Chicago teachers asking for 30% raises over next 2 years

[anvi]

If it were up to me, I'd offer concessions on pay, pension and school-day and school-year length.  But I'd wouldn't go along with tying merit pay or contracts to students' standardized test scores. 

Well, I guess that makes a lot of people happy that so little is up to me.

[anvi]

Um, krazen, do you seriously propose that a teacher in Chicago should make less than $75,000?  How could they possibly live?

Teachers in rural Missouri start at about $28,000 and max out around $45,000 - this is merely a subsistence level salary there, as is $75,000 in a large, expensive urban center like Chicago.

The starting salary of $28,000 is definitely criminal, and I have friends teaching 5-5 course loads in St. Louis itself, never mind rural Missouri, for $29,000.  A friend of mine, when he started teaching at DePaul about eight years ago, had a starting salary in the low 40's.  And, just in case anybody thinks that's a killing salary-wise, it would be good to remember that teachers are also taxpayers, so it's not like any of these people clear those amounts--and this after at least ten years of training in college and grad school.  

On the other hand, I lived and taught in the Chicago area for four years--I left earning a little over 60K, and I had an apartment in Evanston and was pretty content pay-wise, I would have been able to save around $1,000 a month had I not needed to travel so much to keep up the thing with the gf.  If I had had a family there, on the other hand, the partner would have needed to be earning a decent wage.   The work, however, was very dissatisfying, so I took a pretty substantial pay cut to teach elsewhere in the state.  

But one thing I really don't like, as a kind-a sort-a "younger" teacher (early 40's)  in Illinois is that, in both institutions where I've worked, we are barred from paying into and earning Social Security and have to be enrolled in the state pension fund instead.  And the "pension" plan I have is just a 403(b), to which the school is supposed to match my contributions, but my current school still doesn't even though I've worked in the state for ten years.  What all this means is that, as far as I can tell, if I continue to teach in Illinois, I will never be able to retire.  The teachers in the state who have gone before me have pretty effectively emptied the till, both in terms of salary and benefits, and Illinois is busted several times over.

Striking for more salary and benefits in a state whose pockets have holes in the bottom just doesn't accomplish anything except incur the community's ire.  If there were money available, then everyone everywhere would be happier and there would be more point to negotiating, but as it is, agitating for anything other than better facilities so we can have better teaching conditions and resisting completely fallacious methods for improving the system like merit-pay tied to standardized testing doesn't make sense to me.  There was a strike at my university last year, and the teachers' union was basically in it for the maintaining of tenure language in the contract and a 1% raise over the course of two years.  That shook out, for me, to an extra $1.62 per day gross, and getting it meant that non-tenure track faculty would certainly be laid off (as they have since been).  So I weighed that against my students' needs and my real solidarity with junior colleagues and decided to stay in the classroom.  So, if I were in Chicago now, if the strike was just about the merit-pay scheme as currently constituted, I would strongly consider striking, because such schemes have never worked anywhere, and there are very clear reasons why they don't.  But if it was just about the money, I myself would keep going to work.

Maybe that all makes me a "slave" to the system.  I'll admit that I have a kind of underdeveloped sense of self-interest.  I want my work to be meaningful, and as long as it is, if I can live on the pay, I'll do the work.  But that's just me.  Like I said above, no one on either the state government's or the union's side would ever want these things to be up to me.

[anvi]

In response to BigSkyBob's post to me.

I know full-time entry level teachers who are earning that in St. Louis too.  But, let's think through this for a second.  How about we think in terms of hourly wages in a free market and see how a beginning teacher makes out compared to one minimum wage worker with no education requirements beyond high school? Let's then compare their salary to that of other average entry-level workers with equivalent educational levels?  

Let's assume a new single teacher has a load of four or five courses to teach per term.  Their pay is $28,000 a year gross, which after 15% in federal taxes and about 6% in Missouri state taxes comes down to a net of $22,120 per year.  Now, that pay is compensation for for 36 weeks, two 18 week terms.  That would shake out to $614,44 per week net.  Now, a very recent study just released by the Gates Foundation, which surveyed 40,000 public school teachers, concluded that the average teacher works 10.4 hours a workday, which includes contact hours, preparation, grading and administrative responsibilities.  That's a 53-hour work week.  That would make the hourly compensation for a new teacher, $11.60 per hour, net.  

Minimum wage for a 40-hour work week in Missouri is $7.25, but a full-time single minimum-wage worker in Missouri would pay about the same 21% in federal and state taxes, so their net hourly pay would be about $5.73.  

So, a new teacher in Missouri makes just barely over twice the minimum wage in Missouri net.   But, here is the kicker.  Let's say the minimum wage worker in Missouri finished high school (though not all need to, of course).  The new teacher with at least a masters degree, and possibly a doctoral degree, which would be required to qualify for the job has an extra six to twelve years of higher education.  All that education makes the new teacher only double the minimum wage.

Now, let's compare people in other professions with masters and Ph.D. degrees.  The new teacher in Missouri makes $28,000.  The BLS puts the average new full-time social worker with a masters degree at a salary at $40,000 per year.  An MBA working for an average bank in 2009 made about $120,000 per year, before bonuses.  How about Ph.D's?  In 2009, according to the BLS, the bottom 10% of people with chemistry Ph.Ds who worked in industry earned about $36,000 per year, with the median salary for industry-empolyed Ph.Ds in this field at $72,000.  But let's even forget for a second about advanced degrees and take a peek at just technical training.  An entry-level computer-aided design drafter with a high school degree and some community college courses can pull in an average entry-level salary of $42,000 a year.  

