Sorry for the radio silence, readers! I have been in the process of absorbing some very big news, on which more in a few days or so. In the mean time, here's a post I wrote about the fact that teachers from Solorio have raised over $10,000 since Solorio opened its doors in the fall of 2010. That's pretty amazing. It also shows that "miracle schools" don't perform miracles without tens of thousands of dollars of extra money--literally.
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Many people have bought the education reform line that money doesn't make a difference in educational outcomes. But, if you are a classroom teacher or a leftist, you find this argument highly suspicious on its face. Money always matters. I'm proud of Solorio this year, because, even in its short existence, people who teach at Solorio have raised over $10,000 for students through Donors Choose alone. They have also won outside grants for art and public art projects, and sold lots and lots of baked goods, to the tune of probably double that. Add to that the largesse of AUSL, and the newest green building in all of CPS, and it's not hard to fathom why Solorio would be on everyone's "schools to watch" list.
My school boasts a wonderful staff of about 70 people who are mostly young, smart, and nice. Everyone tries to get along with everyone else. We have a lot of meetings. I like working there because it reminds me of another school I worked in like that--a Quaker school, where every decision had to be made by a committee.
I was on 4 committees at Westtown, not counting my two departmental affiliations (English and Theater) or the full faculty meetings, which were scheduled for 90 minutes after dinner every Wednesday. I probably spent 10 hours a week in meetings, 30 hours a week teaching, and 20-30 hours a week prepping for class and caring for students. I loved it, because I love meetings and I love students.
A lot of teachers will tell you that teaching in a high school often feels like being sent back to high school, and they're right. If you were an outcast in high school, you can become a quirky misfit on a high school staff pretty easily, especially if you're friendly and like to volunteer to do dirty jobs nobody else wants to do. In other words, schools are political environments for everyone: all of the adults and all of the children are citizens of the empire, and everyone is a member of a smaller polis ("clique" or "crew" or "bromance") outside the Capitol, which is The Main Office.
You will know you have entered the Hunger Games in a high school building when you realize that what you are wearing matters way more than you thought it would when you put it on that morning. It is very risky to wear bright colors or use the words "folks" or "people" at any urban high school. It is also very risky to use a vast array of other loaded words if you are in a school with a lot of turbulence. The turbulence is just waiting to erupt into violence at any moment. You know you are in such a school when: the school has metal detectors, armed security, a dress code, or a uniform policy that excludes any kind of self-expression through fashion (piercings, nails, earrings are forbidden, shoes must be black or brown with no markings whatsoever).
When a charter school claims to "produce" better students at a more "efficient" rate than its comparable neighborhood school, you have to ask these questions: how much money is spent per student in real dollars? And where does the money come from? Words like "produce" and "efficient" and anything that treats a school like a factory should be treated with caution.
People who feel like they are "other" know this. "The Other" is a word from postcolonialism that is an English adaptation of the word "subaltern," used influentially by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci in the 1930s. Gramsci loved populism and hated Mussolini, whose government put him in prison. Reading Gramsci helped me understand why it might be OK to write an Italian romantic comedy about the Holocaust, which the younger me (The Old Me) would never have thought was OK.
Subaltern people are any people who identify themselves as being "mis-fits" in high school: nerds, LGBTQQ, people with physical, mood, and intellectual disabilities, women, people of color, people with a threatening, "weird" faith--basically, those who get bullied and those who do the bullying. Does that sound like the "bad people" list of anyone you know? Probably not anyone you know personally, because if you're reading my blog, and you've read this far, you probably think it's OK to be Politically Correct, at least when you're not trying to be ironic.
Basically, I'm talking about the same people who are always cool: hipsters, the youth, teachers, and fashionistas. These are people who have learned, either by nature or culture, to find the language of the market highly suspicious. They are the same people as those who also want to try to fit in without looking like they're trying. Teenagers are the most brutal audience there is. If you honed your wit as a social outcast in Chicago, like Tina Fey or Steven Colbert or Gwendolyn Brooks, then your wit can cut like a knife, or tear your flesh (which most people will recognize as the etymology of the word "sarcasm").
We all know or suspect that anything that claims to be "new and improved" or "cool" is actually old and cheaper than it used to be. When I first met Solorio's students, I told them that my favorite store was Target and they could smell the dork on me like I had just bathed in the dollar bins.
Aside: When you let the students ask you questions about yourself, there's a standard list. Top of the list are where you buy your car and clothes. If you're dressed nice that day, they're impressed. If you're not dressed nice and you don't drive a cool car, you reek of loserdom. The best thing about kids these days is that the majority of them are much nicer to adults than my peers were to me when I was young. But the bad news is that all that kindness and courtesy usually masks an ugly underbelly of bullying and deceit and mean girl drama. The way a society treats its children is a sign of the times. When society treats children like objects instead of people, you know times are tough.
In high school, fashion that is cheap rules the day: short or otherwise low-maintenance hairstyles; glasses, facial hair, painted fingernails, and tattoos; and good taste in popular culture are the badges of cool. (I know what you're thinking: those things cost money! Well, they do and they don't. They cost money for some people, and they cost a lot less money for other people. If you've ever wondered why, Google Chicago Sociology or Worlds Columbian Exposition, or read the Sparknotes of The Jungle, or visit a Target.)*
What makes me sad? Educators started using the same value-laden language as the market to describe the kids. Too many educators have so bought into the narrative of modernity that they actually believe the hype. They believe that adults are naturally smarter than young people, that men are naturally smarter than women, that realistic fiction is naturally better than romantic or fantasy fiction. These are all of the cultural lies of modernity: late modernism, which some people choose to call "postmodernism," taught people of my generation to hate the old and love the new. But you only have to visit a high school for a day to be reminded that the old is always new again to a teen.
Showing posts with label numbers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label numbers. Show all posts
Friday, January 25, 2013
Thursday, November 22, 2012
Monday, September 24, 2012
You get a lot of time off.
