Below is a guest blog post from activist Helen Gym on teacher contracts.
-Ben
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The teachers’ contract is a one-in-five year opportunity to set a vision and plan of action to boost the critical frontline of our schools. Yet, both the District and the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers (PFT) are missing out on an important opportunity to sell their vision. Instead, as the Daily News pointed out in its editorial the talks have been cloaked in secrecy with little information or insight into what either of these entrenched institutions are planning to do to reform themselves.
To their credit, last spring, the School Reform Commission solicited input from different advocacy groups, one of which was Parents United for Public Education, about what they would like to see in the PFT contract negotiations. Unfortunately, we heard nothing back about our input, and haven’t been contacted since.
If there were an opportunity to rethink this process, these would be some of our top priorities.
1. Publicly lay out a vision for teaching and learning in the district: This year, the district received more investment from the state and city than in any time past (more than half of which goes into salary and benefits). The District and the PFT owe it to the citizens of this city about how they envision using those resources to improve teaching in the district. This has less to do with posturing about the typical buzzwords like “merit pay” or “seniority” but laying out a broader understanding of the challenges faced with our teaching force (things like the fact that less than half our teachers have more than five years experience, or that Teach for America is being used as a recruitment contract rather than as a supplemental service program) and how the District and PFT plan to address it – what are they promising our teachers and what do they expect our teachers to do?
2. Engage the public to build a better contract: The issue of teaching and learning is not just a negotiation among legal teams; it’s a broader dialogue about publicly what we value in teaching and our teaching force. The District has consistently failed to engage the public around issues that matter; the result often is greater misunderstanding and distrust and a lost opportunity to broaden the impact of contracts.
Last year, Parents United pushed for the district to dialogue with parents about school budgets and hold region by region community meetings on what parents want to see in their schools’ budgets. The same dialogue should happen around the teachers’ contract. What concerns do parents have about teachers and teaching? What are the things that parents will look for to see if a PFT contract is working? The district will find that some of the issues that matter to parents – more evening meetings, say, or making sure sabbaticals and retirements don’t create havoc in a school – might not necessarily make their top list but can be ways to address public concerns about schools.
3. Reduce class size: With a 30:1 student teacher ratio in kindergarten to third grade, and 33:1 in fourth through twelfth, the School District of Philadelphia easily has one of the largest class sizes in the nation. The biggest problem with this ratio is that it’s written into the PFT contract as a maximum, but it’s being used as a standard unit of measure by the district – one of the number one reasons we’ve lost almost two thousand teachers in the last couple of years. In fact, class sizes now are larger on average than they were five years ago, and this despite charters, attrition, and population decline. The last time class size was reduced in the teachers’ contract was twenty years ago. It’s time to reduce class sizes to 25 max in K-3 (ideally 20 in kindergarten) and 28 in grades 4-12.
4. Invest in retention and professional development: As mentioned above, less than half our teachers have more than five years experience. This is a serious crisis that has largely worsened as a result of our own making. Several years ago, I devoted hours of time on an exciting District effort called the Campaign for Human Capital which sought to make recruitment and retention of a quality teaching force the District’s top priority.
All the research and dialogue and analysis of that effort was abandoned in favor of more headline-grabbing reform efforts. One example was the emphasis on recruitment programs like Teach for America, which has had millions of dollars of contracts with little results to show. Teach for America isn’t even a teaching program; it’s a service opportunity for young people who make no more than a two year commitment in public schools. It’s wonderful for them, but makes no sense for the District to view it as a serious recruitment tool, especially considering that Philadelphia’s chapter until recently had the worst attrition rate in the country.
Rather, we need serious investment in recruitment of long-term professionals who will be committed to teaching. With the return of Tomas Hanna as Chief Operations Officer, and who headed up the Campaign for Human Capital, this effort needs revisiting.
5. Quality teachers for quality schools: The lack of experienced teaching personnel also has another side that needs addressing in the PFT contract. Those least experienced in teaching are disproportionately represented in our poorest schools, according to a Public School Notebook study. A number of advocacy groups, including Parents United, feel that this is one of the most significant barriers to improving school climate and academic achievement. There needs to be dialogue about how to change this distribution so it’s not punitive and unreasonable to teachers and schools, but to help the neediest of schools have a fighting chance to turn themselves around.
You can read more about Parents United’s positions at http://parentsunitedphila.googlepages.com.
Helen Gym is a public school parent and one of the founders of Parents United for Public Education, a network of parents demanding that school budgets place kids and classrooms first. For more information, email us at parentsunitedphila@gmail.com.
Comments (1)
I believe the School District of Philadelphia needs to be taken over by the state - the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania...
Oh, but it has been...
Sorry...
Well, the School Reform Commission has most of its hacks from the district, anyway, so it isn't doing much reforming...just a lot of excuse making...
If you want to see a sadder group of ne'er-do-wells, go to a School Reform Commission meeting...
The district is getting worse...mark my words...and will get worse by the day...
It is an institution that lacks ethics...
Helen, number 5, blames teachers...teachers in the district are blamed by the CEO, Ackerman, too, and the real focus of blame are the administrators...
At least teachers are not corrupt.
Most of your administrators are corrupt, in my opinion, and lack ethics...
This district is a mess.
Posted by Down in the Basement | September 6, 2008 10:16 AM