School reform

By: Frederick Hess.

 

Denver is teetering on the brink of the nation’s next big teacher strike. Last week, the Denver Classroom Teachers Association (DCTA) voted to end negotiations with Denver Public Schools (DPS) and strike on January 28. The DCTA has temporarily suspended the strike as Colorado’s new governor weighs whether to intervene. The big issues are teacher pay and the district’s ProComp pay-for-performance system. Denver is notable because, in the course of the wave of 2018 and 2019 teacher strikes, this is the first time that performance pay is in the mix.

DPS is offering teachers a 10% pay raise starting in 2019-20, while the union is seeking an increase of 12.5%. The union’s proposal requires $8 million more than the district’s most recent offer. New Denver superintendent Susana Cordova has blamed the state for the standoff, saying she’d like to pay teachers more but that a lack of state support is prohibitive. (Colorado ranks 27th nationally in per-pupil spending, at $10,865 per student.)

Denver’s ProComp is one of 21st-century school reform’s pioneering pay-for-performance plans. Back in 2005, Denver voters approved a tax to fund a pay-for-performance plan developed jointly by Denver Public Schools and DCTA. The resulting ProComp plan earmarked rewards for teachers who worked in “hard to serve” schools or “hard to staff” fields, earned a positive performance evaluation, obtained additional education, participated in professional development, and more.

ProComp allows teachers to earn an annual $3,851 bump for obtaining an advanced degree or license; a $2,738 boost for working in a “hard to staff” field or a “hard to serve” school; $1,540 for working in a “ProComp Title I” school (which is different from a “hard to serve” school); $855 a year for completing the requisite “professional development units”; and up to $855 for receiving a positive performance evaluation (with that figure falling by half for longtime educators). Teachers can also receive between $800 and $5,000 for leadership roles and a bonus if their school meets performance goals.

The union wants to streamline or eliminate a number of ProComp incentives, arguing that they are unpredictable and confusing and cause salaries to fluctuate capriciously from year to year based on district calculations that determine if a school is “hard to serve.” The DCTA wants to reduce the bonus for working in a “hard to serve” school by about one-third. The district has agreed to streamline some of the bonuses, but Cordova rejects any call to alter the bonus for teaching in high-poverty schools, declaring, “We will not abandon our commitment to closing the opportunity gap.”

The DCTA has some legitimate gripes. In Denver, average teacher pay(before the incentives) is $50,757. After ProComp, the figure is $56,866. Even the higher figure is beneath the national average of $59,660, and it’s substantially lower than Colorado’s median household income of $69,117. And the DCTA has offered at least one talking point calculated to warm the hearts of reformers, blasting DPS for a bloated bureaucracy. As DCTA president Henry Roman has charged, “DPS has made its choice to keep critical funding in central administration, and not to apply more of those funds to the classroom.”

At the same time, the DCTA’s stance raises its own questions. For one thing, the DCTA demands a dramatic, pricey raise from a district that’s already made a generous offer. As Denver’s Superintendent Cordova argued, in discussing Denver’s offer, the Los Angeles teachers were seeking a total raise of 6.5% and teachers in Pueblo, Colorado, “sought and received a total increase of 2% after a week-long strike.” Moreover, the DCTA’s sharp criticism of ProComp elides the fact that the DCTA was a partner in developing the system, which has now been in place for well over a decade. The union has not provided a straightforward rationale for its seemingly sudden change of heart.

Three things are noteworthy about this latest entry in the growing roster of teacher strikes.

First is that even reforms amicably agreed to during the Bush-Obama school reform era can no longer be counted safe. ProComp was adopted in the first years after No Child Left Behind, hailed as a landmark development, devised in large part as a mechanism for delivering a substantial boost in teacher pay, and had long seemed to have become woven into the fabric of Denver schooling. Yet, even this has come under fire and seems likely to change in significant ways. If ProComp is being relitigated, other seemingly settled changes of the past two decades may also find themselves back on the table.

Second, the dispute over bonuses highlights the degree to which ProComp, like so much reform of the past decade or two, was paper-fueled. While the phrase “pay-for-performance” was a sure-fire way to win support among school reformers, ProComp has always been notable for how little it rewards what a teacher does or how well a teacher does it—and how much it emphasizes where a teacher works and what credentials they hold. ProComp reflects the limited reach of so many “big” reform wins, the degree to which those wins relied upon welding intricate new machinery atop existing school systems, and how vulnerable those reforms consequently are to shifting politics and priorities.

Third, while pay-for-performance seems a logical and promising way forward amidst the teacher strikes, this is the first strike in which it’s made an appearance—and the operative question is how much to roll it back. It’s striking how the center has shifted, so that there’s been remarkably little call to focus on differentiating new pay with an eye to teacher talent or workload. Indeed, public sympathy for teachers and the desire to get strikes resolved has meant that such talk has largely evaporated. That’s unfortunate, since part of the win-win opportunity in these strikes is to find ways to do vastly better by terrific teachers who play an outsized role in their schools—but, following on the contours of earlier strikes, Denver makes emphatically clear that those kinds of discussion are not in the cards.

How this ongoing wave of strikes will ultimately play out is far from clear, but the now-established pattern of inattention to benefits, bloated bureaucracies, or differentiation makes clear that there’s little pressure on participants to seek sustainable, win-win solutions. So long as that remains the case, these strikes will represent a missed opportunity.

Source of the article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickhess/2019/01/28/denvers-teacher-strike-puts-pay-for-performance-in-the-spotlight/#7c4b89002caf