This is something that Todd pointed out to me. It's true. But technically, we're called 39-week employees, which means that we don't get paid for our summers off. We do get to keep our health insurance benefits in the summers, but our salaries are for 39 weeks (two less than the 41 that you calculate we get paid for--and yes, it's nice!)
It's true that I love having summers off. It's one of the great perks of working in education. But you can't say that I get paid a lot for someone who gets summers off and also say that it's ok for me to work 60 hours a week when it's not the summer (which averages out over the course of a 50-week year to more than 40 hours per week).
And yes, some doctors get less time off than that, but my family members who are (retired) doctors got 6 paid vacation weeks and 4 paid conference weeks. So that's 10 weeks. Plus sick days, plus paid family leave. And that particular family member made roughly 5 times what I make. I'm just sayin.
Todd says that at his job FMLA is encouraged for any sick days more than a week. In CPS, you have to use 10 paid sick days before you can file for FMLA. And then, under the old contract, you would have to use and take pay for all of your sick days during your FMLA. So, during my recent illness, at one point I thought I would be out for six weeks. I would have had to use all 20 of my paid sick days, whether I wanted to or not. And there are two days this year that I want to use for personal business--for my dissertation defense and for my PhD graduation. I would have had to put my job at risk by taking these days as "zero days"--that is, unpaid absences, which can be cause for discipline or dismissal.
Yes, our medical benefit is awesome. Again, unions have been trading benefits for wages for decades. We make WAY LESS than people with comparable levels of education. Many CPS teachers have TWO masters degrees.
Todd asked: "Is the union sticking to seniority as the primary determinant of salary / benefits?" Yes, seniority and level of educational attainment. But seniority is worth much more than educational attainment. I'm going to get a raise of about $1750 annually when I get my PhD. (I was previously in "Lane V," which is a master's degree plus 45 credit hours. From Lane V to Lane VI (PhD or EdD) will be $1750. From Lane I (BA only) to Lane VI is a little less than $10K. Pretty good, and probably worth how much the degree cost me, but conventional wisdom is that changing "lanes," that is, getting more education, isn't worth it if you have to pay for it. There is a new teacher at my school who is an economist, and I'm going to get him to calculate my loss in earning power for not working from age 24-30.)
It's true that I love having summers off. It's one of the great perks of working in education. But you can't say that I get paid a lot for someone who gets summers off and also say that it's ok for me to work 60 hours a week when it's not the summer (which averages out over the course of a 50-week year to more than 40 hours per week).
And yes, some doctors get less time off than that, but my family members who are (retired) doctors got 6 paid vacation weeks and 4 paid conference weeks. So that's 10 weeks. Plus sick days, plus paid family leave. And that particular family member made roughly 5 times what I make. I'm just sayin.
Todd says that at his job FMLA is encouraged for any sick days more than a week. In CPS, you have to use 10 paid sick days before you can file for FMLA. And then, under the old contract, you would have to use and take pay for all of your sick days during your FMLA. So, during my recent illness, at one point I thought I would be out for six weeks. I would have had to use all 20 of my paid sick days, whether I wanted to or not. And there are two days this year that I want to use for personal business--for my dissertation defense and for my PhD graduation. I would have had to put my job at risk by taking these days as "zero days"--that is, unpaid absences, which can be cause for discipline or dismissal.
Yes, our medical benefit is awesome. Again, unions have been trading benefits for wages for decades. We make WAY LESS than people with comparable levels of education. Many CPS teachers have TWO masters degrees.
Todd asked: "Is the union sticking to seniority as the primary determinant of salary / benefits?" Yes, seniority and level of educational attainment. But seniority is worth much more than educational attainment. I'm going to get a raise of about $1750 annually when I get my PhD. (I was previously in "Lane V," which is a master's degree plus 45 credit hours. From Lane V to Lane VI (PhD or EdD) will be $1750. From Lane I (BA only) to Lane VI is a little less than $10K. Pretty good, and probably worth how much the degree cost me, but conventional wisdom is that changing "lanes," that is, getting more education, isn't worth it if you have to pay for it. There is a new teacher at my school who is an economist, and I'm going to get him to calculate my loss in earning power for not working from age 24-30.)
Let's say my salary was 70% of what I would make if I worked 50 weeks of the year. That would mean my salary, with 3 years teaching experience and a PhD, would be $92,372. Do you think that's fair, even with sweet benefits? I mean, I wouldn't complain if I made $92K. Hey, I can't complain about what I make right now. But it is certainly not commensurate with what other people with my level of education make.
P.S. I'm inappropriately frank about what I make. That's because it's part of the public record anyway! I'm a public sector worker. :)
Sunday, September 23, 2012
Letter to my brother: benefits
My brother has been wondering about the new CTU contract and what it means for teachers. I wrote him a long email about salaries. This one is about benefits.
Dear Todd,
The benefits of being a unionized teacher are pretty nice, as I'm sure you can imagine. Most unionized workers have traded better benefits for stagnant wages for decades. In CPS, we have high quality health care coverage for pretty decent prices. We also get ten paid vacation days (one week of our winter break is "paid," the other is not, and our one-week spring break is paid), three personal business days, and ten sick days per year. CPS also pays an additional 7% of our salary as a "pension pick up" into the Chicago Teachers Pension Fund (CTPF). The pension pickup is not taxable, but often gets included in published figures of our salary. This is sort of misleading, about which see more below.
There were big disagreements in the contract negotiations over all three of these benefits (health care, vacation days, and pensions). So, let's look at one at a time.
Health care. CPS wanted to increase the premiums paid for health insurance, only for couples and families. We pay our premium as a percentage of salary rather than as a set contribution amount. I think this is fairly unusual; I know that New York doesn't do it. It's also quite low--I think it's 2% for Chris and me to both be on Chris's. CPS wanted to increase the family contribution by quite a bit. The union beat this back.
