Grading Texas – Page 130 – Texas State Teachers Association

Making teachers an afterthought

While political leaders throughout the United States continue to heap high-stakes tests on 8-year-olds and wring their hands over less-than-magical scores, many of these same leaders – if you want to call them that — persist in neglecting the teachers at the heart of the educational process. And, I am not just talking about Texas, although our state ranks right down there with the most neglectful.

Now, those of you who think teacher pay isn’t a valid educational issue can go back to sleep. If you think teachers are overpaid because most of them get two months off during the summer, even if they cram about 12 or 13 months’ worth of work into a typical school year, you may find the Cartoon Network or the Disney Channel more to your level of comprehension.

But if you believe that teachers should be paid as professionals at a level that recognizes and rewards the value of their work, read on to learn just how far off the mark the United States has fallen in this age of “accountability.”

Pay for teachers in the United States is now only sixth highest in the world, according to a new report by UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. This ranking is based on daily pay of teachers in public primary schools, adjusted for purchasing power parity. The UNESCO report is summarized in HR Exchange, a publication of the Texas Association of School Boards, linked below.

Since 2000, the purchasing power of teachers has increased significantly in many countries, while increasing by less than 5 percent in the United States. This means that average teacher pay in the U.S. – unlike, say, the pay of hedge fund managers and other business billionaires who are some of our public schools’ biggest critics – has only slightly outpaced inflation. In Texas, according to TASB, the purchasing power for the average teacher in Texas has declined by $1,000 since 2000.

The UNESCO study also found that the United States, on average, rewards experienced teachers less for their years of service — compared to starting teachers’ salaries — than most other industrialized countries. And, the pay disparity between teachers and other people with similar educational backgrounds is greater in the U.S.

Teachers in the United States, according to the report, are paid between 66 percent and 70 percent of the average salaries of other people with bachelor’s degrees. Teachers in the 34 countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which include many countries with much smaller economies than the U.S., earn, on average, between 80 percent and 89 percent of the salaries of other individuals with bachelor’s degrees.

That comparison may be worse in Texas, where teacher pay is more than $7,000 below the U.S. average. And, now, state Education Commissioner Michael Williams, prodded by the Obama administration, wants to add insult to injury by imposing a teacher evaluation system that would potentially link teacher pay to student test scores.

Williams needs to get a clue, and, unfortunately, he isn’t the only one.

http://www.tasb.org/Services/HR-Services/Hrexchange/2014/May-2014/4-world-teacher-salaries.aspx

For-profit charter superintendents

You can count State Board of Education Vice Chairman Thomas Ratliff among those who question how well some charter schools are using your tax dollars. Remember, charter schools receive tax dollars, even if many of them operate like private schools.

Ratliff recently released a survey comparing the salaries of the top 10 highest paid charter school superintendents with those of the top 10 highest paid traditional public school superintendents. According to the Dallas Morning News, the average top 10 charter superintendent salary was $242,172 a year, compared to $323,156 for the average among the 10 highest paid public school superintendents.

To provide perspective, Ratliff noted that the charter superintendents who were surveyed had an average enrollment of 3,037 students, while the average enrollment for the public school superintendents in the survey was 50,555 students. Or, to put it another way, each charter superintendent was paid about $79 per student and each public school superintendent about $6 per student.

“I find it ironic that charter schools were supposed to bring free market principles into the education marketplace, but they are obviously paying way above free market rates for their superintendents,” Ratliff said. “I would also like to point out that these entities are supposed to be non-profit organizations, but at these salary levels, some people are clearly doing quite well.”

Ratliff called on the state education commissioner and the Legislature to do something about the salary disparities.

The charter industry, of course, promptly sent Ratliff a letter, expressing “concern” over his conclusions, claiming, among other things, that many charter schools had a very high efficiency rating, according to the state comptroller.

Ratliff, in turn, said he found the comptroller’s rating system, which lumped charters and traditional public schools together, “skewed” because charters don’t have the same financial responsibilities as traditional public schools.

For one thing, traditional public schools have to provide bus service to students who live more than two miles from a school. Charter schools don’t have to provide transportation, and most don’t. Traditional school districts have to accept every child in the district who shows up for enrollment. Charters can pick and choose and create waiting lists, while many kids on the waiting lists are being educated in traditional public schools.

