The 'ABCs' of school staffing

There is considerable talk these days about how to staff classrooms with qualified teachers, but the ABC Unified School District has other things to worry about.

Fire code violations, for example. Turnout these days is so huge at district job fairs for prospective teachers that organizers always have to take care not to over-pack the room. That typically means lines of teachers snaking outside the district office whenever a job fair is in progress—hundreds of educators waiting their turn to learn more about one or two dozen annual job openings at ABC Unified, a midsize school district south of Los Angeles that joins school districts in Artesia, Bloomfield and Carmenita.

So why is the world beating a path to the door of ABC Unified? Why is demand for positions so great that the district no longer accepts applications from teachers who are not fully credentialed? Certainly it’s not because ABC Unified teaching assignments are the “easy lifts” of public education. The district serves many students from low-income households and communities where gang violence is often a real problem; and many schools serve large numbers of English language learners and students with disabilities. But those challenges are a big part of the draw for educators like Ray Gaer, an AFT member and special education teacher at ABC’s Artesia High School.

Gaer came to ABC from a nearby high school that is often rated one of the nation’s 10 best. “Those kids were going to Harvard or Yale, with or without me. I’d tell freshmen to write me a 20-page paper, and they’d say ‘no problem.’ ...The spark was already in their eye—so what was the point? I like challenges.”

What brought him to Artesia—and, more important, what’s kept him in the district—were not just the challenges but the opportunity to succeed in those challenges. “Teachers feel a lot more supported than they used to. When they ask for things, they get them” he says. Every group at the school level has an opportunity to work together, he says. And new teachers are getting help with the benchmark system used by the district.

“Eventually this is going to be the place you want to work,” the teacher predicts. “We’re recruiting teachers who are hearing about our partnerships with the district. We’re getting both teachers and administrators who are hearing a buzz” about positive, supportive school climate.

Not by accident

It’s tough to put a price on union-management cooperation, but ABC Unified shows it’s easy to calculate the dividends. After a bitter district strike 13 years ago, ABC Unified has emerged as a national model of public school success built on a constructive, collaborative partnership that neither side takes for granted. Student achievement gains are strong, sustained and spread throughout the system; schools where ELL populations top 95 percent often rank at or near the top in district growth.

These things didn’t happen by accident, Laura Rico, president of the ABC Federation of Teachers and an AFT vice president, told leaders of the AFT’s teachers division at their meeting in Los Angeles earlier this year. School gains stem largely from the district’s ability to attract and retain exceptional teachers, she said, and 97 percent of the district’s teachers are fully certified. ABC Unified’s ability to compete for teachers, in turn, also owes much to its reputation for competitive salaries and benefits, a positive and supportive school environment, and a chance for teachers to have a real say in their buildings on issues that matter.

These features are supported and strengthened by ABC involvement in many AFT partnership efforts. With AFT support, a district team participated in a Harvard School of Management conference not long after the strike, and the event is viewed as a turning point in union-administration relations, Rico says.

District teams have traveled as far as Houston to view research-based reading programs, and bonds have been strengthened over the years through district team participation in the AFT’s QuEST and Effective Leadership for Academic Achievement conferences.

The bottom line, Rico says, is a culture in which the union and administration both are committed to schools where students and teachers can do their best, where the union and the administration take joint ownership of the collective bargaining agreement in place, and where both sides are “determined not to let each other fail.”

Beyond carrots and sticks

Much of the debate over school staffing these days focuses exclusively on things like financial incentives and transfer policies. But schools are deceiving them-selves if they think it’s all about “carrots and sticks,” argues Rachel Santos, a teacher at Willow Elementary in ABC Unified.

“Some jobs you can sign on to and ‘boss hop’ around until you find the right fit,” she explains. “You don’t do that in teaching. It’s different. Your position begins in September, and leaving during the year is never done—or if it does [occur], it’s a sign that something very serious has happened” and will have to be addressed in the teacher’s future job search.

What that means for prospective teachers, Santos says, is that they need assurances. They need to know they’re not moving to a building where administrators aren’t supportive, responsive, and willing to listen to ideas and concerns. They need to know there will be time to do their best, to work with colleagues on school improvement strategies. They need to know they’re in a school with adequate resources and a safe, orderly setting. Prospective staff need to feel confident that these things are in place, Santos says, because the alternative is either a job blemish from leaving mid-year, or nine months in a building where teachers have been reduced to a bunker mentality.

ABC Unified looked at teacher recruitment and put school climate near the top of the agenda. Now the district has a reputation for sustaining the types of buildings where teachers can do their best. And that’s a big reason why 450 teachers show up at a job fair for 20 open positions.

The AFT is stepping up its mobilization to bring classroom teachers’ concerns and ideas to the table in the white-hot national debate over hard-to-staff schools, an issue that is sure to capture even more attention when the No Child Left Behind Act comes up for reauthorization this year.

The AFT executive council meets in May and is expected to discuss the issue of hard-to-staff schools. The session will lay the groundwork for stepped-up lobbying, communication and community outreach efforts over the next several months, when Congress takes up NCLB reauthorization in earnest.

Hard-to-staff schools dominated discussion when AFT Teachers division leaders convened in March. The group focused on the real issues that schools and districts face when trying to recruit outstanding staff. These include the need for competitive salaries; the need for safe and orderly school environments; and the need for peace, respect and cooperation between administrators and staff at the building level. Schools and districts that fail to address these concerns typically fail to get the qualified, credentialed staff their students deserve, several council members stressed. “We’ve got $7,000 incentives for hard-to-staff schools, and it still isn’t enough” to solve staffing problems at buildings that haven’t addressed such basic issues as discipline and safety, said John Tarka, president of the Pitts-burgh Federation of Teachers and a member of the divisional leadership council.

Hard-to-staff schools remain a top AFT priority, particularly at a time when some interests are pressuring Congress to legislate changes that would do much more harm than good. These include warmed-over attacks on teacher collective bargaining (now masquerading as “public school staffing concerns”), and efforts to overhaul NCLB’s highly qualified teacher requirement and put student test scores in the driver’s seat. NCLB recommendations released in February by the As-pen Institute and its Commission on No Child Left Behind urged Congress to adopt a new “highly qualified effective teacher” (HQET) provision. HQET is guided by flimsy-at-best evidence that student test scores can be a proxy for sound teacher evaluation. Even more outrageous is the assumption under the HQET proposal that the 25 percent of teachers with the lowest scores are, by definition, ineffective.