It's Takes Character to Admit When You're Wrong

So kudos for that, Liv, even if the "hidden from public view" clause is fairly funny when you consider that one of your commenters was right along with me in pointing it out.  It's hard to make the argument it's hidden when people are talking about it on the internet, iznit?  And that pay raise would roughly correlate to the changes in the state salary schedule in 2007 and 2008, if I'm doing the math right.

And on we go.

Read more here, if any.

Freezing the Teacher Salary Schedule Could Save $25,000,000 a Year

Towards the end of last session I heard a rumour coming out of Don Cox's office that the state was considering "freezing" the state salary schedule, meaning that the step increases teachers receive in their first 15 years of teaching would be suspended and your salary for this year would be the same as your salary for last year (less the LID days, which is another topic). It was a proposal that didn't get anywhere, but there is a savings there, and I was a little surprised not to see it percolate back up given where we're at in the state budget.

So over the weekend I played with a couple of documents from the Superintendent of Public Instruction. First is the Personnel Report that details how many teachers there are in the state; the second, the salary schedule that shows what we teachers were paid last year and this year. I plugged it all into this spreadsheet:

• The first line is the salary from the 2008-2009 school year.
  
• Next, the salary that a person in the same column would have received the very next year, 2009-2010, assuming they stayed in the same "lane".
  
• The next line is the difference between the two numbers; this is the raise that a hypothetical person would have received from year-to-year.
  
• The fourth line is taken from the personnel summary, and shows how many people in 2008-2009 were at that place on the salary schedule. For example, in 2008-2009 there were 774 teachers who had a Bachelor's Degree only (no additional credits) and were in their first year of teaching.
  
• The final line is that number of teachers multiplied by the additional salary they would have received, creating a total for every teacher in that cell.

Put it all together for all the teachers in their first 15 years of teaching, and the spreadsheet says that we spent an additional $28,982,381 by not freezing the schedule last year.

There's a lot of assumptions that go into this: that all those teachers came back, that they were all charged to the state, and that they are reported correctly to OSPI. On the other hand, I'm also not figuring in any increases for moving over "lanes" (e.g., moving from the BA+45 column to the MA+0 column), or mid-year hires, etc. Plus, I'm an amateur--there could potentially be a lot more to be found there, because I"m not looking at the right chart or reading the right numbers in the right way.

But let's say that I'm full of crap and off by even 20%. That's still almost $25 million dollars in potential savings, which is something that we can't ignore. Do I like the idea of taking money from teachers? Absolutely not, but this isn't a "go backwards" deal--it's working to maintain what we already have.

My bottom line is levy equalization. If we can make enough sacrifices in other places to keep LEA, then we've accomplished something meaningful. Offering step increases to those employees in the first 15 years, those who are the most likely to be impacted by district cuts if levy equalization goes away, makes about as much sense as putting on your makeup before a trip to the guillotine.

Read more here, if any.

There's Good Money in the Ed Reform Racket

The University of Washington's very own Marguerite Roza, an assistant professor at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, made quite a splash recently with a study arguing that states should no longer pay additional money to teachers when they earn Masters degrees. This isn't a new line of thought, but getting a full page write-up in Education Week and a mention in the Education Gadfly in short order isn't a bad month for an education researcher.

I've written about her before as well, here.

Her research is pretty counterintuitive, particularly to a happy union hack such as myself. Recent topics have included the idea that teachers could take a pay-cut to stave off layoffs, that insurance benefits are rather wasted, and now this new bon mot about degrees. It makes one wonder, how comfortable is this professor who has made the thrust of her research an examination on how to take salary and benefits away from teachers?

Turns out, courtesy of the state salary database at the News Tribune, that Dr. Roza is doing quite well indeed--a $10,400 monthly base salary, which works out to a cool $124,800 per year. Not too shabby!