Next time, you hear about a “non-profit” charter school, take a closer look. Many of these” non-profits” are operated by for-profit management companies, which ultimately receive the tax dollars. According to Ratliff’s findings, many charter superintendents certainly are profiting.

Appreciate teachers, not high-stakes tests

Leave it to state Education Commissioner Michael Williams to “celebrate” Teacher Appreciation Week by giving teachers the back of his hand. Admittedly, that may sound a bit hyperbolic, but my characterization will be mild compared to what some parents may start saying once they realize the commissioner has fed a testing frenzy in their school districts.

Williams this week released a new, pilot teacher evaluation system that will be partly based on student test scores. The emphasis on test scores was not unexpected because that was a requirement from the federal government for granting Texas a waiver from some provisions of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. But the testing emphasis, nevertheless, flies in the face of increasing parental outrage over the standardized testing culture for which NCLB and its champion, former President George W. Bush, are largely responsible.

Now, the Obama administration has misguidedly taken up the testing banner, and Texas officials who go out of their way to disagree with President Obama on just about everything else are all too eager to heap more high-stakes tests on students and teachers. A couple of weeks ago, you may recall, Attorney General Greg Abbott proposed giving teachers – in lieu of a pay raise — a bounty for students who pass Advanced Placement tests.

Beginning with the next school year, the new evaluation system will be introduced in as many as 72 school districts and charter schools, Williams announced. Unless the Legislature steps in and says otherwise, the commissioner plans to expand the system – or a version of it – to all districts during the 2015-16 school year.

Teachers also will be evaluated on other factors, such as self-assessments, classroom observations and professional feedback. But 20 percent of an evaluation will be based on test scores for those teachers who administer standardized tests.

Thanks to pushback from parents, most legislators have started to realize that high-stakes testing and the teaching-to-the-test syndrome that it encourages are interfering with the real learning process. That is why they took a first step toward testing sanity last year by reducing the number of end-of-course exams that high school students have to pass to graduate. Now, tying a teacher’s evaluation and, potentially, pay level to test scores will encourage more teaching to the test.

Some people just don’t get it. You can count Commissioner Williams, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and President Obama among them.

Teachers are professional educators, not bounty hunters

Greg Abbott’s teacher “bonus” idea sounds more like a bad April Fool’s joke concocted by a tone-deaf political consultant than a serious policy proposal from someone aspiring to be governor of Texas. Abbott is proposing that teachers be awarded a $50 bonus for every student who passes an Advanced Placement (AP) or International Baccalaureate (IB) exam – up to $2,000 each year.

Abbott has been so busy over at the attorney general’s office defending an inadequate school funding plan, including $5.4 billion in budget cuts from 2011, that he must not have noticed what the Legislature did last year. Last spring, lawmakers reduced from 15 to five the number of end-of-course exams that high school students have to pass in order to graduate. And, why did they do that? Because parents have had it up to here with the state’s overemphasis on standardized testing and what they fear is a plague of teaching to the test at the expense of real instruction.

Now, what does Abbott or that political consultant think is going to happen if teachers are given a financial incentive, regardless of how pitiful, for every passing grade on an AP or IB test? Parents are going to start screaming even louder against teaching to the test. And, teachers, whether guilty of the practice or not, are going to take the blame.

Moreover, the bonus plan would unfairly overlook many teachers in lower grades who gave the AP and IB students the necessary foundation for passing those tests. Teachers who administer the tests don’t deliver the passing scores alone.

What is really insulting about Abbott’s proposed bonus, however, is the fact that average teacher pay in Texas is about $7,000 below the national average. Abbott ignores this problem while proposing a few dollars for a limited number of teachers. Teachers are professional educators, folks, not bounty hunters.

There is a stark contrast in education between Abbott and his opponent, Wendy Davis. Davis has made teachers the first plank in her education platform and wants to begin a serious conversation about improving teacher pay and student achievement. And, unlike Abbott, she consults with real educators.

Abbott listens to education privatization schemers, including pseudo “reformers” who want to drain neighborhood schools of tax dollars to enrich private charter operators. That’s where meaningless ideas like test bonuses come from.