The high cost of low salaries.

Now that my daughter (RHS Class of 07) has begun working on her Master’s and started student teaching at an elementary school in New Hampshire, I’m getting a fascinating look at the process of becoming a teacher. The view from the very first days of one’s career is so interesting – especially when that career is constantly in the news and the topic of blog posts, speeches, political posturing, national debate and local ridicule. More than a few young or aspiring teachers are asking themselves, “What am I doing? Is this really the smartest thing for me to do with my life?” For most young adults who enter the teaching profession right out of college, teaching is a calling. They’ve always wanted to be a teacher, or they’ve always know they wanted to work with children. Teaching is certainly not the career one lands on when scanning the list of Top 10 Starting Salaries or Top 10 Growth Careers, where it seems the primary focus is on how fast can you get out and how much money can you leave with. Teaching is no way to get rich – there are much higher starting salaries and much more lucrative fields. This fact, I believe, is directly related to the current worries about the quality of our schools.

I read a great piece in the NY Times about teacher compensation and the high cost of turnover -- as 46% of teachers quit before their fifth year. (The High Cost of Low Salaries, 4/30/11) According to the piece:

WHEN we don’t get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don’t blame the soldiers. We don’t say, “It’s these lazy soldiers and their bloated benefits plans! That’s why we haven’t done better in Afghanistan!” No, if the results aren’t there, we blame the planners. We blame the generals, the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No one contemplates blaming the men and women fighting every day in the trenches for little pay and scant recognition.

And yet in education we do just that. When we don’t like the way our students score on international standardized tests, we blame the teachers. When we don’t like the way particular schools perform, we blame the teachers and restrict their resources.

Compare this with our approach to our military: when results on the ground are not what we hoped, we think of ways to better support soldiers. We try to give them better tools, better weapons, better protection, better training. And when recruiting is down, we offer incentives.

We have a rare chance now, with many teachers near retirement, to prove we’re serious about education. The first step is to make the teaching profession more attractive to college graduates.

I find it difficult to argue with this premise. What do you say?

The article discusses a McKinsey study that looked at countries with successful education systems – you know, the countries frequently cited as shining examples of school systems that are “better” than ours, namely Singapore, Finland and South Korea. The study found:

Turns out these countries have an entirely different approach to the profession. First, the governments in these countries recruit top graduates to the profession. (We don’t.) In Finland and Singapore they pay for training. (We don’t.) In terms of purchasing power, South Korea pays teachers on average 250 percent of what we do.

The authors also remark that “turnover in these countries is startlingly low: In South Korea, it’s 1 percent per year. In Finland, it’s 2 percent. In Singapore, 3 percent.”

Is this a coincidence? I don’t think so. Great teachers are going to be the key to improving our education system, and great teachers – who possess the best and brightest minds and who can afford to teach and contribute for the long haul – will cost money.

The NY Times column concludes:

For those who say, “How do we pay for this?” — well, how are we paying for three concurrent wars? How did we pay for the interstate highway system? Or the bailout of the savings and loans in 1989 and that of the investment banks in 2008? How did we pay for the equally ambitious project of sending Americans to the moon? We had the vision and we had the will and we found a way.

To which I add, it’s time to rustle up our collective will, leave the politics out, and make it happen. This is not to say it must happen by being fully funded by local property taxes. It's a federal issue. Right? Isn't our nation's overall approach to education a national issue? Hello? Is this thing on?

And to the young teachers just starting their careers now, perhaps in your first classrooms this week: Hang in there. Don’t be discouraged. Think for yourself and not your union’s political agenda. Be part of the conversation. And thank you.

Budget and contract "news" is premature...and incorrect.

The other blog in town is erroneously reporting “BOE announces no raises for teachers and secretaries…” following the misleading report in Friday’s Ridgewood News that stated, “District administration has slated no raises for staff…” Let me just clarify something right now – the Board’s negotiations with the REA (teachers’ union) have not even started yet! The budget has not been created yet! This is an example of bad reporting that spreads through electronic media and takes on a life of its own.

Here are some facts:

The BOE’s negotiations with the Ridgewood Education Association will begin this month. The Board has been meeting in closed session to prepare, as has been announced in our public meeting notifications. There will be a process, obviously, and there will be proposals. But that negotiation, and the content of those proposals, will be confidential. They must be. Those are ground rules that the Board and the REA agree to. I know it can be hard for Ridgewood residents to not know, and to wonder what’s happening behind those closed doors, especially since the outcome of the negotiations will have such a direct impact on our community. But the negotiation process has to be confidential so that the parties can have direct and frank conversation with each other. “Negotiating in public” is not productive.

Believe me, when there is something to announce about the contract, we will announce it. But as of now, we haven’t even had our first meeting! Don’t you think it’s a little premature to “announce” contract terms? Please resist the urge to get riled up…my best advice would be to attend BOE meetings in-person or watch online so you can hear exactly what is said yourself. Any questions, feel free to email me or post them here.

