he continues.  ”The four additional sites appear positioned to demonstrate similar results.  These are good investments that should be sustained.”

Common themes have emerged among all sites that have helped high-need schools improve instruction and develop a framework, through TIF, to support sustained increases in student academic performance.

1.      Rigorous and accurate evaluation must take place in order to provide educators with realistic and meaningful feedback on their performance and a clear path toward improvement.  Algiers educators attribute their growth to transparent analysis of formative and summative assessment through weekly job-embedded professional development aligned with extensive support.  Indiana is implementing a similar program.  Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools credits much of its success to implementing TIF through the district’s curriculum and instruction instead of human resources.  This emphasis on teaching and learning facilitated significant improvement on the design and implementation of student learning objectives.

2.      Compensation is a key factor, but must be aligned with other aspects of human capital management to support improvements in instruction.  Amphitheater Unified School District Project EXCELL! schools have seen significant improvement in reading and math due to feedback through test scores, multiple evaluations, and weekly group meetings where teachers examine student work to identify areas for instructional improvement. Teachers and principals at Guilford County, North Carolina’s, Mission Possible schools are using data to improve practice with support at the school and district levels. As a result, they have demonstrated increased composite scores on state assessments and increased retention rates.  Amphitheater, Guilford County and Henrico are identifying areas for growth to provide instructional coaching.

3.      Supporting teachers as individuals as well as teams creates a collaborative environment that emphasizes learning and improvement.  All nine sites have created systems in which collaboration is prioritized, supported, and incentivized.  Teams of teachers meet at all of these sites, sometimes led by master or mentor teachers, to examine evidence and focus on student learning.

4.      Leadership positions with substantial autonomy and additional compensation attract effective educators to high-need schools.  Knox TAP, Tennessee, is using teacher leaders to drive impressive outcomes for students in high-need schools.  This is done through combining NIET’s resources with job-embedded professional development, career advancement, strategic compensation, and rigorous evaluation focused on growth to recognize and spread teaching expertise.

5.      The experiences of schools and districts implementing reforms can have a significant impact on policy at the state and local level.  South Carolina, Tennessee, Indiana and Louisiana have taken lessons learned over the past six years at their local TAP sites to inform state policies around evaluation and compensation.

Download the full report on the NIET site at http://www.niet.org/assets/increasing-educator-effectiveness-lessons-learned-from-teacher-incentive-fund-sites.pdf.

The 2010 report is located at http://www.tapsystem.org/publications/eck_tif.pdf
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Teacher raises: What works best?

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A crucial question at the nexus of the issues of student achievement and battles between school districts and teachers unions is the issue of teacher pay scale.  A helpful study by Jason A. Grissom of Vanderbilt University and Katharine O. Strunk of the University of Southern California has recently delved deeply into this question and come to the conclusion that creative options may be best for districts seeking to boost student achievement while also facilitating teacher growth.

The two primary types of pay scale options used by school districts and evaluated by Grissom and Strunk are front loaded pay schedules and back loaded pay schedules. In the first model, young teachers, who may be attracted outside of the teaching profession by other, more lucrative job opportunities, are offered rapid increases in pay in their first years of teaching.  The goal of the front loaded model is to bring in high achieving new teachers so that students will make corollary improvements. In this front loaded model, young teachers receive an average of 37% greater raises based on years of experience than do teachers who have been in the profession longer. Critics of this model argue that these teachers are not yet equipped to provide their students with the same level of quality instruction as their veteran counterparts.

The more common model in districts that use collective bargaining, due to the dominance of older, more experienced teachers in teachers unions, is the back loaded pay schedule. The theory here is that veteran teachers are the ones who will help students make the greatest achievement gains, so those teachers should be retained through attractive pay scale options. On average, these veteran teachers receive salary increases of 135% more than non-veteran teachers. This model has sometimes been held up as a paragon of the problem of teachers unions: older, burned-out teachers protect each other but do not help students make gains.

Grissom and Strunk, after serious study of the empirical evidence, suggest that neither plan is the silver bullet for satisfying teachers or increasing student achievement. First, the authors argue that there is correlation between back loaded pay schedules and a lack of student achievement gain; however, the correlation is so small that it cannot be seen as causal.  Further research here would help clarify the efficacy of back loaded pay schedules.  Furthermore, the authors argue that front loaded schedules do help attract quality, young teachers, but that this cannot as of yet be conclusively linked with greater student achievement. In conclusion, Grissom and Strunk offer creative options that may break the mold of these two dominant pay scale models. As succinctly summed up by Amber M. Winkler of the Fordham Institute for Advancing Educational Excellence, “For districts struggling under onerous collective-bargaining agreements, other financial perks such as loan-forgiveness or signing bonuses might make sense instead.”

