FCPS retroactively denying pay raises
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Anonymous
Bump. FCPS recently sent out something saying that Idaho State University programs and credits were reviewed and deemed acceptable. How many credits in FCPS is one class worth? I’m seeing they are $165 for a 3 credit class… but is that equivalent to 3 credits towards MA+30 or are they counted as less? |
Anonymous
Yes, a 3 unit grad class from ISU would count as 3 towards MA +30 |
Anonymous
| I have a PhD. I still feel underpaid. Secretaries make more than I do. |
Anonymous
Why do you think your tax money is paying? Teachers pay for their own courses. We can get reimbursement for a portion of it, but it's pretty minimal. The whole reason teachers choose ISU is because it's cheap. |
Anonymous
How ignorant are you of what the school board actually does? Do you think their job is to sit around reviewing teacher education credits? |
Anonymous
and here I thought they choose it because it was a degree mill |
Anonymous
Because it's not relevant AND trying to protect privacy. Are you always this big of an a-hole? |
Anonymous
These classes were just as difficult as the classes I took from UVA and Mary Washington. No teacher is getting diplomas from ISU, they are taking non-degree graduate credit. |
Anonymous
| This isn’t the same as a traditional pay raise. They title of this thread is misleading. |
Anonymous
NP, but of course the school board is involved! The tax money pays for not just the "minimal reimbursement", but also the salary bump that teachers get after taking these courses. And this salary bump is nearly always the only reason that teachers take the courses; it's widely acknowledged (and confirmed by research) that master's level education has close to a nil result on teacher effectiveness, with some studies showing significant *negative* impact. |
Anonymous
What research would that be? |
Anonymous
I can say (after 16 years of experience in education) that continuing my education through a masters, an Ed.S, and multiple graduate certificates that graduate and postgraduate work helped me be a more effective teacher. |
Anonymous
Here are a few of the many: "How and Why Do Teacher Credentials Matter for Student Achievement? " which looks at a massive dataset of North Carolina students and teachers from third to eighth grade. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w12828/w12828.pdf See section starting page 32 "Graduate degrees One of the most counterintuitive findings to emerge from the basic models is the small or negative effects of having a graduate degree. Most of those degrees are master’s degrees that generate higher salaries for teachers. A negative coefficient would suggest that having such a degree is not associated with higher achievement. Thus, if the goal of the salary structure were to provide incentives for teachers to improve their teaching, the higher pay for master’s degrees would appear to be money that is not well spent, except to the extent that the option of getting a master’s degree keeps effective experienced teachers in the profession..." The paper goes on to say that they think that master's degrees have no effect, and that the negative trend is either due to selection effects or small sample sizes. Here's another one: "It's easier to pick a good teacher than to train one: Familiar and new results on the correlates of teacher effectiveness" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272775710001755 "Neither holding a college major in education nor acquiring a master's degree is correlated with elementary and middle school teaching effectiveness, regardless of the university at which the degree was earned. Teachers generally do become more effective with a few years of teaching experience, but we also find evidence that teachers may become less effective with experience, particularly later in their careers. These and other findings with respect to the correlates of teacher effectiveness are obtained from estimations using value-added models that control for student characteristics as well as school and (where appropriate teacher) fixed effects in order to measure teacher effectiveness in reading and math for Florida students in fourth through eighth grades for eight school years, 2001–2002 through 2008–2009." |
Anonymous
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Here's a slightly more positive view, using further Florida data. They think maybe a master's degree isn't worthless in conjunction with middle school math, though the degree causes a negative impact for MS & HS reading, and do caution that there's further potential for negative effects while the teacher is obtaining the degree, as it takes time and energy away from the classroom. On the other hand, what they do not seem to mention in the text were the results in table 12 showing slight negative impact of master's degree on elementary school math performance and the huge negative impact on HS math performance, which was twice the size of the positive impact seen in MS.
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED509656.pdf "We consider the impact of advanced degrees in Table 12. Since our model includes teacher fixed effects, post-baccalaureate degrees earned prior to the period of analysis wash out when we demean the data. Thus our approach measures the impact of changes in the possession of an advanced degree (for a given teacher) during the period of study.20 [Note 20 The estimated coefficient on the advanced-degree variable measures the average productivity differential between the time before and the time after receipt of the degree. Before the degree is received some knowledge may have already been acquired through coursework already completed, thus biasing the estimated effect toward zero. However, work toward an advanced degree may take away from time available for class preparation and other teaching-related activities, which would tend to lower productivity before receipt of the degree and upwardly bias the estimated impact of the degree.] Our results indicate that obtaining an advanced degree during one’s teaching career is positively correlated with teacher productivity only in the case of middle school math. For elementary teachers there is no correlation between receipt of an advanced degree and performance. For middle school reading teachers and both math and reading high school teachers there is actually a significant negative association between attainment of an advanced degree and measured productivity. This may be because graduate degrees include a combination of pedagogy and content and our other evidence suggests that only the latter has a positive influence on teacher productivity. Other explanations for the graduate degree results arise from issues of methodology. Most previous studies suffer from selection bias, as noted earlier, and our solution is to study the effects of graduate degree attainment within teachers using teacher fixed effects. However, this approach imposes the implicit assumption that the receipt of the graduate degree reflects a sudden infusion of new preparation. In reality, the receipt of the degree is the culmination of several years of graduate courses whose influence may already be reflected in the teacher effects, especially for those teachers who take graduate courses over many years before receiving a graduate degree. Another possibility is that teachers load up on courses in the academic year preceding the receipt of the degree and therefore have less time to devote to their students. We found evidence above of such a contemporaneous decline in productivity when we considered the effects of other forms of professional development" |
Anonymous
| I will point out that the various 'higher education is worthless when it comes to teacher effectiveness' papers should typically be regarded as an admission against interest. Professors are typically strongly biased towards higher education. |