A little bit later today I will clarify the budget discussion from last Monday night, which is where the phantom “freeze” reports originated.

A little clarity in reporting of administrators’ contract.

Friday’s Ridgewood News contained a letter to the editor that was a response to some one-sided reporting in the previous week’s edition: a classic example of two wrongs making something even more wrong (or something like that!).

The topic of both was the school district’s contract with the Ridgewood Administrators Association (RAA), which the BOE voted to approve at our meeting on October 18. Friday’s letter complained about the salary increases that were included in the contract. I would like to add a few facts that were left out of the original article, so that residents can form opinions that are more reflective of reality.

1. The Nov. 5 article focused only on increases – it did not list any of the concessions made by the RAA. All together, if you add up any increases and subtract any decreases in compensation, the net increase in the cost of the total contract is approx. 2.1%.

2. The salary increases included in the contract range from 2.5% to 4.0%.

3. The contract also includes concessions on the part of the RAA, the most significant of which being that all members will now pay 1.5% of their salaries toward healthcare premiums.

4. The RAA contract was negotiated before the district learned of cuts in state aid last spring. The Memorandum of Agreement with the RAA was signed on March 10. We learned about our 100% aid cut of approx. $3 million on March 17. I’m not sure why it takes until October to actually have a signed and approved contract, but that’s what happened. What we approved on October 18 was something that was negotiated and to which we agreed in another era – the era back when we used to receive aid from the state. Despite the seemingly short timeframe, today's world is a very different world.

I believe that negotiating these terms with the RAA has no negative bearing on our strength in negotiating the REA’s (teachers’) contract this year. Speaking for myself (because I'm not allowed, by law, to speak for the BOE), I promise that I will be, in the words of Friday's letter-writer, “strong, will pay attention to the costly details and will keep the contract fair and affordable.”

Law & Order: Special Teachers Unit.

What a coincidence. Tonight I’m in a hotel room prior to a meeting with a client tomorrow, so I sat down to do another read through of the District’s contract with the Ridgewood Education Association (REA = teachers). Just a little light reading. I also had to watch the series finale of Law & Order – the last episode ever of one of my favorite shows. I love the “ripped from the headlines” stories. As I’m watching the episode develop, I realize just which headlines this episode was ripped from. The bad guys in tonight’s Law & Order? The teachers’ union! Wow, they really went for it, too. In a nutshell, the plot involved an impending school bombing (which the detectives discovered by reading a blog, btw), and they figure out it’s a teacher making the threats. But the teacher’s union reps will not help the police find the identity of the bomber. They plead with various union leaders, lawyers and teachers, to no avail. The union head actually uses lines like, “Sorry, I’ve got to enforce the terms of the association’s agreement.” And then DA Jack McCoy yells at the union lawyer “We’re trying to save lives here…get out of my way!” Wow. Symbolism much? In the end, one brave teacher gave up the bad guy’s name, the frustrated teacher/bomber (who was upset about being wrongfully accused of assaulting a belligerent student) was captured, the police saved the day, and all ended well. It was a great episode and just reinforces how issues of teacher contracts, compensation, benefits, performance, evaluation, tenure, etc., are such hot topics of conversation. I mean, once you play a major role in a Law & Order storyline, you’ve become fully ensconced in the zeitgeist. And I thought it was pretty crazy that I happened to be reading our teachers’ contract at the same time.

By the way, there always seems to be a feeling of mystery surrounding the teachers’ contract. While negotiations are usually confidential, and while Board conversations regarding negotiations happen in closed-door Executive Sessions, the actual contract itself is a public document. You can read our current REA contract (as well as the RAA contract, RAES contract and Dr. Fishbein’s Superintendent’s contract) on the District website (click here).

If you’re interested in learning more about teachers’ contracts in general, I can recommend two very interesting websites:

TR3: Teacher Rules, Roles and Rights
In 2007, the National Council on Teacher Quality launched the database "TR3" which catalogs teachers contracts in the nation's largest school districts and allows users to analyze contracts from 100 districts in 50 states along major dimensions. The database has been hailed as a landmark step forward in understanding the role of contracts in the development and reform of human resources policies in education.

Explainer: Understanding Teacher Contracts
This interactive "explainer" puts two teacher contracts side by side so that readers can see what these often mysterious documents look like, and compares the differences and similarities in layman's terms in 10 key areas such as teacher pay, evaluation, the rights of teachers' unions, etc. It also includes a brief history of teachers' collective bargaining.

I found both of these sites to be really interesting and helpful, especially in providing perspective and a look at alternative approaches to common issues.

As conversations about teacher contracts unfold and become more significant across the country, in New Jersey, and here in Ridgewood, understanding what contracts actually contain and how they differ from one another will help everyone -- from BOE members to administrators, staff, parents and taxpayers -- to make sense of competing claims and to evaluate various policies and terms.