For a link to a summary by Amber M. Winkler, see http://www.edexcellence.net/commentary/education-gadfly-weekly/2012/september-13/how-should-school-districts-shape-teacher-salary-schedules.html#body

For the original article, please see http://epx.sagepub.com/content/26/5/663

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Is DCPS a model urban school district?

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The New Teacher Project (TNTP) has recently released a new report, Keeping Irreplaceables in D.C. Public Schools: Lessons in Smart Retention, which holds up the reforms begun in DC public schools by former schools chancellor Michelle Rhee as a model for human capital reform.  The main thrust of the reforms highlighted concerns good teacher retention through new processes of teacher evaluation and compensation.

TNTP was founded by Michelle Rhee in 1997, and current DCPS chancellor Kaya Henderson is also a former TNTP executive, so it may come as no surprise that TNTP supports the reforms that have been taking place there, but the findings merit serious consideration because DCPS is “the first large school district in the country known to be retaining far more of its Irreplaceables than its low-performing teachers.”

The report claims that schools lose their best teachers due to the combination of “weak school leadership, poor working conditions, and restrictive policies.” Most school districts  retain good and bad teachers at about the same level—bad news for students.  But since the reform began in DC in 2007 under Rhee, according to the report, DCPS has retained 88% of its “Irreplaceables” and kept only 45% of its lower performing teachers (2010-2011); both statistics are markedly better than other similar, large school districts.

These statistics are also important because they contradict the main worry that many had about the reforms put in place by Rhee, namely that in the attempt to remove poor teachers, higher performing teachers would also be driven away.  In fact, the “Irreplaceable” teachers, according to the surveys of teachers, principals, and reviews of teacher evaluation results used in the report, feel more valued and have the chance to achieve compensation to the tune of $100,000 per year after at least four years of experience.

Finally, the report makes three recommendations about how to continue and extend the recent successes in DCPS:

  • Schools should maintain higher expectations for teachers
  • DCPS should do more to evenly distribute its top teachers across the District because DCPS is weaker here than other school districts
  • DCPS should do more to help principals create the sort of healthy learning environments which will retain the “Irreplaceables”

For more information including links to summaries of the report and the full report itself, please visit the following websites:

http://thenewteacherproject.createsend1.com/t/ViewEmail/r/EC8C4848BCB6C6C2/4A7FCE5F9C0A574EB4B1B1F623478121

http://tntp.org/irreplaceables/dcps

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Should Teachers Be Allowed to Sell Their Lesson Plans?

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Last week Andrew Rotherham from Time magazine wrote about whether teachers should be able to sell their lesson plans. He talks about kindergarten teacher Deanna Jump, who has made more than one million dollars selling her lesson plans online. That is what teachers are looking for, since the new Common Core standards are in effect; textbooks lack the information teachers need in their lesson plans.

Since teachers need new information, many websites have popped up around the web to enable sharing such as BetterLesson (which in June signed up its 100,000th teacher), American Federation of Teachers’ Share Site, TeachersPayTeachers, and TES Connect. Rotherham writes:

Standards and testing may hog the spotlight in education, but they spell out only what students should be able to do, not how to get kids to learn those skills. Lesson plans are teachers’ tools: lend someone a better hammer, and he’ll do a better job. But a lousy carpenter can’t fake it even with the greatest tools money can buy, and the lesson plans that come with textbooks often aren’t very engaging or aren’t in line with the Common Core State Standards that 45 states recently agreed to adopt. There’s a lot of concern among teachers about meeting these standards, particularly since more states have started tying teachers’ evaluations to their students’ performance…

That may sound like a raw deal until you think about what’s been happening in higher education, where more and more colleges are getting professors to put their syllabus and, more recently, videos of their lectures online. But it’s a new frontier in the long insulated K-12 world. And as a legal matter, it’s not cut and dry: if teachers produce a lesson as part of their regular work, even if it’s on their own time, does their school or school district have any right to profits from it? In 2004 a federal court in New York said yes. Look for more litigation as the money involved with these sites grows.

For more information and the full article, go to http://ideas.time.com/2012/09/20/should-teachers-be-allowed-to-sell-their-lesson-plans/

 

 

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How to Build a Better Teacher

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In a recent article for Slate, Ryan Fisman reflects on the current emphasis on teacher effectiveness.  Is firing bad instructors the only way to improve schools?  According to new research, maybe not.  Few districts have the “luxury” of being able to fire low-performing teachers and replacing them with more effective ones.

This being the case, how else can schools be improved?  According to new studies from psychologists, economists, and educators, it may be possible to improve low-performing teachers, rather than firing them.  “If these studies can be replicated throughout entire school systems and across the country, we may be at the beginning of a revolution that will build a better educational system for America,” writes Fisman.

