"So what kind of teachers could a school get if it paid them $125,000 a year?"

Parent Cafe
21

<p>The whole premise of this school, I think, is that overall, low socio-economic, high minority schools don’t get all the best teachers. The experiment, I think, is that what would it take to recruit the very best teachers to work in such a school. Not one or two teachers that are superior but the entire teaching staff. The school will be successful, because the simple act of making a choice to attend, means those families are a step above their neighbors who didn’t opt to participate. However, it doesn’t mean that the underlying assumptions are incorrect – that the difference in teacher quality isn’t a huge issue.</p>

<p>A very recent study argues that as schools become more and more minority, the quality of the teacher pool declines. The author of the study had a unique opportunity to study this issue when the Charlotte-Mecklenburg system ended bussing. </p>

<p>Here is a summmary of the study… </p>

<p>Student Demographics, Teacher Sorting, and Teacher Quality: Evidence from the End of School Desegregation
C. Kirabo Jackson
Journal of Labor Economics
April 2009</p>

<p>We know that schools with lots of poor kids tend to have less effective teachers while schools with wealthier kids tend to have better ones. What we know less about is why. This study by Cornell economist Kirabo Jackson suggests a disturbing possible explanation. He examined teacher movement patterns in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools between 2002 and 2003, which was the year this 137,000-student district ended its 30-year-old busing policy. The result was a naturally-occurring and rare situation where the demographic makeup of schools very quickly converged to that of their surrounding neighborhoods. And it provided Jackson with a unique opportunity to observe teachers’ reactions to changes in student demographics while other school and neighborhood characteristics (as well as teacher demand) stayed the same. The results are disquieting. Schools that had an influx of black students as a result of the policy change also saw a decrease in the number of high-quality teachers–both black and white–as measured by years of experience, value-added scores, and certification scores. For the average school that was 60 percent black (before the policy change), a 15 percent increase in black students (after the change) translated into a .3 standard-deviation decrease in teacher quality. In the end, this study refutes the idea that the relationship between teacher quality and student demographics is merely a product of residential segregation. Rather, teachers sort themselves according to student demographics, with some apparently preferring to teach minority students (perhaps because they think they are better at it) and others not. </p>

<p>And the author’s comments:</p>

<p>The reshuffling of students due to the end of student busing in Charlotte‐Mecklenburg provides a unique opportunity to investigate the relationship between changes in student attributes and changes in teacher quality that are not confounded with changes in school or neighborhood characteristics. Comparisons of ordinary least squares and instrumental variable results suggest that spatial correlation between teachers’ residences, students’ residences, and schools could lead to spurious correlation between student attributes and teacher characteristics. Schools that experienced a repatriation of black students experienced a decrease in various measures of teacher quality. I provide evidence that this was primarily due to changes in labor supply.</p>

22

<p>I am not a fan of tenure but have some concerns that local politics would do more damage by removing politically unconnected teachers to be replaced by the political connected.</p>

23

<p>Politically connected teachers and administrators in tenured positions still get the jobs and transfers that they desire unlike the politically unconnected.</p>

24

<p>DocT I agree. What I am concerned about is an unconnected good teacher being let go so the politically connected relative gets hired. There are some shady things going on now with alternative route hiring in some subject areas. For some reason it seems many alternative route teachers that have been hired are connected politically. There are plenty of certified teachers available in these subjects. I have heard that many of the alternative route teachers are not doing a good job.</p>

25

<p>Regarding Post 21: I appreciate your sincerity, I do. Unfortunately, though, the actual experiments that have been done wherein outstandingly qualified & committed teachers have been the exclusive staff within a deprived economic environment, have resulted in very little long-term gains. The educationally enriched settings these children came to in the morning were defeated by the educationally deprived settings at home, which lacked books and which represented the opposite of the school setting. This is why some urban minority charter schools send their most motivated students to boarding prep schools in the East. It’s about the immersion. Without a <em>culture</em> of education, the message is not received and the motivation is not interiorized. The study I looked at most recently involved a totally crack staff from administration to every teacher, black and white combined, recruited from specific locales for their knowledge & expertise. They finally realized something I’ve known since childhood: The best way to educate poor children is to educate their parents.</p>

26

<p>I’m wondering about Mr. Carbone’s qualifications as a phys ed teacher. Not sure serving as strength coach for professional athletes is going to have much transference when teaching younger students. However, it IS interesting that the founders of this school value physical education enough to make this investment…</p>

27

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<p>I served on the board of a private school and have known people who chose to teach at private over public. Reasons are things like: being in a religious environment (for religious schools), not having or needing a credential and being able to get the position because of a strong background in the subject matter, the fact that private schools have autonomy to do things public schools can’t and are free from a lot of the dysfunction of public school systems, being happy in the private school community and deeply discounted or free tuition for the teacher’s children – which can be a big financial perk depending on the school. Also, the ability to get rid of students who are discipline issues, etc. and not having to deal with a lot of the kinds of problems public schools have to deal with. I know people who say the disparity in salary is worth it for those reasons. I said salary is a draw for talent but it is not the only draw – these are also perks that attract people to jobs. The point is people gravitate towards jobs where there are incentives they value - and for a lot of people, money is a big incentive.</p>