CPS also wanted to institute a "wellness program" for all CTU members. Chicago has actually gotten almost all of the city employee unions to sign on to this--the last holdouts are the police. Of course, this is to bring down costs. It's going to be sort of a pain in the butt. We have to do annual "biometric screenings" and then keep some sort of account online where we record "points" of some sort once a month for engaging in healthy activities. The only example I've been given of how to do this is reading articles online about healthy habits. So it's mostly just a cost savings, and not actually designed for wellness, which is sort of silly. This doesn't bother me so much, though, because I heard that a staggering proportion of members were not using their insurance well, instead using the ER for most of their health care needs. Yikes! Why don't they just do some health insurance education, you ask? I dunno. HMOs are hard to use, I promise you that.
Sick days. In the past, CPS employees have been able to "bank" their accumulated sick days and personal days. They can then use them in case of long-term illness or family/maternity leave, or they can have the days paid out at their final pay rate when they retire or leave the system. Arne Duncan, our illustrious Secretary of Education, received a $50K sick day payout when he became ed secretary. (Duncan then said in statements that the system was flawed. But he didn't offer to return his payout.)
So CPS wanted to do away with our ability to bank sick days. Initially, they were talking about instituting a "use or lose" policy. Other districts have done this with disastrous effects, from what I've heard. CPS doesn't actually have enough day-to-day substitute teachers to cover all of the absences if every teacher actually took all 10 sick days every year. Also, many teachers (Chris included) didn't want to lose the sick days they had already banked.
The compromise that was reached is pretty great. Previously banked sick days go into a special bank, to be paid out under the old terms. New sick days can still be accumulated up to 45 days to be used as necessary (sick days can also be donated, which is cool). Our three personal days will be use or lose. And, best part, CPS will now offer employees paid short-term disability/maternity/family leave. The first 30 days are paid out at 100% of your salary. After that, it steps down, and you can take up to 90 days. For young teachers new to the system, this is huge, as it means that you don't need to work for several years to accumulate sick days before you can take a paid maternity or paternity leave.
Pensions. The sick day thing wasn't an easy sell, and it really divided the membership along veteran/rookie lines. So did pensions. Initially, CPS was pushing to institute a new two-tier system where current employees would stick to the old pension plan, but new employees would get put into a defined contribution plan. This was obviously divisive. People my age and younger are obviously worried that the pension won't work out for us, so we would rather be able to have a little bit more control over our retirement money. People who are closer to retirement are worried about the weakening of the Chicago Teachers Pension Fund, which is actually (thankfully) separate from Illinois's state pension fund and very solvent. Unfortunately, CPS has been diverting money from the CTPF for the last few years to pay for deficits.
Also unfortunately, CTU is one of many teachers unions that foregoes Social Security taxes in favor of their pension contributions (not all teachers unions do this). Many people don't know this, and this is why I think it's unfair to count our pension pickup as part of our "income." It's true that we don't pay social security, so I guess our net income is higher than it normally would be. But we don't *receive* social security either, so it's sort of misleading. I'm sure you can calculate how fair this is in monetary terms, but that's not within my mathematical power.
Anyway, CPS backed off changing our pension contribution scheme pretty quickly. And eventually they agreed to maintain our 7% pension pickup. The best part is, for awhile CPS was saying in the news that we were being offered a 16% raise over 4 years. Guess how they got this number? 3% + 2% + 2% + 2% + 7%. That's right. They haven't actually been paying our pension pickup for the last four years, so they counted starting to pay it again as a RAISE. And here they're saying we're the ones who don't know how to teach math.
The benefits of being a unionized teacher are pretty nice, as I'm sure you can imagine. Most unionized workers have traded better benefits for stagnant wages for decades. In CPS, we have high quality health care coverage for pretty decent prices. We also get ten paid vacation days (one week of our winter break is "paid," the other is not, and our one-week spring break is paid), three personal business days, and ten sick days per year. CPS also pays an additional 7% of our salary as a "pension pick up" into the Chicago Teachers Pension Fund (CTPF). The pension pickup is not taxable, but often gets included in published figures of our salary. This is sort of misleading, about which see more below.
There were big disagreements in the contract negotiations over all three of these benefits (health care, vacation days, and pensions). So, let's look at one at a time.
Health care. CPS wanted to increase the premiums paid for health insurance, only for couples and families. We pay our premium as a percentage of salary rather than as a set contribution amount. I think this is fairly unusual; I know that New York doesn't do it. It's also quite low--I think it's 2% for Chris and me to both be on Chris's. CPS wanted to increase the family contribution by quite a bit. The union beat this back.
CPS also wanted to institute a "wellness program" for all CTU members. Chicago has actually gotten almost all of the city employee unions to sign on to this--the last holdouts are the police. Of course, this is to bring down costs. It's going to be sort of a pain in the butt. We have to do annual "biometric screenings" and then keep some sort of account online where we record "points" of some sort once a month for engaging in healthy activities. The only example I've been given of how to do this is reading articles online about healthy habits. So it's mostly just a cost savings, and not actually designed for wellness, which is sort of silly. This doesn't bother me so much, though, because I heard that a staggering proportion of members were not using their insurance well, instead using the ER for most of their health care needs. Yikes! Why don't they just do some health insurance education, you ask? I dunno. HMOs are hard to use, I promise you that.
Sick days. In the past, CPS employees have been able to "bank" their accumulated sick days and personal days. They can then use them in case of long-term illness or family/maternity leave, or they can have the days paid out at their final pay rate when they retire or leave the system. Arne Duncan, our illustrious Secretary of Education, received a $50K sick day payout when he became ed secretary. (Duncan then said in statements that the system was flawed. But he didn't offer to return his payout.)
So CPS wanted to do away with our ability to bank sick days. Initially, they were talking about instituting a "use or lose" policy. Other districts have done this with disastrous effects, from what I've heard. CPS doesn't actually have enough day-to-day substitute teachers to cover all of the absences if every teacher actually took all 10 sick days every year. Also, many teachers (Chris included) didn't want to lose the sick days they had already banked.
The compromise that was reached is pretty great. Previously banked sick days go into a special bank, to be paid out under the old terms. New sick days can still be accumulated up to 45 days to be used as necessary (sick days can also be donated, which is cool). Our three personal days will be use or lose. And, best part, CPS will now offer employees paid short-term disability/maternity/family leave. The first 30 days are paid out at 100% of your salary. After that, it steps down, and you can take up to 90 days. For young teachers new to the system, this is huge, as it means that you don't need to work for several years to accumulate sick days before you can take a paid maternity or paternity leave.