For example, Cincinnati’s teacher evaluation system (discussed here) focuses on meaningful feedback and coaching as part of teacher evaluations and was phased in gradually.  These methods hold promise for improving teacher quality; teacher performance, rather than jumping for a year or two and then settling back to its original level, has been on the increase since implementation in 2000.  And the expense of “creating” a better teacher is fairly modest—about $7,000 per teacher.

Another recent study from the National Bureau of Economic Research focused on “loss aversion” and how it might affect teacher performance.  Rather than paying for performance, the study involved giving teachers an upfront bonus, with the understanding that some (or all) would have to be paid back if their students failed to meet performance targets.  The authors believe the “loss incentive” was extremely motivating, enough to transfer a bad teacher into a mediocre one, or to make average teachers excellent.

Fisman realizes it is unlikely that a “pedagogical silver bullet that makes a great teacher” will ever be found (despite the large sums being spent to discover it).  However, it may be possible to find individual interventions that “do have outsized effects on student learning.”

To read the full article, please visit http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/2012/07/how_to_improve_teaching_new_evidence_that_poor_teachers_can_learn_to_be_good_ones_.html

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Teachers “Trending Toward Reform”

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Over the past decade, teachers have seen changes in both their conditions of employment-from pay to retirement benefits-and their practice. Far too often, these policies have been made by people who talk about teachers, rather than talking to them.
Last fall, Education Sector surveyed a nationally representative random sample of more than 1,100 K-12 public school teachers. The results of that survey are published in the newly released Trending Toward Reform: Teachers Speak on Unions and the Future of the Profession. The authors look at teacher attitudes on a variety of teacher-centered reforms, including new approaches to evaluation, pay, and tenure, and the role of unions in pushing for or against these reforms.
The report shows how teachers’ thinking has evolved on some reform issues. It repeats questions from Education Sectors’ 2007 survey Waiting to Be Won Over and a 2003 Public Agenda survey on these same issues. The findings show continued strong support for teachers unions–81 percent of teachers say that without a union, they’d be vulnerable to school politics or administrators who abuse their power. But teachers also want unions to be involved in more than just “bread and butter issues.” They want unions to put more focus on reform.

Other key findings include:

  • Teachers think evaluations are improving. In 2011, 78 percent said their most recent evaluation was done carefully and taken seriously by their school administration.
  • Three out of four teachers–76 percent–say that the criteria used in their evaluation were fair.
  • Teachers are warming to the idea that assessing student knowledge growth may be a good way to measure teacher effectiveness, with 54 percent of 2011 teachers agreeing. This compares with 49 percent in 2007.
  • Teachers are still opposed to including student test scores as one component of differentiated pay, with just 35 percent supporting that idea.
  • Teachers do support differentiated pay for teachers who work in tough neighborhoods with low-performing schools (83 percent support). Teachers also support differentiated pay for teachers who have earned National Board of Professional Teaching Standards certification or for those who teach hard-to-fill subjects.

To read the full report, please visit http://www.educationsector.org/publications/trending-toward-reform-teachers-speak-unions-and-future-profession

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Green Dot Announces Pay-for-Performance Agreement

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Green Dot Public Schools (GDPS), a charter school network operating in inner urban Los Angeles, announced earlier this month the approval of a contract with its teachers that includes a pay-for-performance evaluation tool.  Though the agreement does not “make the critical link between teacher compensation and student performance,” it does position the charter group to do so in two years.

Right now, teachers are getting their regular step and column advancement, but both labor and management is working to perfect the evaluation process with the expectation of formally incorporating it as a component for setting teacher compensation.  This agreement is unique among public (both charter and traditional) schools, because not only has a pay-for-performance plan been agreed to, but it has been agreed to with the support of the teachers’ union.

“We’re working very collaboratively with the teachers,” Marco Petruzzi, CEO of GDPS said. “They’ve really put a lot into this – in fact, nearly 30 percent of our teachers participated in focus groups and other activities. I think that’s really important – that it has been a group effort and not top-down, and we really worked through the details with the union.”

Though GDPS has always had a contract that includes performance evaluations, the new system makes the process more formalized.  For starters, administrators will be required to get specific training before they are allowed to conduct classroom evaluations.  They will also have to follow a specific process for conducting the evaluation, including transcribing a minimum sequence of at least 45 minutes of instruction.

In the meantime, GDPS has implemented an element of pay for performance in their compensation structure.  For the next two years, high performing teachers will be eligible for bonuses from $500-2,000.  “What we are doing is piloting teacher bonus on top of the step and column increases,” said Arielle Zurzolo, a teacher in GDPS and president of the union. “So teachers are guaranteed their money until we can feel confident to say that we trust this system – that is, when the system can say that you are an effective teacher, you are an effective teacher.”

Petruzzi said the administration is very sensitive to concerns about moving ahead too quickly.  “We know that there are a lot of kinks that need to be worked out,” he said. “We want, number one, for the credibility of the system to be very high.”