28

<p>Tenure needs to go. I’ve seen first hand what this power does to teachers. I’ve seen groups of teachers form close networks with one or two of them acting as Union laison’s for the building They become like a group of bullies and make life very difficult for the newer and more innovative teachers. I’ve seen these bully groups make up stories about newer teachers and report them back to the building principal. I’ve seen these groups (out of fear because the newer teachers are rising stars) literally force younger and better untenured teachers out of the districts–usually because the new teacher gets sick of dealing with the immature crap in the building. The politics lie with the union, tenured teachers, and local school districts. Local school districts tend to favor the more vocal teachers within the union thus giving the power straight back to the teachers
that are more interested in getting the most out of their contracts rather than getting the most out of their students.</p>

<p>Tenure and the teacher’s union are the problem. Get rid of it and you’ll be left with the people that have a true calling and love for teaching. Once these teachers get tenure, their attitudes change.</p>

29

<p>Good teachers can often help students overcome disaffected parents. </p>

<p>Good parents can sometimes help overcome uninspired teachers. </p>

<p>Mediocre teachers and uninvolved parents are usually a toxic combination. </p>

<p>Students of inspired teachers and great parents should be very greatful for the hard work put in by those parents and teachers. And many of them should be grateful for the destiny of their birth and where their parents decided to live.</p>

<p>I have rarely seen even the most difficult kids from troubled homes NOT learn from a master teacher. I hope this experiment is successful and can help move towards allowing school boards to both reward great teachers and remove them if they cannot motivate their students.</p>

30

<p>epiphany’s post summarizes what I’ve read back in the 1990s.</p>

<p>If you educate the parents, they incrementally improve the education of their children and then you have a generational improvement effect which snowballs. That’s tackling a problem at the source instead of addressing it downstream when you have problems to deal with. If you educate the parents, they can provide improvement for two, three or four children. Or you can increase your costs for those two, three or four children. Kids learn some of their parenting skills from their parents and keeping the parents out of the loop means that the kids may not see the positive parenting skills towards education and raise their children as they were raised.</p>

<p>We want a virtuous cycle - not a cycle of treating the symptoms.</p>

31

<p>Being a European football (soccer) fan, my mind wanders back to the Real Madrid experiment earlier this decade. With a substantial FORTUNE to spend on talent, the football club snatched up Ronaldo, Zinedine Zidane, Beckham, amongst other A-listers.</p>

<p>The theory, of course, is that collecting the best players makes for the best team. The outcome suggested that even Real’s stadium wasn’t big enough to hold the hype, the ego, and self-importance that these superstar-type athletes bring.</p>

<p>At big research universities, where there may be multiple academic stars of the same caliber, don’t they at least put them in offices in different buildings on different parts of campus?</p>

32

<p>Oh man, I was wondering if this school was anywhere near me. Not only is it in my city, it’s in my neighborhood! I live in Washington Heights.</p>

<p>As for the salary, it’s not about increasing the value of teachers that are already there. It is about attracting the brightest and best to a field that they might not have considered. I had a lot of colleagues in undergrad, and have some now, who specifically said that they couldn’t or wouldn’t teach because “my parents told me they didn’t send me to college to be a teacher” (lack of prestige, respect, and money) or “I have too many student loans to be a teacher”.</p>

<p>It’s kind of circular to say that student success is based upon the quality of the students. How do you get high-quality students? They aren’t just born and they don’t just pop up. Attentive parents and excellent teachers are required to shape a student into a high-quality student.</p>

<p>Teachers go into private education not so much because the students are already high-quality from birth, but because they have more freedom to shape them into high-quality students. Public schools have so many hurdles and stupid rules that many free-spirited teachers have to clear, and sometimes they are forced to pass students that are truly failing. Besides, parents who are paying for school are by default going to be more involved.</p>

<p>The kids from the inner-city area this school is being built in are no less capable of being high quality students than the upper middle-class kids at private schools; the difference is just that the upper-middle-class kids usually have two parents at home, more money to support them and to “buy” better teachers, administrators, and school systems. The poor inner-city kids are stuck with whatever the government gives them.</p>

<p>But I agree, tentatively, about tenure. Tenure may need to go. There are too many complacent teachers in the system protected by tenure who don’t need to be teaching anymore (although, on the other hand, there are a lot of really awesome teachers who are protected by it. I had a lot of them in high school – at a lower-middle-class public high school, no less.)</p>

33

<p>The problem of egos is seen in basketball too.</p>

<p>Phil Jackson did a great job with the Chicago Bulls with one superstar and a lot of role players in support. Some of them were talented veterans near the ends of their careers that came in off the bench to make a difference.</p>