Pensions. The sick day thing wasn't an easy sell, and it really divided the membership along veteran/rookie lines. So did pensions. Initially, CPS was pushing to institute a new two-tier system where current employees would stick to the old pension plan, but new employees would get put into a defined contribution plan. This was obviously divisive. People my age and younger are obviously worried that the pension won't work out for us, so we would rather be able to have a little bit more control over our retirement money. People who are closer to retirement are worried about the weakening of the Chicago Teachers Pension Fund, which is actually (thankfully) separate from Illinois's state pension fund and very solvent. Unfortunately, CPS has been diverting money from the CTPF for the last few years to pay for deficits.
Also unfortunately, CTU is one of many teachers unions that foregoes Social Security taxes in favor of their pension contributions (not all teachers unions do this). Many people don't know this, and this is why I think it's unfair to count our pension pickup as part of our "income." It's true that we don't pay social security, so I guess our net income is higher than it normally would be. But we don't *receive* social security either, so it's sort of misleading. I'm sure you can calculate how fair this is in monetary terms, but that's not within my mathematical power.
Anyway, CPS backed off changing our pension contribution scheme pretty quickly. And eventually they agreed to maintain our 7% pension pickup. The best part is, for awhile CPS was saying in the news that we were being offered a 16% raise over 4 years. Guess how they got this number? 3% + 2% + 2% + 2% + 7%. That's right. They haven't actually been paying our pension pickup for the last four years, so they counted starting to pay it again as a RAISE. And here they're saying we're the ones who don't know how to teach math.
Thursday, September 20, 2012
Short History of CPS-CTU salary talks that I wrote for my brother
I wrote this email to one of my brothers just now, and then thought it might be helpful for others who read my blog.
Dear Todd,
I've been meaning to write back to you since I got your email about Karen and how we were still out. Karen doesn't always look great in the news, but I've grown to really respect and admire her as a leader.
We only decided to stay out on Sunday because the lawyers had not finished writing the tentative agreement. In the past, other teachers' unions have had items clawed back when they went back to the classroom too early. Everyone wanted the strike to be over, and it would have been really hard to muster everyone to go back out again if something like that happened. If we had reconvened on Monday, it would have been during Rosh Hashanah, which many in the House of Delegates (including myself) thought would be in appropriate. So we met Tuesday. This gave them enough time to finish writing the agreement.
I honestly wasn't worried about losing public support when we voted Sunday, and the honks and thumbs up that we got on the picket line on Monday felt no different from last week--if anything, we had even more support from families who understood that we wanted something in writing before we could go back into the building. There was still a minority of delegates on Tuesday that wanted to stay out and hold out for more--by and large the people who wanted to hold out were doing so on the basis of salary and benefits. The problem is, these people are out of touch with economic reality and/or are conspiracy theorists who believe that CPS is hiding cash under its mattress.
I've been so busy that I haven't had a chance to read any of the reports estimating what the new contract is going to cost the district. But they'll come up with the money. They always do. It was their bad for creating and ratifying a budget before they had a contract with the teachers.
Nothing in the tentative contract is a secret. What might have seemed odd to someone on the outside though is the way that the union kept saying that it wasn't about the money, and yet that we were striking over wages and benefits and layoffs. This is because of a new Illinois state law that says we can only strike over wages and benefits and layoff practices. We had to keep saying that we were striking on those things, even though they were actually negotiating on other things in the contract, because otherwise the strike could be declared illegal. And yes, Rahm tried to do that. Big baby. Part of me really wanted to see him try to use a court order to make the teachers go back to work. The Chicago Police are completely on the teachers' side--they always give us thumbs ups at our rallies--because their contract is up next.
The salary sticking point was tricky. The backstory is that the Board canceled a promised 4% raise for the 2011-12 school year, the last year of our previous contract. At the end of the 2010-11 year, they said that they could only honor the raise if they laid off teachers. CTU staged a couple of protests over this and even threatened to reopen the contract early, but we never got the money. Then when the 2011-12 school year started, Rahm Emanuel announced that he was going to use his prerogative under a new state law to extend the Chicago school day. (This was a big campaign promise of his--he used a completely made up statistic about how kids in Houston attend school for a total of 4 years longer than Chicago students over the course of their lives. By the way, Chicago does not have the shortest day in the nation. And most research says the length of time in the classroom does not correlate to student achievement or graduation rates. But who's paying attention to doing what makes sense?) The union cried foul and actually got a court order from the ILRB for him to stop. But then he went into individual schools (many run by AUSL, the organization that runs my school) and offered teachers $1000 bonuses to agree to a longer day. Many of these teachers felt coerced into voting yes. The ILRB said that the district had to stop having teachers vote waivers on the longer day, but that the schools that already had voted would keep their longer day.
The longer day became the signature reform in the new contract talks, at least on Rahm and the city's side. They created a huge propaganda machine referring it to as the "Full School Day," as if teachers had previously been doing half days! We were forced to pass out letters to our students from the district explaining how important it was to make this change. Meanwhile, CPS wanted to add 90 minutes to the elementary school day (45 to the high school day) and 10 teaching days to the school year, and they initially offered no pay raise. They said they couldn't afford it. Then they started offering 2% in the first year of a 4-year contract, followed by a salary freeze in years 2 and 3, and the implementation of a total overhaul of our compensation scheme in year 4 of our contract.
The big line in the news throughout negotiations was that CTU had "demanded a 30% pay increase." The actual number was somewhere between 26% and 29%. Of course, no one expected to get a raise like this, but personally I thought it was a bad PR move on our part all along. The point they were trying to make is that the city was asking us to work 19% more than our existing time while also claiming that these are unprecedented times of austerity. We needed to make sacrifices for the children, they said, which is more of this "education crisis" nonsense where politicians try to make it look like they're going to fix everything right away because there's no time to lose.