The progress made by GDPS vis-à-vis teacher evaluation has largely come from grant money from the Gates Foundation and the US Department of education over the past three years.  The uncertainty of how the system might continue to be funded once the grants have ended has led GDPS to consider how they may continue to make significant steps forward.  California’s struggling economy has decreased state education funding, and it is hard to predict when it might recover.  “In our mind, if we can get funding back to where it was [in 2008]—we have a path to make all of this work,” said Petruzzi.  “And it’s something that is highly repeatable by all districts.

To read the full story, please visit http://www.siacabinetreport.com/articles/viewarticle.aspx?article=2408

 

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Higher Wages Would Attract, Keep Better Teachers

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Last month, Jack Jennings of the Center on Education Policy wrote an article refuting the contentious AEI paper claiming that public school teachers are overcompensated and under-achieving (see a summary of this study here).  Jennings contrasts the methodology of the AEI study with a study from an impartial group, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a group composed of the world’s most advanced economies.

Jennings discuses OECD’s Building a High Quality Teaching Profession: Lessons from Around the World, which analyzed how high-performing countries have developed their effective educators.  Among the other areas of analysis, the report included a discussion of teacher pay.  The US ranked 22nd out of 27 countries in teacher pay, meaning American teachers are paid only 60% of what the average, college-educated American worker is paid in other sectors.

Another study that refutes the AEI paper was conducted by McKinsey & Co., a major market researching firm, which concluded that the US was not attracting higher-performing college graduates to the teaching profession because the pay is so low in comparison to other industries.  To be competitive, teachers would have to be paid between $65,000 – $150,000 per year, far more than the current salaries.

“Money is never the reason why people enter teaching, but it is the reason why some people do not enter teaching, or leave after a few years,” Jennings concludes.

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Pension Reform May Attract Better Teachers

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The Center for American Progress has released two new reports that attempt to predict the outcomes of traditional defined-benefit pensions for teachers vs. cash-balance plans.  Redefining Teacher Pensions: Strategically Defined Benefits for New Teachers and Fiscal Sustainability for All, by Raegan Miller, argues that since teachers are the single most important school-based resource affecting student achievement, all areas of compensation, evaluation, and tenure should be “fair game” for policy reform.  Specifically, teacher pensions “should be subject to the outcome- and equity-oriented workforce goals of broader teacher reform programs,” which should attract more top graduates and career-changers to the profession, particularly those in STEM.

The second paper, Buyer Beware: The Risks to Teacher Effectiveness from Changing Retirement Benefits by Christian Weller, argues that it is not that simple.  Changing teacher pension plans from defined benefit to cash-balance plans may have the reverse effect than that predicted by Miller.  “Higher turnover and larger initial pay [the usual effects of cash-balance plans] work against each other with respect to average teacher effectiveness…more experienced and presumably more effective teachers will become more likely to leave their jobs in search of higher paying or more rewarding work.”  They would be replaced by less experienced teachers, which would lower average teacher effectiveness.  On the other hand, this effect could be offset by the “quality” of the new hires, like those mentioned by Miller.

Weller believes that changing pensions from defined-benefit to defined-contribution or cash-balance plans will depend on the size of the effects of the amount of turnover, the extent of the learning curve, and the reaction to initial compensation changes.  He ran a simulation on the change, with the following outcomes/conclusions:

Average teacher effectiveness could decrease.

The risks for teacher effectiveness could be much greater than demonstrated in the simulation, since most simulations do not take into account the costs associated with higher turnover and transition costs.

Lowering teacher turnover could lower the risk of declining effectiveness.

Higher initial compensation has a limited impact on the risk of decreasing effectiveness.

There are substantial transition costs in switching retirement benefits.

For Miller, the pertinent point is that defined-benefit plans do not serve the overarching goal of education reform.  She recognizes that pension policy “is not a potent lever, on its own,” but that it needs to be studied carefully to identify policies that “enable, catalyze, reinforce, or complement other policies sharing the goals of improving the overall quality of the teacher labor force and creating greater equity in the distribution of teaching talent.” Traditional plans, she argues, do not serve these goals.  Therefore, she offers the following recommendations:

  1. Amend state constitutions subjecting any benefit-enhancing legislation to protracted, rigorous scrutiny.
  2. Amend ESEA so that district Title I, Part A funds are penalized in proportion to failure to make actuarially required contributions to defined-benefit pension plans.
  3. Redefine pension benefits for new teachers using a cash-balance approach that will leave existing defined-benefit plans alone, while also “loosen[ing] the grip that the traditional salary schedule has on teacher compensation in the broadest sense.”

To read Miller’s full report, please visit http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/09/redefining_teacher_pensions.html

To read Weller’s full report, please visit http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/09/buyer_beware.html

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