So, to put all this in perspective, if we think $28,000 per year for a new full-time teacher in Missouri is an adequate salary, then we think new teachers should be earning twice the minimum wage, 66% of the salary of a community-college educated CAD-drafter 70% of the wages of a new social worker, 77% of the wages of a new industry-employed chem Ph.D., and 23% of an average MBA newly hired at a bank.  

Now, obviously, most teachers who have been in the field for a long time earn a lot more than $28,000 a year.  But if we think that's a fair entry-level wage, it seems to me that our market doesn't value new teachers very much, especially when one considers how much more heavily colleges and universities are now relying on them relative to how many tenure-track positions they offer.  And, if this is how much we value them, I wouldn't expect to draw too many talented people into the profession or expect much in the way of educational quality from those there now.

[anvi]

As to evaluation standards, I'm fine with letting schools retain firing options for every teacher's entire career, and I think rational evaluation procedures by peers, mixed in with incentives for continuous professional development and offering to teach for periods of time in poor urban and rural schools all make sense.

I don't think teacher compensation or careers should be linked to standardized test scores.  Here is why.

If you do that while leaving the rest of the current system in place, then teachers will be hired or fired, promoted or demoted, on the basis of their students' test performances, but there will still be tons of financial aid money and open enrollment available at colleges and universities.  All this does is give teachers incentives to cheat and students no incentive to learn anything.  That's like making dentist licenses depend on their patients' dental health, but then letting even the patients with lousy teeth get leading roles in Hollywood flicks.  The dentists will just find creative ways to get good reports filed to whoever is on the oversight boards.

If you want to use standardized testing, then you have to do systemic reform where scores on those tests will determine what schools and career training opportunities students can qualify for as well as how much aid they can get for what.  That puts the incentive to learn back in the students' court, where it belongs.  On the teachers' end, you ensure that they get requisite training, qualify to teach the subjects they are assigned, mentor them, have them peer monitored, and give them incentives to improve and the school the option to let them go.  If the systemic reforms are rational, then merit pay based on standardized test scores will be unnecessary.  And since that approach has never been proven to produce the desired results anyway, why not do things right instead?  So much of what passes politically for education reform nowadays really does nothing, and the financial incentives in education, from student aid to funding schools to the way teachers are handled is also all f-ed up.

[anvi]

Yeah, Ernest, there is an oversupply of people with advanced degrees competing for teaching positions.  Allowing primary and some secondary school to be staffed by people who have earned teaching certificates along with their BA degrees would be ok with me.  But the current oversupply of people with advanced degrees gives institutions that hire free rein to nab the most credentialed people at the lowest prices they can.  And, since school facilities themselves, as opposed to their administrative and teaching staffs, have suffered from less and less state funding as the years have passed at the same time as population has risen, schools without major endowments have to draw more and more of their funding from tuition and fees, and that also motivates them to hire the best credentialed people they can afford so that they can survive in this competition.  The circle is many kinds of vicious. 

[anvi]

Depending on how well they are crafted, standardized tests are designed to be and often can be effective measures of student aptitudes for certain subjects, which is why they can be used to determine areas where students are more or less likely to excel in either their work or further instruction.  But standardized tests are not objective measures of teacher effectiveness; they are not designed for that purpose, and they are fundamentally unsound indicators of it.

First of all, in current circumstances, state education boards may variously assess, and school districts, schools or individual teachers may use, textbooks for their courses that may or may not have significant overlap with materials chosen by national standardized test designers to assess.  Students who perform well in classes using the instructional materials assigned in them may easily perform poorly on a highly generalized standardized test that measures different competencies than were covered in a class.  Inferring that teachers performed poorly under these circumstances would just be wrong.  If you had national standards that controlled curricula in all states and national boards that determined textbook usage everywhere that corresponded to standardized test assessments, some of this problem could be mitigated, but advocates for measuring teacher performance based on standardized test scores don't, as far as I'm aware, also advocate for this.  (EDIT: There is however a movement afoot in lots of schools to centralize curricular decisions away from departments to supervising college administrators, so while not much may be heard of this option openly, something portending it is going on in institutions at all levels.)

Standardized tests that are well-crafted to measure student aptitude in specific subject-areas are constructed with problems that are at least moderately difficult in that subject area.  That is so because the tests are constructed precisely to effectively differentiate student performance in their specific areas.  As a rule, only somewhere around half of the students who take such a standardized test on a well-defined content area will perform well.  Problems that will likely be answered correctly by a large majority of students will more often than not be excluded from a standardized test altogether.  By contrast, school classes are often designed to ensure that most of the students who take the class will become proficient at a defined and minimum set of skills that correspond to the level of the class being taught.  Therefore, student performance that could in every fair respect be judged above-average in classes available in a particular school's curriculum might only be middling on a standardized test.  That result does not lend itself to an accurate assessment of teacher effectiveness either.  Once again, I don't hear advocates of merit-pay or hiring and firing decisions based on the standardized test performance of students advocating for a nationalized student curriculum that would mitigate the effects of this situation either.

Finally, students have aptitudes for different subjects that have nothing to do with teacher performance.  Students with extraordinary verbal skills may simply not be very talented when it comes to math, and vice-versa.  Students who have extraordinary musical skills simply may not be able to figure out chemistry, and vice-versa.  Students who have native intellectual talents for history may struggle terribly with logic puzzles.  Should teachers be penalized because of variations in student aptitude?  

There are also areas that are more controversial, having to do with economic or socio-cultural disparities, that I won't emphasize here.  What I've already written should be enough to show that standardized tests ought to be employed as more or less "non-subjective" measures of student aptitude for different areas of study, which is precisely what they are designed to predict.  They are not objective measures of things they were never designed to measure.  Using a standardized test to assess teacher effectiveness in our educational framework will work about as well as using a lawnmower to fly to Japan.

[anvi]

Good grief.