When everything went into arbitration over the summer, the arbitrator stunned everyone by coming out on the side of the CTU, at least on wages. My favorite part of his report was where he likened CPS to someone who has bought a car and can no longer make the payments, but wants to keep the car anyway. The longer day was their idea, and if they couldn't pay for it, then they didn't need to have it. Except that it was one of Rahm's top five campaign promises. The arbitrator, who has a reputation for being fairly financially conservative, recommended a 13% raise. He came to this number by deciding that CTU had fared better than the rest of the economy during the last contract, so we were slightly overpaid, and basically figuring the difference for a 19% increase in time. He stressed that teachers are just like all other workers--you can't ask them to work more time for free. (The CTU had meanwhile commissioned a report from the School of Labor Relations at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign that found that teachers work an average of 58 hours a week during the school year. I was only sad that this report was issued by the labor relations department at the school, which I thought made it less credible than it would have been had it been done with the school of education.)
Of course, as soon as the arbitrator went against what CPS wanted, they said he was a crazy idiot, and we were back at the table. So, in the end, we got a 3-year contract with COLA increases of 3%, 2%, and 2%. We also got to keep our salary "steps," which are increases we receive for years of teaching experience. We have an option to extend our contract for a 4th year for another 3%, but it has to be agreed upon by both the union and the district. This is the most I have ever felt like a baseball player.
I have more to say about steps, so-called "merit pay," and benefits, but I'll leave it at that for now!
Dear Todd,
I've been meaning to write back to you since I got your email about Karen and how we were still out. Karen doesn't always look great in the news, but I've grown to really respect and admire her as a leader.
We only decided to stay out on Sunday because the lawyers had not finished writing the tentative agreement. In the past, other teachers' unions have had items clawed back when they went back to the classroom too early. Everyone wanted the strike to be over, and it would have been really hard to muster everyone to go back out again if something like that happened. If we had reconvened on Monday, it would have been during Rosh Hashanah, which many in the House of Delegates (including myself) thought would be in appropriate. So we met Tuesday. This gave them enough time to finish writing the agreement.
I honestly wasn't worried about losing public support when we voted Sunday, and the honks and thumbs up that we got on the picket line on Monday felt no different from last week--if anything, we had even more support from families who understood that we wanted something in writing before we could go back into the building. There was still a minority of delegates on Tuesday that wanted to stay out and hold out for more--by and large the people who wanted to hold out were doing so on the basis of salary and benefits. The problem is, these people are out of touch with economic reality and/or are conspiracy theorists who believe that CPS is hiding cash under its mattress.
I've been so busy that I haven't had a chance to read any of the reports estimating what the new contract is going to cost the district. But they'll come up with the money. They always do. It was their bad for creating and ratifying a budget before they had a contract with the teachers.
Nothing in the tentative contract is a secret. What might have seemed odd to someone on the outside though is the way that the union kept saying that it wasn't about the money, and yet that we were striking over wages and benefits and layoffs. This is because of a new Illinois state law that says we can only strike over wages and benefits and layoff practices. We had to keep saying that we were striking on those things, even though they were actually negotiating on other things in the contract, because otherwise the strike could be declared illegal. And yes, Rahm tried to do that. Big baby. Part of me really wanted to see him try to use a court order to make the teachers go back to work. The Chicago Police are completely on the teachers' side--they always give us thumbs ups at our rallies--because their contract is up next.
The salary sticking point was tricky. The backstory is that the Board canceled a promised 4% raise for the 2011-12 school year, the last year of our previous contract. At the end of the 2010-11 year, they said that they could only honor the raise if they laid off teachers. CTU staged a couple of protests over this and even threatened to reopen the contract early, but we never got the money. Then when the 2011-12 school year started, Rahm Emanuel announced that he was going to use his prerogative under a new state law to extend the Chicago school day. (This was a big campaign promise of his--he used a completely made up statistic about how kids in Houston attend school for a total of 4 years longer than Chicago students over the course of their lives. By the way, Chicago does not have the shortest day in the nation. And most research says the length of time in the classroom does not correlate to student achievement or graduation rates. But who's paying attention to doing what makes sense?) The union cried foul and actually got a court order from the ILRB for him to stop. But then he went into individual schools (many run by AUSL, the organization that runs my school) and offered teachers $1000 bonuses to agree to a longer day. Many of these teachers felt coerced into voting yes. The ILRB said that the district had to stop having teachers vote waivers on the longer day, but that the schools that already had voted would keep their longer day.
The longer day became the signature reform in the new contract talks, at least on Rahm and the city's side. They created a huge propaganda machine referring it to as the "Full School Day," as if teachers had previously been doing half days! We were forced to pass out letters to our students from the district explaining how important it was to make this change. Meanwhile, CPS wanted to add 90 minutes to the elementary school day (45 to the high school day) and 10 teaching days to the school year, and they initially offered no pay raise. They said they couldn't afford it. Then they started offering 2% in the first year of a 4-year contract, followed by a salary freeze in years 2 and 3, and the implementation of a total overhaul of our compensation scheme in year 4 of our contract.
The big line in the news throughout negotiations was that CTU had "demanded a 30% pay increase." The actual number was somewhere between 26% and 29%. Of course, no one expected to get a raise like this, but personally I thought it was a bad PR move on our part all along. The point they were trying to make is that the city was asking us to work 19% more than our existing time while also claiming that these are unprecedented times of austerity. We needed to make sacrifices for the children, they said, which is more of this "education crisis" nonsense where politicians try to make it look like they're going to fix everything right away because there's no time to lose.
When everything went into arbitration over the summer, the arbitrator stunned everyone by coming out on the side of the CTU, at least on wages. My favorite part of his report was where he likened CPS to someone who has bought a car and can no longer make the payments, but wants to keep the car anyway. The longer day was their idea, and if they couldn't pay for it, then they didn't need to have it. Except that it was one of Rahm's top five campaign promises. The arbitrator, who has a reputation for being fairly financially conservative, recommended a 13% raise. He came to this number by deciding that CTU had fared better than the rest of the economy during the last contract, so we were slightly overpaid, and basically figuring the difference for a 19% increase in time. He stressed that teachers are just like all other workers--you can't ask them to work more time for free. (The CTU had meanwhile commissioned a report from the School of Labor Relations at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign that found that teachers work an average of 58 hours a week during the school year. I was only sad that this report was issued by the labor relations department at the school, which I thought made it less credible than it would have been had it been done with the school of education.)
