Reply to Anne Arundel - NO special ed teachers will return

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]There seems to be a lot of agreement that SPED teachers should be paid more- or at least get hazard pay for now- but then a couple posters here said the union would never allow it?  Why is that?  Will they not agree to any raises unless it is for all teachers?[/quote]

Correct.
AACo used to have bonuses for teachers at the most challenging schools (not just Special Ed, but high FARMs, etc) and the union did away with all those too.  Basically their stance is that all teachers should be paid on the same scale, despite the fact that some teachers do remarkably different jobs.[/quote]

I would like to see that practice return. That is a measure that could actually combat the achievement gap. All things being equal, why wouldn't most teachers want to be in a less stressful, less challenging environment?[/quote]

I think it's part of a general fear of performance-based pay.  Teachers have broadly fought all efforts to tie any portion of salaries or bonuses to job performance.  There seems to be an incredible lack of trust between teachers and administrators.  Once you understand that, many of the broader actions of the teachers unions make more sense.[/quote]

Performance based pay would punish teachers who work with challenging students.  Also, how do you measure performance?  Do you want art teachers judged on English scores?  Because that has been known to happen in some school systems that have adopted such systems.[/quote]

The same way nearly every other profession does it: through subjective evaluations by their supervisors.[/quote]

in which case, teachers who can would get to stable high performing better off schools where it's easy to justify a bonus because all of the kids are testing where they should be as opposed to schools in poorer neighborhoods with high ESOL and FARMs populations where its harder to justify bonuses because the test scores are never where they should be. Even with subjective scores, school administrators will still have to answer to their bosses and it's a lot easier to call everyone a model employee if the school is thriving [/quote]

How is this different than any other field?

I'll also note that in most cases, employees get grouped into different evaluation pools, with each pool getting set aside their own pot of money for pay increases and/or bonuses.  These dollar amounts allocated to each pool might be based on their size, or it might be based on their need to more strongly reward/retain high-performers in particular areas.

In the case of schools, it seems like you'd almost certainly separate the pools at least by school, and perhaps grouping departments as well.  And you'd probably allocate more money for schools (Title 1?) and specialities/areas (SPED, STEM) where it is harder to recruit or retain teachers.
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