I've ragged on Dan Goldhaber of the UW before, too--he's written about education, and is a very convincing public speaker, but the ideas that he presented during the Basic Ed Finance hearings were waaaaaaaaay out there. According to the Tribune Dr. Goldhaber makes $13,530 a month, or $162,360 a year. Those numbers are provided by the state.

Want to know why teachers are often so cynical about change agents? Because it's usually not the change agent who will be most affected by whatever grand idea is being proposed--it's the teachers.

(For the record, I made $46,341 last year with a Masters degree plus 8 years)

Read more here, if any.

How Superintendent's Salaries are Determined

The longer the financial crisis drags on, the more pressure there will be on the state to fix the funding formula for school administrators. Right now the school district gets $69,000 for each principal and central office administrator; everything above that number comes out of the school district general fund. In some cases, that's $100,000+.

Read more here, if any.

You Are Reading the Blog of a Chump

Remember the other day, when I was saying nice things about the presidents of Washington and Washington State Universities for refusing pay raises, or taking a pay cut? Man, what good examples!

Then I got this week's Chronice of Higher Education. Hey, guess which university presidents have the highest base pay in the country?

1. David P. Rosell, Delaware: $2,377,000
   
2. E. Gordon Gee, Ohio State: $775,000
   
3. Mark Emmert, University of Washington: $603,120
   
4. Elson S. Floyd, Washington State University: $600,000

#3 and #4 in the county. Not bad for government work. The pictures gets even rosier when you consider that Emmert is also #3 in the country for deferred compensation; he's got a cool $250,000 still coming to him, eventually.

So that made me go hmmm. Then I turend the page and met this headline:

For a Raise, Try Looking in the Evergreen State

....which goes on to cite the state of Washington as a great, great place to be a university president. There's a defense of the salaries paid, Emmert's especially, as being the price you have to pay to keep talent. I don't disagree.

But when the state is looking at a $5 billion dollar hole big salaries raise eyebrows, and those are big salaries.

Read more here, if any.

College Presidents Take Lead on Salary Issues--No Raises for Them!

This I like, from the Spokesman-Review:

With state colleges and universities facing the potential for historic budget cuts, the president of Washington State University is taking a $100,000 salary cut.

WSU's Board of Regents voted to approve Elson S. Floyd's pay cut Friday, upon his request.

"These are exceedingly tough times for my students, faculty and staff," Floyd said. "We will be asking them to think more creatively and work harder with less as we deal with budgetary restraints.

"It is incumbent upon me to lead by example."

Similarly, the president of the University of Washington has also decided not to take a scheduled pay raise.

The cynics of the world might note that in Floyd's first year on the job he made $600,000, and that the pay cut is really a cancellation of a pay raise, and he'll still go up $25,000. That said, gestures matter an awful lot in times like this, and it's great to see a school leader take the lead like this.

Read more here, if any.

Did You Say the Future, Conan?

One of the sessions at WERA a few weeks back was on School Employee Compensation and Student Outcomes, presented by staff from the Washington State Institute for Public Policy and based off of their report of the same name from December 2007. It’s actually pretty good reading, as academic reports go; particularly interesting to me were the long-term looks at national graduation rates (less than 10% in 1900, nearly 70% today) and the discussion about what the immediate goals of our state legislature are regarding funding and results.

You can download the report here.

Read more here, if any.

The EFF Podcast on Posting Teacher Salary Data Online

The Evergreen Freedom Foundation is in a good groove with their Get Free podcasts. The hosts are entertaining, the topics are worthwhile, and the production value is praiseworthy. Even though I’m a liberal (who still finds their video podcast host very easy on the eyes) I can give credit where it's due.

In their most recent podcast there’s a discussion of the EFF’s habit of posting teacher salary data on-line. Sonya Jones, who really comes off as rather bitchy in her blog posts, had gotten a letter from a teacher who didn’t realize that this was the practice and that it was just one of those things that we teachers have to deal with by virtue of being state employees.

The piece from the podcast that’s interesting is the defense that the hosts put up, offering that it’s not about individual teachers, really, but more about giving the public information on the system as a whole.