Of course, as soon as the arbitrator went against what CPS wanted, they said he was a crazy idiot, and we were back at the table. So, in the end, we got a 3-year contract with COLA increases of 3%, 2%, and 2%. We also got to keep our salary "steps," which are increases we receive for years of teaching experience. We have an option to extend our contract for a 4th year for another 3%, but it has to be agreed upon by both the union and the district. This is the most I have ever felt like a baseball player.
I have more to say about steps, so-called "merit pay," and benefits, but I'll leave it at that for now!
Sunday, September 9, 2012
A School Leader Who Really Understands How to Assess a Student's Growth
A 16-year-old girl finds out that she is pregnant. The school finds out. She is escorted to her locker, told to take her things and leave the rest, and sent out of the building.
Forty years later, having grown into a remarkable businesswoman and mother, the former student calls the school and asks what can be done about the degree the school stole from her.
Glad no one is saying she needs to take the ACT!
Tuesday, May 8, 2012
Teaching to the Test is Making me CRAZY
Today I said something to a colleague I instantly regretted. It was about teaching kids in preparation for a national test. But it's testing season, and I am nearing my limit. I overheard a girl walking out of class saying "I went up 6 points!" This Friday we are having a "Prep Rally" in advance of upcoming state tests. It seems as if every conversation with colleagues winds up with someone expressing anxiety about their students' test scores and the way that we are "being measured" on the basis of these scores. Of course, we don't know exactly how we're being measured, or when, or by whom. We have been told what to expect of our students, but we have not been told what's expected of us. This has led to rampant paranoia and rumors of people being dismissed or "reassigned" if their scores don't go up, but I have yet to see this actually happen to an actual person.
As if the shadowy Big Brother atmosphere weren't bad enough, many of my colleagues express a distressing faith in the validity of this method of measurement. They use phrases like "moving kids" and "big win." But the whole point of a "big win" is that it's a way to have kids make a "big gain" on their scores by teaching them something small. In other words, it's a test-taking strategy, it's not a way for students to actually develop as learners. **Update: In fact, at our "Prep Rally," students were told that the "gain" that they must make in order to be competitive for colleges involves getting just one more question right on the test. One question is the difference between making a gain and not making it. One question can also be the difference between a bad and a good night's sleep, a lousy or a decent breakfast, or a healthy day and a headache day. so how is this measuring learning?
Margaret Spellings, the Education Secretary who brought us No Child Left Behind, was fond of saying "There's really nothing pedagogically flawed about teaching to a test, as long as what the test is measuring is what you want the kids to know." How true that is.
As if the shadowy Big Brother atmosphere weren't bad enough, many of my colleagues express a distressing faith in the validity of this method of measurement. They use phrases like "moving kids" and "big win." But the whole point of a "big win" is that it's a way to have kids make a "big gain" on their scores by teaching them something small. In other words, it's a test-taking strategy, it's not a way for students to actually develop as learners. **Update: In fact, at our "Prep Rally," students were told that the "gain" that they must make in order to be competitive for colleges involves getting just one more question right on the test. One question is the difference between making a gain and not making it. One question can also be the difference between a bad and a good night's sleep, a lousy or a decent breakfast, or a healthy day and a headache day. so how is this measuring learning?
Margaret Spellings, the Education Secretary who brought us No Child Left Behind, was fond of saying "There's really nothing pedagogically flawed about teaching to a test, as long as what the test is measuring is what you want the kids to know." How true that is.
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Jukin' the Stats
I recently saw a billboard proclaiming that charter schools graduate 80% of their students.
Fans of The Wire are already familiar with the awesome phrase "jukin' the stats." And, as The Wire itself pointed out in Season 4, schools are no strangers to this phenomenon. The regular public schools in my district graduate just under 60% of their students. Do charter schools really graduate 20% more? Of course not.
These days in education, as in many other realms, data is king. Everyone has an almost blind allegiance to rationalism. Numbers don't lie, right? But, the thing is, numbers can lie. Public education reform policy is replete with ideas involving common-sense, easy-to-understand "data" that, beneath the surface, has very little validity.
Take, for example, the biggest thing that our Education Secretary Arne Duncan has been pushing in his Race to the Top agenda: evaluating teacher "performance" and "effectiveness" by using so-called "value-added" measures. The premise behind this program is that we can measure how "effective" a teacher has been by taking her students' scores on the state test at the beginning of the year and subtracting them from the scores on the test at the end of the year. Sounds simple, right? And of course, the next thing you know, newspapers like The L.A. Times and The New York Times are filing FOIA petitions to publish teachers' scores. The thing is, most statisticians will tell you that this method produces numbers for individual teachers that vary widely from year to year for the same teachers, have large margins of error, and are, basically, mostly bogus. In my own experience, what a student would have to score to show "gains" is within the margin of error of the test. In other words, if a student scored X in September, and needs to score Y in May, the student may actually score Y or X, give or take, taking the test in two consecutive weeks. Because most of the tests being used to get these scores don't even claim anywhere near that kind of accuracy for a student taking it just once. That means that "value added" actually only works--only actually tells you something significant--when you measure large groups of students and large groups of teachers over time, like a school's improvement over several years.
And then let's look at the premise of value-added itself: this is a method that assumes that children are vessels into which teachers can simply add more volume over the course of a year of teaching. Any real teacher or student of education knows that this is not what teaching and learning actually looks like. The people who espouse this policy are essentially treating children as if they are so many widgets on an assembly line, a view of education that is now nearly a century old--as old as the assembly line itself. You can see this attitude in the language they use--talk of teacher "efficiency" and "productivity." These are simply code words for spending less money to educate more students. Those who say that teacher quality is "the most important factor" in a student's education really mean that it is the most important *school* factor. More than that, they also mean that it is the most cost-efficient factor, far more cost-efficient than, say, decreasing class size, which has been shown to be effective especially for urban minority and low-income students. In other words, the recent attacks on teachers and their unions is actually a movement to find the cheapest way to "save" public education.
