The California Teachers Association hasn’t spent an entire decade conspiring with the State Superintendent to mask its members’ illicit use of performance-enhancing drugs. Barring that, I see little difference between this association and that which represents the players in Major League Baseball.
The magnetic polarities of fiscal responsibility and performance incentives (essentially merit pay) fuel the tug-of-war of labor negotiations in both the sports and education arenas. Both associations argue fervently that their employees deserve more money, yet both oppose a consistent, standardized formula for measuring performance and calculating compensation. In baseball, the only standard by which an athlete’s skill is measured is the value of the most recent contract. If one third-baseman breaks the bank – as Adrian Beltre’s six-year, $96 million contract did last summer – then any third baseman with comparable skill can make a comparable sum. Conversely, the team owners grapple to keep these ever-increasing salaries within their multi-million-dollar budgets while simultaneously hoping to recruit enough quality players to field a successful team. Leaders in public schools are under similar pressure as the national conversation about education now emphasizes identifying, developing, and recruiting high-quality teachers. Kate Jamentz’s Isolation is the Enemy of Improvement even stresses the importance of teacher teamwork as an integral part of a high-functioning school, and in this NCLB era of public school ratings, “fans” of education can now see how their local faculty “team” ranks in the standings just as easily as one follows the Giants in the National League West. Given this pressure to place the most qualified and talented instructors “on the field”, administrators might be more than happy to push the salary of a thoroughly skilled educator beyond the upper limits of their current pay schedule so long as they had a reciprocal power to flat-line compensation for ineffective teachers. At this notion, CTA categorically balks, claiming that a true measurement of merit is well nigh impossible for teachers.
But is calculating the skill of a third-baseman any less of a crap shoot? Major League Baseball provides twenty-nine different statistics for Adrian Beltre. One cannot possibly crack the calculus that assessed his value at just shy of $100 million. Absent a workable formula, the task then falls to the athlete (or his agent) to build their own arguments for what kind of compensation best reflects their apparent talents. Teachers should be afforded the same opportunity. Convert CTA’s lobbyists in Sacramento into the Jerry Maguire’s of the classroom, and let their persuasion raise the standards of teacher performance and pay. Could this lead to all the greatest teachers being lured away to work at George Steinbrenner High? Not if schools can negotiate for term as well, allowing those with smaller budgets to offer job security or other perks – such as a highly collaborative environment – in lieu of a higher per annum. Yes, schools and districts should negotiate the length of a teacher’s contract, too. At some point, educators must be forced into “free agency” wherein they must sell their own skills in order to maintain employment. This is actually to a common area of compromise between salary-pushing athletes and their fiscally responsible employers. Young players are drafted out of high school or college – conscripted to their first contract. When that deal expires, the players may now pursue offers from other organizations while their current teams may entice them to stay by offering longer-term contracts or multi-year extensions, essentially offering job security in exchange for a lower salary. Experienced players will often add “no movement” clauses that prohibit teams from terminating them or demoting them to the minor leagues even if their performance slips. Sound familiar? The worries associated with teacher tenure, though, can be ameliorated if it’s bargained right alongside compensation, term, and all the other contractual variables.
Nonetheless, if the public push for extending the time needed for a teacher to earn permanent status continues, CTA should then lobby for a minimum contract length for a starting teacher. The current tenure law almost has it backwards – new teachers need to be protected against repercussions for anything short of student endangerment or criminal acts. Discipline needs to be meted out with an eye towards nurturing their instructional skills and keeping them in the profession if they have any skills at all. A “minor leagues” for teaching would be ideal for the profession’s rookies, yet a stipulation that some students get less-than-big-league instruction probably wouldn’t sit too well. It falls on the manager of the school, then, to ensure their young teachers have the time and support necessary to develop their craft effectively. California’s BTSA program has been widely panned as an overwhelming burden for new teachers, yet other avenues like Teach for America seem to recruit people into the most challenging classrooms without any support at all. School leaders must carefully and patiently manage the teaching assignment (and, where possible, the actual student roster) of each instructor hired at the dawn of their career. An initial, almost-guaranteed contract of three to five years would ease the pressure for a new teacher to learn too quickly; once that contract ends, schools can set the teacher free or negotiate their permanent status as a condition for re-signing.
Absent this revolution in educational hiring, though, I’d still want to assess how well a teacher can evaluate proficiency given the myriad ways to measure performance. I’d ask an applicant in a job interview to demonstrate her preferred methods for reviewing a body of work and assessing the skill level of a few selected subjects. For the first demo, assess yourself.
Play ball.
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