Build it and they will come
May 10, 2007 4:45 PM
As a result of all these efforts, there’s been a noticeable increase in experienced teachers in our highest-poverty schools. Schools with 80 percent-plus poverty levels now have the same proportion of teachers with more than 5 years experience as schools with less than 80 percent poverty. Not that the critics would actually let the facts intrude on their rhetoric.
Still, the clamor to recruit more experienced teachers into high-poverty schools is unabated. But does anyone ask you, the teachers, [how to do that]?
I’ll bet you can think of half a dozen ways that low-performing schools could attract and retain more good teachers. Indeed, thousands of you have already gone to hard-to-staff schools — or at least schools that by their demographics should be hard to staff. In every district there are examples of great schools with great teachers in tough neighborhoods — schools with a staff that stays, works hard and succeeds. They are the stuff that legends are made of.
How do those schools do it? What makes a school a place where teachers want to teach and children want to learn? What would make every public school a school of choice for parents and educators alike?
Three years ago, at our spring conference, I laid out a blueprint for turning around low-performing schools. We proposed a comprehensive array of strategies and conditions including collaborative planning and decision-making; small classes; safety and discipline; adequate resources; good facilities; health and guidance services for kids and families. …
Call it the school of dreams. Build schools like that, and they will come.
But today I’d like to go further than those recommendations. I’d like to focus specifically on incentives to attract teachers to traditionally hard-to-staff schools and keep them there.
One factor that clearly keeps experienced teachers in tough schools is the quality of the leadership. We all know principals who know what they are doing and who are so supportive, or so inspiring, that their staffs would follow them anywhere. We need more of those principals. If every hard-to-staff school had a collaborative leader like that, there wouldn’t be any hard-to-staff schools.
Unfortunately you can’t mandate that. And holding student test scores over the heads of principals won’t accomplish that goal either. It will only create tension, not collegiality. If the DOE really wants to find out if principals are effective, ask their staffs. The new staff satisfaction survey is a good step in that direction, but for a real check and balance, we need 360-degree evaluations in every school, and especially in hard-to-staff schools. Flattening the management structure that way helps to build the collegial communities in which students and teachers thrive.
And here’s a simple, common-sense incentive. Teachers, like everyone else in New York, need a reasonable commute. In fact, most teachers transfer in order to be closer to home.
Well, maybe you can’t move the school, but with three-quarters of our members living in the city, they must rely on limited mass transit routes within and between the outer boroughs, or they must drive. Countless hours are spent circling the school every morning looking for a spot or rushing out at lunch to change sides. Parking could solve that.
And while we are talking about commutes, how about incentives for people who volunteer to work in hard-to-staff schools, like discount MetroCards or E-Z passes or housing allowances?
These are the kinds of things we’ve been talking about for years — the kinds of things that, if asked, any teacher would mention.
Today I’d like to propose three new ideas that will create a healthy balance of newer and veteran teachers in hard-to-staff schools.
Number 1: A basic strategy for improving the learning of struggling students and reducing the anonymity that leads to dropping out is personalizing instruction. That means tailoring lessons to the individual learning needs of each child and offering more one-on-one attention in class. But when a teacher works with more than 150 secondary school students every day, or teaches five or six subjects a day in an elementary school class, that individualization becomes impossible. Classes are too large and time is too short.
So as an incentive in hard-to-staff schools, to enable teachers to effectively personalize and differentiate instruction, I propose that those schools receive funding to reduce their student-teacher ratio by 20 percent. The staff and the principal would then use a school-based option to decide exactly how to use these funds. Take a typical secondary school: Every class could be 20 percent smaller, or teachers could teach four periods and devote the additional time to work on agreed-upon educational tasks that are part-and-parcel of the school’s Comprehensive Educational Plan — or they could design a combination of time usage and class size reduction. I’m sure elementary school teachers can envision countless ways to use a 20 percent reduction in student-to-teacher ratios. …
Why these two strategies?
Smaller classes let teachers make personal connections with every child and differentiate instruction accordingly. …
On the other hand, changing teacher schedules could provide time for teachers to work together to analyze and address students’ needs. …
The time spent on this professional work would help students, enhance teachers’ skills and build the kind of community that is the hallmark of every successful school. And the extra CFE money for high-need schools should more than cover what amounts to about a 12 percent increase in a school’s budget.
Number 2: Sometimes a struggling school has become resigned to failure, its staff discouraged and dispirited. It takes more than one person to turn such a school around; it takes a real change in culture — and that may mean a group of teachers who have worked together before and want to stay together. I propose that hard-to-staff schools offer group transfers for two or more teachers who want to take on a new challenge. They must apply as a team, be hired as a team, and go as a team. And to encourage them to take the risk and make the move, the school system should offer them the assurance that, if the school should close, they could return to their home school or have preference in other schools.
Number 3: Let’s not ignore the allure of money. … We have previously proposed a hard-to-staff differential for all the educators in those schools. Now here’s a value added: What if we expanded that notion into a broader service differential so we could compensate teachers and others who go above and beyond for their students? A service differential is just like any other differential, but instead of taking courses to earn it, you provide extra service.
Perhaps you develop a unit of lesson plans for your grade or department, or you launch a schoolwide parent involvement program, or you design and operate a school-to-work internship program, or an annual Earth Day program that takes on neighborhood environmental projects —- or any of the countless special initiatives that teachers would want to undertake. Those programs could earn you credits toward a differential. …
These proposals are powerful recruitment and retention incentives that would transform hard-to-staff schools into schools that teachers would gravitate to and parents would want their children to attend. And in recognition of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity legacy, we could call them Collaboration for Education schools, or CFE schools. Although I won’t hold my breath for the day the union-bashers see it this way, the results would finally put to rest the myth that the union contract hinders, not helps, children’s education.
These ideas are in the tradition of the grand alliance between public school educators, parents, labor unionists and civil rights advocates. Although educators are no more responsible for the inequities that exist in our public schools than we are for the injustices that pervade our entire social structure, we will not shy away from the fight to eradicate them. The UFT is, and always has been, committed to the principles of democracy and equality of opportunity that public education was created to advance. The proposals I’ve offered today are part of that worthy mission.
Thank you.