And so this is where jukin' the stats leads us. To believe that there is an easy, common-sense way to fix public education, just like on The Wire the higher-ups want an easy, common-sense way to fix all of the problems of urban poverty--crime, the drug trade, schools, everything. But, if anything, we should be intensely suspicious of simple solutions and straightforward-seeming numbers. Teachers are, after all, professionals. Do people honestly think that millions of smart people who have been working on this problem for decades haven't thought of these simple solutions before?
Fans of The Wire are already familiar with the awesome phrase "jukin' the stats." And, as The Wire itself pointed out in Season 4, schools are no strangers to this phenomenon. The regular public schools in my district graduate just under 60% of their students. Do charter schools really graduate 20% more? Of course not.
These days in education, as in many other realms, data is king. Everyone has an almost blind allegiance to rationalism. Numbers don't lie, right? But, the thing is, numbers can lie. Public education reform policy is replete with ideas involving common-sense, easy-to-understand "data" that, beneath the surface, has very little validity.
Take, for example, the biggest thing that our Education Secretary Arne Duncan has been pushing in his Race to the Top agenda: evaluating teacher "performance" and "effectiveness" by using so-called "value-added" measures. The premise behind this program is that we can measure how "effective" a teacher has been by taking her students' scores on the state test at the beginning of the year and subtracting them from the scores on the test at the end of the year. Sounds simple, right? And of course, the next thing you know, newspapers like The L.A. Times and The New York Times are filing FOIA petitions to publish teachers' scores. The thing is, most statisticians will tell you that this method produces numbers for individual teachers that vary widely from year to year for the same teachers, have large margins of error, and are, basically, mostly bogus. In my own experience, what a student would have to score to show "gains" is within the margin of error of the test. In other words, if a student scored X in September, and needs to score Y in May, the student may actually score Y or X, give or take, taking the test in two consecutive weeks. Because most of the tests being used to get these scores don't even claim anywhere near that kind of accuracy for a student taking it just once. That means that "value added" actually only works--only actually tells you something significant--when you measure large groups of students and large groups of teachers over time, like a school's improvement over several years.
And then let's look at the premise of value-added itself: this is a method that assumes that children are vessels into which teachers can simply add more volume over the course of a year of teaching. Any real teacher or student of education knows that this is not what teaching and learning actually looks like. The people who espouse this policy are essentially treating children as if they are so many widgets on an assembly line, a view of education that is now nearly a century old--as old as the assembly line itself. You can see this attitude in the language they use--talk of teacher "efficiency" and "productivity." These are simply code words for spending less money to educate more students. Those who say that teacher quality is "the most important factor" in a student's education really mean that it is the most important *school* factor. More than that, they also mean that it is the most cost-efficient factor, far more cost-efficient than, say, decreasing class size, which has been shown to be effective especially for urban minority and low-income students. In other words, the recent attacks on teachers and their unions is actually a movement to find the cheapest way to "save" public education.
And so this is where jukin' the stats leads us. To believe that there is an easy, common-sense way to fix public education, just like on The Wire the higher-ups want an easy, common-sense way to fix all of the problems of urban poverty--crime, the drug trade, schools, everything. But, if anything, we should be intensely suspicious of simple solutions and straightforward-seeming numbers. Teachers are, after all, professionals. Do people honestly think that millions of smart people who have been working on this problem for decades haven't thought of these simple solutions before?
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Less Money Mo Problems
Many of the new education reformers will tell you that money doesn't matter. Right now, everyone tells you that teachers are the only factor that matters. The truth is, teachers are the biggest "in school" factor in student achievement. BUT, that doesn't mean that there aren't other "in school" factors. If money weren't a factor, then why would a wealthy suburban district outside my city spend 50% more per pupil than my urban district?* If they could do just as well while spending less, would they spend more? That's bad capitalism!
Of course, these numbers for expenditures per student don't factor in how much teachers spend of their own money on materials for their pupils. According to this CNN article, 97% of teachers report spending some of their own income on materials for their pupils, and, on average, they report spending $350 of their own money per year. That's $100 more than the maximum amount the federal government allows us to deduct from our taxable income. (And, by the way, when you have it written into your tax code that educators spend their own money on their students, shouldn't that tell you something is wrong?) So, our public education system is being funded in part (even if it's a small part) by the educators themselves. And if you believe that teachers are underpaid, then you will think that's a travesty. Of course, there are those out there that believe that teachers are overpaid.
Take my students, for example. They're always pointing out to me that I make money, and they don't. They're also always pointing out that all adults seem to get paid, which is way better, to their way of thinking, than not getting paid. I have a student who is writing a persuasive essay about why students should get paid for all the work they do studying in school. I routinely have students tell me that they don't need to pick things up off the floor because the custodial staff in our building is paid to clean. And, my favorite, this conversation I had, while passing out index cards to my students to make flashcards:
Me: You all do know that I buy these cards with my own money, right? I don't get money from the school to buy them. I buy them with my own money.
Student: Yeah, but you get money from the school.
Me: No, that's just what I'm saying. The school doesn't give me money to buy classroom supplies. I use my own money.
Student: Yeah, but the school pays you.
Me: Yes. They pay me. And I use that money to eat.
So, herewith, my list of emergency supplies that you absolutely must keep on hand for students:
-pencils
-pens
-notebook paper
-bandaids
-kleenex
-hand sanitizer
-healthy snacks for cranky first period students who eat hot chips for breakfast
-feminine hygiene products
*My district spends approximately $21,000 per student; the suburban district that boasts the #1 high school in the state spends $32,000 per student. These numbers are the sum of the average "instructional expenditures" and the "operational expenditures" per student, from the state report card.
