Insight
Hard-to-staff schools: Incentives at work
May 24, 2007 1:08 PM
Over the last 15 years education reforms have successfully addressed many tough issues, from standards to certification to accountability. But getting as many highly qualified and effective teachers as are needed into hard-to-staff schools may be the toughest challenge yet.
True, No Child Left Behind, the federal education law, demands that teachers in the nation’s poorest schools have full credentials. Yet that mandate has not necessarily turned those schools around.
Today, thousands of the nation’s poor and low-performing schools are staffed mainly by credentialed — but novice — teachers. Whether because the schools are dangerous and disorderly, the leadership is inept or the neighborhood is inaccessible, teachers come but do not stay. Constant turnover damages staff morale and undercuts the education mission of the schools and their students.
In New York City, it was partly this dilemma that drove the Department of Education to develop its new funding system, “Fair Student Funding.” One of its aims was to redistribute teacher talent across the school system, driving experienced teachers to hard-to-staff schools by the rather crude mechanism of taking funds for teacher salaries away from stable schools and giving that money to schools with inexperienced staffs.
Thanks to the intervention of the UFT and the protests of parent and civic groups, the DOE modified that plan. It agreed to hold schools harmless from budget reductions for existing staff, at least for the next two years, ensuring that successful schools won’t be decimated.
But that begs the question: What sorts of incentives would bring top teachers to hard-to-staff schools and keep them there, helping to turn around schools in desperate need of expertise and stability?
Addressing experienced teachers’ needs
Incentives have to address the needs of the school, of course: Some schools need more special education teachers; others may want someone who can redesign the math program. Such questions are for the school to answer.
But it’s equally important that incentives match teachers’ needs. Forced transfers would hardly make experienced teachers do their best at a school. Blanket incentives, like offering merit pay for raising test scores, have been tried and discarded all over the country. What are really needed are incentives that capture the professional goals and aspirations of experienced teachers and give them a way to effect change.
Susan Moore Johnson and the Project on the Next Generation of Teachers at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education have followed the new generation of teachers for several years. When they first start teaching, Moore found, what these teachers wanted most was support from the principal, colleagues or mentors.
But as these teachers became more experienced their needs changed. The project’s current focus is on “second-stage” teachers, those with four to eight years’ experience. Among the conditions those teachers most want and need, according to research the Project presented at the American Education Research Association conference in April, are “collegial learning opportunities” where they can work in close collaboration with one another to improve instruction, and a chance to influence the school beyond their immediate classroom, in areas of curriculum and policy.
Second-stage teachers “respect and support the intentions of state and district level initiatives and ... they want a role in shaping how those initiatives come to life in their own classrooms as well as in classrooms across the district” writes project author Stacy Agee Szczesiul. “Like others of their generation, they want to be recognized for their expertise and, consequently, they want to be involved in decisions that influence their work.”
If high-needs schools are to attract these second-stage teachers, who have mastered the basics of teaching and are ready to take on more demanding professional challenges, they must answer those needs.
Teacher transfers: the facts
Over the last several years, the UFT has actually succeeded in getting experienced teachers into hard-to-staff schools. The union helped design the Extended Time Schools in 1999, which offered an array of educational reforms and 15 percent higher pay to teachers with at least five years, experience who agreed to work in the city’s lowest-performing schools. It also supported a push to staff SURR schools — those identified by the state as persistently low-performing — with certified and experienced teachers. It helped create the “lead” teacher program in hard-to-staff schools. And over the past few years there have been a series of changes to contractual transfer provisions, culminating last year in an open-market system.
As a result, New York City actually has a much more even balance of experienced teachers than some pundits would have you believe. The UFT recently ran the numbers and found that there is exactly the same percentage of teachers with more than five years, experience — 55 percent — in schools with over 80 percent poverty as in schools with less than 80 percent poverty.
What’s more, under the new open-market transfer system, data show that in 2006, of 2,600 transfers, teachers with more than 10 years’ seniority actually moved to schools with slightly higher poverty levels (74 percent free lunch), on average, than their less-experienced colleagues (71 percent free lunch). And, in fact, seniority transfer rights have not recently caused a significant movement of senior teachers out of low-performing schools anyway, despite anti-union propaganda.
In 2005, 515 teachers took advantage of the former transfer provisions, six-tenths of 1 percent of the teaching force, and only 118 of those moved from low-performing to higher-performing schools.
UFT’s incentive ideas
Still, poor schools are disadvantaged and we need to do more. At this year’s Spring Conference, May 5, UFT President Randi Weingarten proposed several incentives designed to attract second-stage teachers to hard-to-staff schools:
- Reduce student-to-teacher ratios in struggling schools by 20 percent to allow for more individualized, tailored instruction for struggling students;
- Offer a “group transfer” incentive for experienced teachers to move together into a hard-to-staff school;
- Create a service differential that would pay teachers to implement good ideas in schools, such as a parent involvement program or a school-to-work internship program.
These incentives reflect the interests of experienced teachers that Johnson and her project colleagues identify. These teachers seek opportunities to try different approaches with challenging students; they want to collaborate to improve curriculum and instruction; and they want to reach beyond their classrooms to develop schoolwide initiatives. The incentives do that, and are more in line with teachers’ thinking on this topic, thinking that has been noticeably absent at the DOE.
Such incentives, combined with a structured career ladder that rewards teachers as they move from novice to expert, would represent a sea change in teacher compensation systems and the teaching profession. And it’s not so unthinkable. There are many areas of the country where incentives like these are already in place.