<p>He later moved to LA and had to deal with two massive egos on the same team. Much, much harder stuff to deal with though he managed to achieve a moderate amount of success.</p>

34

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<p>They are born, actually. That is, they are born into environments which assume education as a priority, assume continuing hard work as a component of that, have at least one parent signed on to education as a priority and demonstrating a love of learning within the home environment, where the time consumed greatly exceeds the time consumed in the school environment.</p>

<p>This is not about theory. This is about the actual studies completed, based on real-life examples. Rare is the student who can overcome educational apathy at home, and who, further, will seek out an education despite severe educational deprivation at home. It happens, but it is by no means the norm. In the most recent example I gave here, the students indeed made gains, which were extremely temporary. That prompted the originators of the pilot program to transfer their attention to parental education, as they realizled (as BCEagle said), that this was the root and source of the problem.</p>

<p>This is not limited to minority groups or the economically deprived. I see it in my job weekly. Caucasian middle-class students whose parents are ambivalent about the value of a college education (for example) are students that it is almost impossible to convert by outside measures. Lacking a clear future goal/path, it is very difficult for the student to see the value of hard work leading to good grades in high school. Doesn’t matter how gung-ho we as a staff are, how gifted-with-words we are in persuading the student, how the student may even see how much he has gained by hard work. Our message is not being echoed at home, and may even be passively or subtly opposed.</p>

35

<p>I don’t think anyone in teaching gets the ego strokes that someone like Kobe Bryant does, so I’m not sure the analogy works.</p>

36

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<p>As a Real Madrid fan, I maintain people keep forgetting the early Galacticos <em>did</em> win two Champions League titles, and the three you mentioned were actually very professional (well, Zidane and Beckham were). The problem, I believe, was in the boardroom, who misunderstood the on-pitch value of these attacking players relative to defensive players and consequently paid very little attention to defenders (“defenders don’t sell shirts”), kicking Makelele out along the way. Then Perez would look at his managers and say, “Even with this bunch of players, you can’t win?” and out the door they would go. During Perez’s reign RM cycled through six managers in six years. </p>

<p>The analogous situation in this discussion would be if the school spent a million a year on these teachers while working out of a safety hazard of a building. High school teachers don’t quite run in the same ego-league as sports stars.</p>

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<p>I’m not sure how relevant it is in this case, since the eight teachers (does Mr. Carbone?) all have classroom experience. However in general I think that is true. There’s that awful adage “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach”. For better or for worse, offering a high salary to teachers would give a greater respectability to the profession.</p>

37

<p>DocT is correct. There are NOT folks working outside of their area of certification in CT…and all are certified. The only exception I know of is in districts that use Teach for America folks in their schools. As a matter of record, entering teachers in our inner cities in CT make a LOT more money than their suburban counterparts. </p>

<p>I agree…it’s not the salary…it’s the dedication to the profession, the support of families and community, and the strength of the curriculum at the school that make the difference.</p>

38

<p>It can be any kind of reward. Money, a nicer office, a position of authority. Or even a title.</p>

39

<p>Why the tenure bashing?</p>

<p>Full disclosure: I am a teacher. I am certified by my state. I hold National Board Certification [National</a> Board for Professional Teaching Standards: National Board for Professional Teaching Standards](<a href=“NBPTS Main Site Home - NBPTS Main Site”>http://www.nbpts.org/). I have an Ivy League education. I am a proud member of our teachers’ union.</p>

<p>There is actually a good reason for tenure: “ its primary purpose is to protect competent teachers from arbitrary non-renewal of contract for reasons unrelated to the educational process-- personal beliefs, personality conflicts with administrators or school board members” , etc. And yes, that most certainly would happen (it has and it still does). And, yes, a tenured teacher CAN get fired or laid off. </p>

<p>School districts across the nation are conducting layoffs due to the economy. Most of the time, it is based on seniority and certification area: if a district needs to lay off 100 teachers across the board, the least senior teachers go first. Many of these could be tenured teachers, depending on recent hires. </p>

<p>Also, there are situations where a tenured teacher could get laid off before a non-tenured teacher, because of certification areas: if the music program is cut, the music teachers would go, tenure or not. Yes, even if there are non-tenured math teachers still employed.</p>

<p>There is a probationary term before a teacher acquires tenure. If the administration of the school is well- run, teachers who do not perform up to standard are not offered tenure. If there is an egregious breach of contract by a tenured (or non-tenured) teacher, he or she can be fired. The contract serves both the administration and the teachers’ union. </p>

<p>Of course I do this job for the money and the benefits! I certainly wouldn’t do it for free. But, there are many other jobs I could be doing and I choose this one. I love my job, and I’m very good at it. This is true of most of my colleagues. </p>

<p>NYSmile, the situation you describe may have been created by tenured teachers, but it is not the result of teacher tenure. There is good and bad in everything.</p>

40

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That’s part of the problem - it should be the 100 ‘least competent’ to go regardless of seniority. I’d expect the better teachers would actually welcome this.</p>