Of course, these numbers for expenditures per student don't factor in how much teachers spend of their own money on materials for their pupils. According to this CNN article, 97% of teachers report spending some of their own income on materials for their pupils, and, on average, they report spending $350 of their own money per year. That's $100 more than the maximum amount the federal government allows us to deduct from our taxable income. (And, by the way, when you have it written into your tax code that educators spend their own money on their students, shouldn't that tell you something is wrong?) So, our public education system is being funded in part (even if it's a small part) by the educators themselves. And if you believe that teachers are underpaid, then you will think that's a travesty. Of course, there are those out there that believe that teachers are overpaid.
Take my students, for example. They're always pointing out to me that I make money, and they don't. They're also always pointing out that all adults seem to get paid, which is way better, to their way of thinking, than not getting paid. I have a student who is writing a persuasive essay about why students should get paid for all the work they do studying in school. I routinely have students tell me that they don't need to pick things up off the floor because the custodial staff in our building is paid to clean. And, my favorite, this conversation I had, while passing out index cards to my students to make flashcards:
Me: You all do know that I buy these cards with my own money, right? I don't get money from the school to buy them. I buy them with my own money.
Student: Yeah, but you get money from the school.
Me: No, that's just what I'm saying. The school doesn't give me money to buy classroom supplies. I use my own money.
Student: Yeah, but the school pays you.
Me: Yes. They pay me. And I use that money to eat.
So, herewith, my list of emergency supplies that you absolutely must keep on hand for students:
-pencils
-pens
-notebook paper
-bandaids
-kleenex
-hand sanitizer
-healthy snacks for cranky first period students who eat hot chips for breakfast
-feminine hygiene products
*My district spends approximately $21,000 per student; the suburban district that boasts the #1 high school in the state spends $32,000 per student. These numbers are the sum of the average "instructional expenditures" and the "operational expenditures" per student, from the state report card.
Thursday, May 5, 2011
This is what high-stakes testing feels like, part two
A student asked me if her score went up, and when I had to tell her no, her face fell. There were tears in her eyes as I told her that her score had gone up a lot between September and January, and that she had made a lot of progress. More heartbreaking than her tears was the brave face she put on as she smiled and nodded.
I feel reassured when the literacy coordinator not only tests them, but also gives them a survey with questions about their reading habits. In that class, students who came in saying they hate to read are leaving saying that they love it.
I was looking at the comments to see if there are any (there are not), but I was happy to see this old one from my brother: "One good teacher inspiring even one kid for a year can make a lot of difference."
Thanks for reminding me.
I feel reassured when the literacy coordinator not only tests them, but also gives them a survey with questions about their reading habits. In that class, students who came in saying they hate to read are leaving saying that they love it.
I was looking at the comments to see if there are any (there are not), but I was happy to see this old one from my brother: "One good teacher inspiring even one kid for a year can make a lot of difference."
Thanks for reminding me.
Monday, June 28, 2010
Frowny face, or, turnarounds by the numbers
Today in my special education class we talked about particular needs of high school students with disabilities, and we looked at some numbers for students in high schools that we will be working in.
The numbers were pretty disheartening. At the school where I will be tutoring this summer (and where I have a 50-50 chance of being placed for the school year), the reported truancy rate is 53%. The mobility rate, which measures how often students move in and out of the district, is almost 40%. It's pretty hard to teach students when you don't know who is going to show up from one day to the next, or from one year to the next. In addition to that, more than 75% of students entering 9th grade at this school are reading at 6th grade level or lower. Only a handful are reading at grade level. About 15% are reading at 2nd grade or lower (including not at all).
So I was wrong to worry about seeing 150 students a day. On a really good day, I may see 90 or 100 of them.
Our job is to close the achievement gap, and at this school, that means preparing these kids to take the ACT. So these are pretty scary numbers. It's not that I wasn't aware of these problems before--far from it--but somehow they seem much more stark to me today. As our teacher said, "often you have a year or less to do as much as you can for these students" before they change schools or leave school altogether.
Our teacher had passed out "response cards" with a variety of responses (multiple choice, true false), including a smiley face and a frowny face. When she asked us how we felt after this review of the numbers, there was a clear majority of frowny faces. But one woman in my class showed her happy face. She said that she feels inspired to help these students and that she has hope and a drive for them to improve. And she's right--the numbers should not depress me, even though they do. They also make me feel the intense urgency of these students' need. So thanks, friend, for reminding me to hope and know that we can do better--that's why I'm here.
ADDENDUM: I learned today that the 53% truancy rate is actually a reduction from more than 60%, one year after getting turned around. Who knew that 53% would be an encouraging number?
The numbers were pretty disheartening. At the school where I will be tutoring this summer (and where I have a 50-50 chance of being placed for the school year), the reported truancy rate is 53%. The mobility rate, which measures how often students move in and out of the district, is almost 40%. It's pretty hard to teach students when you don't know who is going to show up from one day to the next, or from one year to the next. In addition to that, more than 75% of students entering 9th grade at this school are reading at 6th grade level or lower. Only a handful are reading at grade level. About 15% are reading at 2nd grade or lower (including not at all).
So I was wrong to worry about seeing 150 students a day. On a really good day, I may see 90 or 100 of them.
Our job is to close the achievement gap, and at this school, that means preparing these kids to take the ACT. So these are pretty scary numbers. It's not that I wasn't aware of these problems before--far from it--but somehow they seem much more stark to me today. As our teacher said, "often you have a year or less to do as much as you can for these students" before they change schools or leave school altogether.
Our teacher had passed out "response cards" with a variety of responses (multiple choice, true false), including a smiley face and a frowny face. When she asked us how we felt after this review of the numbers, there was a clear majority of frowny faces. But one woman in my class showed her happy face. She said that she feels inspired to help these students and that she has hope and a drive for them to improve. And she's right--the numbers should not depress me, even though they do. They also make me feel the intense urgency of these students' need. So thanks, friend, for reminding me to hope and know that we can do better--that's why I'm here.
ADDENDUM: I learned today that the 53% truancy rate is actually a reduction from more than 60%, one year after getting turned around. Who knew that 53% would be an encouraging number?
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