I think this defense fails. I can see where they’re trying to go, but I don’t think they quite get there.

The biggest flaw is simply in how their spreadsheets on salary data are constructed. As a union guy I’ll freely admit that I’ve used them on more than a couple of occasions to help various causes, and from that perspective I can tell you that the problem with the spreadsheets is that there is no differentiation between various job classes. You can’t look at any one of them and tell what the average teacher makes in district X, because if you aggregate all of the names and data for any individual school district you’ll also pull in the paraprofessionals (artificially lowering the average) and the administration (raising it up, though not by nearly as much a percentage). Even if you have a rote understanding of what the range of a teacher’s salary is, I’m willing to bet that the consumer at large could look at the raw data and pull in custodians (since most of them work a 240 day year) and paraprofessional supervisory staff.

Last year I looked at the same topic and asked whether this data was usable data, and as constructed I don’t know that it is.

If you've accessed the spreadsheets and used them, what did you use them for?

Read more here, if any.

The Schoolyard Bully

From the tone of this article, you'd have to think it's the NEA and the AFT.

A piece from the article that doesn't work:

Or consider performance-based pay. Forty percent of teachers leave the classroom within their first five years on the job — in some measure because they don’t stand to gain the same performance-based pay raises available to their private-sector counterparts. Merit pay would help public schools retain good teachers by paying them more.

Let's note first that "in some measure" is a wonderfully inexact phrase; it could be one teacher, it could be all of them. Let's note too that as long as teaching is a government function there's a built-in incentive to keep costs vis-a-vis payroll down, so this idea that there's an untapped funding source out there just waiting to go to teachers is a figment of the imagination.

I'm taking a school law class now taught by a former superintendent who now does a ton of work for school districts locally as a hearing officer, investigator, and superintendent search consultant. He looked kindly on the proposed merit pay plan out of Idaho that would have given teachers raises of about $3,000 in return for giving up tenure; if you extrapolate that same number into Washington, with 80,000 teachers, you'd be looking at a cost of $240,000,000. It's not doable.

I think that if you do it right merit pay could work, under the perfect conditions and appropriate reasons. We can't pretend, though, that merit pay is a way to solve the salary gap, and it has to be acknowledged that (as with most things in life) it's impossible to do in a completely fair manner.

I do enjoy the discussion, though.

Read more here, if any.

Frozen Assets redux

Better than a year ago now I wrote about Frozen Assets, a report from the Education Sector that took a fairly critical look at teacher pay provisions. It caught my eye because the primary author is Marguerite Roza, a researcher at the University of Washington.

Unlike many reports, though, this one has come back to life via John at the American Federation of Teachers catching Education Sector blogger Kevin Carey in a bit of a pickle where one of his written comments on the narrowing curriculum would seem to invalidate ES' earlier report on teacher wages. It's an interesting discussion from both sides.

Read more here, if any.

The Over Paid Teacher

There’s a lot of people out there who talk about teacher salaries in the abstract—“They’re overpaid! They’re underpaid! They’re paid just right!”, etc. Since teacher salaries are a matter of public record there’s not a whole lot to be argued about there, but what about the other numbers like benefits, retirement, etc.?

On Friday I got my annual statement summarizing all my paychecks for the year. I give you those numbers here so that you can know exactly what it’s like.

• Social security wages: $42,864.02
  
• Wages, tips, other compensation: $35,822.74
  
• Federal income tax withheld: $4,390.32
  
• Social security tax withheld: $2,657.56
  
• Medicare tax withheld: $621.53

That’s basically the information from the W2. The central number is the second, because that was nominally my take home pay after taking out the income tax and social security.

Oh, but there were other deductions:

• L&I: $48.72
  
• Section 125 ME: $4,077.82
  
• Union Dues: $732.64
  
• Retirement: $7,041.28

The total of those deductions is $11,900.46. When you subtract that from the line above it leaves about $24,000, or $2,000 a month.

