MCPS teacher with a PhD: what's your salary lane (Master's +30 or Master's +60)?
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Anonymous
Agree this isn't an especially hard problem to solve, and although I'm generally pro-union, this is one place where they'd never let this happen. |
Anonymous
That was the premise of "no child left behind" - a dismal failure. |
Anonymous
Wrong. They will take the credits from your masters beyond 30 or 32. I have a friend who did not receive his additional +30 salary for years before alerting MCPS and getting a small settlement. |
Anonymous
Are you saying an educational institution should not value education attainment? |
Anonymous
You seem mature and intelligent. |
Anonymous
Why on earth are you assuming that teachers should be compared across schools? It's not a. Comparison of teachers.. it's a Comparison of individual students. Do the students show proficiency at the end of the years vs the beginning of the year? |
Anonymous
Most people don’t get a doctorate to teach in public school. They’re usually at universities. |
Anonymous
Because you can’t accurately measure a teacher’s impact. Too many variables between students and each class. You would be comparing apples to oranges. Teacher A has 50 kids in a class, 20 of them with IEPs and they are on the same evaluation system as a teacher with 17 kids in a class with only 8 of them with IEPs AND a para and co-teacher? Hell no |
Anonymous
People already in public school get a doctorate for the higher pay (might as well make the +30 go toward a degree) and higher positions such as principal, county curriculum coordinator or superintendent. |
Anonymous
Yes, I agree. However, measures of proficiency must be defined. As a 5th Grade teacher (currently home on COVID quarantine), if I have a student who begins the school year on a second grade benchmark level and ends the school year at a fourth grade benchmark, how is that progress evaluated? According to my principal, it only matters if the student meets grade level targets. Little regard is given to the growth the student did achieve and the amount of time and energy I invested helping the student achieve two-three years worth of progress in one year (a process that is extremely time intensive and requires a dedicated and concentrated focus on SEL in addition to skillful instruction). Unfortunately, the student is entering middle school below grade level because they have been pushed along in a system that does not value mastery and uses a one-size-fits-all approach to instruction. Current curriculum used by MCPS allows very little foundational skill remediation and the expectation is we push through content regardless if a student has developed mastery. For example, students Who lack a concrete understanding of simple concepts such as addition and subtraction are still expected to multiply and divide fractions. As the student gets further and further behind they experience increased levels of frustration, anxiety, low self confidence, etc. This often leads to increased behavioral challenges and frequent outbursts, or the student becomes withdrawn and anxious, further affecting the class dynamics and time taken away from instruction. I teach at a title I school with a transient population that includes many MLL students. In addition to many students not being on grade level when they enter my class, it is not uncommon to have 3-5 students transfer out and to receive an additional 2-3 students during the school year. Highly doubtful MCPS would use common sense and exclude those students from data when looking at my overall class progress in regards to possible monetary incentives regarding teacher performance. Though unpopular, I am in favor of examining the extreme disparity between the salary of a three-year teacher compared to the salary of a 20+ year teacher (and I say this as a 12th year teacher, so I have nothing to gain personally). Currently, a third year teacher with a masters degree makes $60,665 per year compared to the $105,224 salary for a 19th year teacher. The difference of almost $45,000 does not come with additional responsibilities or duties. Given the extreme teacher shortage, there should be a focused incentive to attract new teachers into the field. MCPS should examine a way to evaluate life experiences and factor that information into the salary scale. Examples include someone who has 10 years experience as a paraeducator, or someone who may have taught for a few years and then became a stay at home parent for five years, or someone who has been a private preschool teacher for eight years. Given they meet the educational requirements and have (or are working towards) certification, why is their experience not valued and taken into consideration on the salary scale? I’m not advocating to lower the salary of a teacher with 20 years plus experience but I think the salary disparity should be examined. Especially considering the additional certification requirements for new teachers mandated by the MSDE Blueprint for Learning (2025), I don’t see how anyone interested in changing careers would be motivated to become a teacher. Teachers should be compensated for experience but experience does not always directly correlate with increased effectiveness. I know of several teachers with 25+ years of experience who are phenomenal, but there are equal if not greater number of 25+ year teachers I personally would not want as my child’s teacher. I am in full agreement that teachers should be evaluated on effectiveness and should receive monetary compensation but the issue is complicated and multifaceted. In true MCPS fashion, there would likely be a five year study dedicated to pursuing this idea with multiple new central office positions created. Meanwhile, teachers continue to leave the field and seek out alternative careers at an alarming rate. |
Anonymous
I work in a field where performance cannot be measured quantitatively. So my boss subjectively decides who gets promotions, which are really just pay increases in my office (not an increase in responsibilities). Promotions are not automatic. This is normal. And though I started out making less than an entry-level teacher, 10 years in I make around what a 12-month +60 teacher with 25 years experience makes. This is possible because I have proven myself and my boss is in a position to reward that. Is there nobody in schools in a position to assess performance, which as you note, has to be subjective? |
Anonymous
How can you bring something this subjective into a huge system? That makes sense. Have you not heard about innate bias and how women and minorities are often subjectively treated worse than white men. There have been so many studies on this. Researchers fake applied for jobs using the exact same resumes but either white or asian names. Only the resumes with white sounding names got call backs. There are a hundred similar studies like this one |
Anonymous
How would you judge performance? Give us some specifics. The variations in students is huge. MCPS did away with final exams. If you are a 11th grade on-level physics teacher for example, how would MCPS analytically assess how effective you are? |
Anonymous
No, not if it doesn’t improve their performance as a teacher. Do you? |
Anonymous
How do you think performance is assessed in other professional jobs? Managers look at any quantitative data that is available, but ultimately use that as input when making qualitative assessments based on the circumstances. |