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New pay plan for Houston teachers draws criticism from union
No research supports plan imposed by district, AFT local leader says
The new plan, which would allow some teachers to earn up to $3,000 in annual bonuses, “doesn’t include any components of a good plan,” says Houston Federation of Teachers president Gayle Fallon. For one thing, she says, the plan’s rewards are based almost entirely on the standardized student test scores of individual teachers. “We asked them to show us research demonstrating that paying for test scores improves academic performance, and the research isn’t there.”
Pay incentives in the plan will be based on three components, which compare scores on various state and national tests to those of students in similar schools and classrooms in Houston, around the state and nationally. Teachers will find it hard to even tell what they need to do to earn the bonus money, Fallon says.
What’s more, she adds, the plan leaves out a large group of teachers whose students don’t take standardized tests, such as art, music, special education, preschool and early elementary grade teachers.
A more productive use of the $14 million allocated for the pay plan, Fallon argues, would be to raise salaries across the board for the district’s teachers, who are underpaid compared to neighboring systems. Starting salaries in Houston, for example, rank dead last among 11 districts in Harris County, Texas. The picture for top salaries is only slightly better, with the Houston teachers ranking seventh out of 11.
“We lose teachers left and right,” Fallon says. “Over half of our first-year teachers are gone by their fifth year, which exceeds the national average.” Many of them leave for jobs in suburban districts, which offer higher pay and fewer of the challenges faced by a large urban system like Houston with its 210,000 students.
AFT and Special Olympics join forces
Partnership will strengthen outreach to educators and schools
The union also has endorsed the Special Olympics’ “SO Get Into It” service-learning curriculum for all grade levels, which consists of lesson plans, activities and videos promoting student and teacher awareness and understanding of—and involvement in—Special Olympics. “The AFT is uniquely poised to implement this program in classrooms through state and local affiliates and members,” says AFT executive vice president Antonia Cortese.
Many AFT members, especially special education teachers, serve as coaches and volunteers with Special Olympics, and some AFT affiliates have collaborated in the past with local Special Olympics programs.
A joint letter from AFT president Edward J. McElroy and Special Olympics president and CEO Bruce Pasternack has been sent to AFT state federations and their Special Olympics counterparts.
Special Olympics is dedicated to empowering individuals with intellectual disabilities to become physically fit and productive through sports training and competition. It offers children and adults with intellectual disabilities year-round training and competition in 26 Olympic-type sports.
To learn more about the “SO Get Into It” service-learning curriculum, visit www.special
olympics.org/getintoit.
Louisiana educators stand in solidarity with displaced collegues
Addressing the first statewide convention since the Hurricane Katrina disaster, LFT president Steve Monaghan underscored the need for the union to frame the debate about the future of New Orleans schools in terms that will have broad public appeal—opportunity, fairness, access and accountability—and that will contrast our values against the anti-public education and anti-worker actions of our opponents. AFT president Edward J. McElroy gave the keynote address, calling the government’s response to Katrina “cruel and incompetent at all levels” and attacking those who would use the hurricane as an “opportunity for social engineering and anti-worker experiments.”
Efforts under way to secure funds for New Orleans schools
In January, AFT staffers joined UTNO president Brenda Mitchell, Orleans Parish school board president Phyllis Landrieu, and Bill Roberti, managing director of Alvarez and Marcel (the firm that oversees the financial operations of the Orleans school district), to begin discussions on the problems facing New Orleans students and school employees. Roberti agreed that there is a need to work with the union to address the healthcare coverage crisis facing members, as well as to get the federal government to release $50 million in Title I funds the district is entitled to—funds that will be essential to restoring the New Orleans public education system.
The AFT also is seeking congressional support for release of the Title I funds. To that end, staffers from the offices of Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), ranking Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee, and Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), ranking Democrat on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, were part of a team who traveled to New Orleans to meet with elected officials, higher education presidents and UTNO activists.
Meanwhile, UTNO has been instrumental in efforts to build a coalition of community groups in support of New Orleans public schools. And, in January, UTNO president Brenda Mitchell launched a series of meetings with displaced UTNO members to keep them informed about the union’s ongoing advocacy. More than 100 members attended a meeting in Baton Rouge and another 400 in New Orleans. Meetings also were scheduled for Houston; Atlanta; Birmingham, Ala.; Dallas; Jackson, Miss.; and Shreveport, La.
Recent years have seen an acceleration of charter school growth, and the number of these schools now stands at more than 3,000 with a combined enrollment of more than 900,000 students. The charter school mission has “morphed into a variety of forms” that frequently are at odds with the vision first outlined by the late Albert Shanker, AFT executive vice president Antonia Cortese told a conference session.
There have been promising examples of how union contracts in such states as New York and Massachusetts have helped ensure that buildings in the charter school mold are staffed by well-qualified, well-supported educators. But there also have been many instances where charter schools have broken from Shanker’s vision of small, teacher-developed laboratories of learning and instruction that might point the way to broader school improvement. In fact, too many of today’s charter schools have taken the cookie-cutter approach to education as the number of for-profit charter schools has proliferated. Often, a “charter school has become the reform itself rather than the instrument of reform,” Cortese said.
Charter school growth has had far-reaching effects on traditional schools. The growth has prompted urban areas from Albany, N.Y., to the District of Columbia to siphon off already meager resources from traditional schools. And the government response in the hurricane-ravaged New Orleans public school system has been almost as catastrophic as the storms themselves. Spurred by the prospect of federal funds earmarked for charter schools only, and the willingness of state and local officials to isolate charter “reforms” to the city, New Orleans has embarked on a nearly across-the-board conversion of traditional public schools to charter schools, robbing school employees of their bargaining rights and collective voice in restoring the school system.
The AFT will continue to press a multipronged response to these developments. Key efforts will involve supporting federal, state and local legislation that will bring transparency and accountability for student achievement into the charters.
The conference also discussed the AFT’s continued efforts to examine the performance of charter school students compared with their counterparts in traditional public schools. Affiliates such as the Ohio Federation of Teachers have been taking the lead when it comes to exposing cases where the charter school movement has been hijacked by for-profit companies and tainted by political patronage.
AFT president Edward J. McElroy reminded the conference audience that the union needs “a sophisticated series of strategies” to deal with the challenges charter schools present. The strategies must be tailored to each state and district, but all should accurately cast the AFT and its affiliates as “advocates for outstanding public schools” and fight plans to use charter schools as a way “of killing the union, and by extension, killing the schools and communities” they serve. And the union should remain stalwart in its efforts to organize the unorganized and give educators both in traditional and in charter schools a true voice in their profession and careers.