What’s that Section 125 ME number? That’s what I pay in health insurance out of pocket per year, or about $340 a month. If anyone tells you that all teachers get their health insurance paid for, slap them with a trout. Know too that I voluntarily put far more into my retirement plan than I have to, but on TRS3 if you don’t save for yourself you’re absolutely screwed.

This is my reality. What's yours?

Read more here, if any.

Goldhaber Watch, Day 102

I’ve talked about the work of Dan Goldhaber out of the University of Washington before; smart guy who does a lot of good thinking about how to reform the system, even if I bitterly disagree with some of the things he’s tried in the past. In the December 19th Seattle Times he’s got a guest editorial spun out of the work that he’s doing with the School Finance Redesign Project wherein he talks about the perils of trying to implement differentiated pay for teachers based on subject, SES, board certification, etc. It’s worth reading, if only so you can be the weatherman who tries to tell which way the wind blows.

For what it’s worth (zero!), here’s some of my thinking on changing the pay structure:

Let’s Pay More for Math and Science Teachers! I’m not against this, if there’s proof that they’re getting results. If you’re going to give extra money to the same bad teacher doing the same lousy teaching that they’ve always done, that makes the whole system look foolish. If you’re giving extra money to a teacher who gets 40 kids a year to achieve at the highest level on the AP exam, now we’re talking.

(Sidebar: Those interested in the math/science teacher issue should check out the December 21st issue of the Chronicle Review for Linda Darling-Hammond’s article. It’s a great overview of the topic, and she’s a very readable author.)

Let’s Pay More for National Board Certified Teachers! Long time readers might think I’m against this. They’re right. I think that the National Boards are a waste of money, and I’m annoyed that they’ve been embraced by both my State Superintendent and my union.

Let’s Pay More for Teachers in High Poverty Schools! I’m all for it, because I’ve never heard a good reason not to.

We know that high teacher turnover is one of the factors that keeps low-SES, high poverty schools stuck in a never-ending cycle of rehiring and retraining. If making more money can convince teachers to stay there longer, that’s a good thing that will save us taxpayers money in the long run. If a bump in pay attracts successful teachers to those schools, that’s a good thing because those are the kids who need them most!

My only worry is that you might attract the wrong sort of teacher. Take Mr. Ennui, for example, who’s getting pressured by his principal to improve his practice but doesn’t really want to because hey, he’s been doing it forever and he’s only got three years until he can retire and it’s not him who’s the problem it’s the kids so why should he work hard—you might know him by reputation, even if you don’t know him personally. If he took a job in a school with a higher pay grade just for the sake of boosting his retirement, that’d be a damn shame for the kids.

Let’s Pay More for Teachers Who Live in Mercer Island! Um, no. My understanding is that at one time we had a differentiated salary schedule based on what part of the state you live in, and that just seems asinine to me. Sure it’s more expensive to live in Seattle, but there are advantages to the city that you won’t get living in Stehekin. It’s not always easy to attract teachers to some of our more distant towns, either—why would you go and teach special ed in Curlew if you could make more doing it in Spokane? The single salary schedule might have it’s weaknesses, but let’s not forget the strengths.

Also, I should be paid more. Just because.

If you could change one thing in our state salary structure, what would it be?

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Money Matters!

From the June 15th Chronicle of Higher Education:

An effort by a major university to replace loans with grants in its financial aid to low-income students has led more of its graduates to choose public-service careers, a study has found.

The study, supported by the private National Bureau of Economic Research, concluded that an additional $10,000 in student debt reduces the likelihood that a graduate will take a job in a nonprofit organization, government, or an education field by five to six percentage points.

If I’d financed $50,000 worth of college education, it certainly wouldn’t be to go into a career that starts at $30,000 a year. This is one of the few areas where it can be truly said Eastern > Gonzaga.

Read more here, if any.

If something isn't controversial, do you need to say it isn't controversial?

Surfing around to take a break from lesson planning I ended up at the Evergreen Freedom Foundation's website, where they've posted their annual list of teacher salaries in Washington State. It lists everybody alphabetically by district; if you were paid by a school, you're in there somewhere.

