Reply to The wisdom of rewarding Montgomery’s school employees (Washington Post)

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

Please tell me your view on pay and turnover.  I guess I didn't see it a few pages ago.  Can you update me?

I am going to leave the numbers argument alone.  I have made my point.  I guess we disagree.[/quote]

It's not "my" view on pay and turnover, although I give it weight since it's coming from actual teachers who are in a better position to explain how *they* view the tradeoff than you are. Their posts are scattered through this thread, I just went back and spotted a few easily. However, I'm not going to regurgitate their views, you'll just have to go back through the thread yourself.

Your numbers argument seems to be as follows: instead of teacher pay raises (or hiring more teachers, or other worthy objects), you expect MoCo to spend hundreds of K, maybe a million, to update payroll and other systems, and hire numbers crunchers, so you can have better, faster data on turnover. Is that right?[/quote]

I guess the teacher distraction threads work.   Teacher posts originally said roughly that if we don't raise salaries, then teachers would start leaving.  In fact, the wording sounded pretty dire and that without the raises turnover would be a real problem.  Someone then posted some statistics that showed 8 years of turnover rates at 8% or lower.   As we entered the economic slowdown in 2008-2009, turnover was only 4.7%.  They also showed extremely high teacher job application counts so that even if teachers to leave, there were plenty of folks in the pipeline ready to take over.   This was all from MCPS data with a link posted to a web site.  This conformed my idea that MCPS is already one of the, if not the, highest paying school system in the area (I also shared a link that says MCPS has an average teacher salary that is 9K higher than Fairfax County) and that retention is not a problem.  If you support a raise, fine, but retention is not a problem.

The response to this argument was that the data only goes to 2009!!!   I say either show better data or admit that you don't know if there is a teacher turnover problem.  Anecdotes don't really help.   We already know there is a 5-8% turnover rate.    Again, if you still want to support the raise, then fine.   Just don't use teacher turnover as the reason or at least admit that this is just a conjecture.

What I think happens is that some of these posts throw some pretty strong langugage out there, but when pressed, there is not as much validity as is presented.    I will accept that turnover is potential problem if salaries get too low, but in this economy with the previous MCPS salary structure, my opinion is that this is an extreme stretch.

As for the data, I can only say that MCPS was able to produce it up to 2009 apparently, so I don't think money or systems is the issue.  This issue is just a distraction, however.  The real issue is that teachers will get a raise, while many taxpayers will not.   One of my kids had a kindergarten class with 18 or 19 students a few years ago.    Another one of my kids had a Kindergarten class of 28 recently.  That tells you what I see as a parent.[/quote]

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