I get that our salary is a matter of public record; there's a couple of things worth commenting on in their press release, though:

On March 27, 2007, the Evergreen Freedom Foundation (EFF) updated its complete look at the Washington State Teacher Salaries database. This database allows parents and interested citizens to review the salary and benefits of any teacher or other school employee in Washington State. All information is provided by the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction.

EFF begin this listing 3 years ago as an effort to allow citizens to know exactly how much these “public employees” were being paid.

“These figures go along to dispelling any myths that are out their regarding teacher’s salaries in Washington State,” said Steven Maggi, director of EFF’s Education Reform Center. “We believe that it is important to use actual data when discussing school funding issues. Using actual salary and benefit figures makes the topic of attracting and retaining excellent teachers easier to understand and is not controversial.”

It's a small thing, but why did they put "public employees" in quotes? Are teachers not public employees? I grant that my own biases may well play a role here, but one could easily read that as the EFF being snarky, and what does that do for them?

Then there's that last quote, and it's where the title of the post came from: why do you have to tell us that this isn't controversial? If it's not controversial, shouldn't that fact stand by itself without needing to be said? Perhaps Mr. Maggi's point was that making the real numbers available makes comparison possible in a non-controversial way, but if that's what he was getting at he buried it under some poor sentence structure.

There's also the very real possibility of math hijinx. If I take the average of all the districts M through O, the average total salary of a teacher is about $39,000. The trick is that includes parapros, bus drivers, administrators, etc, artificially raising some classes and lowering others.

What the EFF has given us here is data, but is it useful data?

Read more here, if any.

Dollars? Cents.

There's nothing quite like the night before payday.

Mrs. Thinker was not very happy with me when she opened up Money and saw that the balance in my checking account was better than $800 in the red. "Where the hell did it go?" was her question, though she phrased it a bit less delicately.

Where did it go? Our first half property taxes were due; that was about $300. Paid a lump sum on the auto insurance; so long, $450. The hearing aide specialist needed a partial payment on the Little (s)Thinker's new mold for her hearing aide; that was $100.

"That's about half your take-home already," she pointed out.

Don't I know it. My monthly net is about $2,000, including my $150 a month stipend for the after school enrichment classes. Every now and then there's a little extra when I teach the before school remedial classes.

Right off the top of that comes my mortgage, $700. Cable, electric, telephone, gasoline, food. Copays for my daughter's frequent appointments. A couple of magazine subscriptions. Snacks, teaching supplies, and prizes for the classroom.

"I know, I know....it adds up."

When I've been paying bills I hate that phrase, because it usually adds down. 3 months out of 4 I play that game where I let the checking account get dangerously close to zero, often writing checks that fall well below, hoping to God that I've timed the mail right. When I haven't WaMu sends me a $29 love note and thanks me for my financial foibles.

I don't do the job for the money, but I also can't ignore that aspect of my life, especially with a special needs child. That's why reports like this from the American Federation of Teachers are so important, because they demonstrate beyond any shadow of a doubt just how far behind we've fallen. There's talk of a 4.3% COLA on the horizon for next year, and I thank WEA-PAC for all the great work they've done in that regard, but there are hard, hard days when I can't help but wonder why I have to leave my daughter early and get home late so that we can stay even.

Anyhow, check out the full report. It's great reading, and I commend Ed and all the other folks at the AFT for their work. I think it's also one of the most important conversations we can have as a profession; please join in.

Read more here, if any.

We pay our subs $86 a day.

From Pittsburgh:

Allderdice High School in Squirrel Hill will have a new principal Monday -- its third one this school year.

The Pittsburgh school board on Wednesday tapped Bernard Komoroski, a retired district teacher and administrator, to run Allderdice through July 31. He will be paid $600 a day.

That means that if there's 50 days left in the school year, he stands to pocket a cool $30,000. Not bad for part-time work.

Read more here, if any.