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Finance Control Board discuss teaching contracts

Editor's note: Community activist Shiela McElwaine has attended many meetings of the Finance Control Board and has created transcripts of those meetings. She has offered them to Reminder Publications so that residents can read for themselves what occurs during the meetings that are often conducted at a time inconvenient for many people to attend. This is the first intallment of the events of the Dec. 18 meeting.



Finance Control Board, Dec. 18; Present: Thomas Gloster, Alan LeBovidge, Mayor Charles V. Ryan, Jake Jacobson, City Clerk Wayman Lee. Absent: City Council President Jose Tosado



Subject: Contracts for teachers

Alan LeBovidge: The next item on the agenda is to get an update on the S[pringfield] E[ducational] A[ssociation] contract and Superintendent Burke, I guess, is going to lead that discussion.

Superintendent of Schools Joseph Burke: Yes. Good Morning. It's a pleasure to give you a brief update on where we are with the final teacher contract and then, you know, I'm sure that there'll be some questions and that sort of thing, and I apologize in advance if I sound funny. I have a pretty bad cold and I'm all stuffed up and I can't hear very well, so my voice may modulate in a little unusual fashion here. So let me run through this with you and talk about the landmark features of this contract and some of the key things that are in it. I'm just going to give just an overview first and then I'll go into some specifics.

The contract establishes pay increases based on superior performance and results for teacher leaders and instructional leadership specialists, two new positions that we've created in this contract, and it eliminates seniority as the primary determinant of salary increases. It eliminates steps and C[ost] O[f] L[iving] A[llowance]s both as the basic pay schedule and establishes a different kind of pay schedule and salary bands for experienced teachers in the teacher leader and instructional leadership specialist positions based on excellent performance and results. It installs a "value added growth model" as the method for measuring teacher success and performance. It provides a mechanism for redistributing teacher talent to the most needy schools, and I'll come back and talk about that in a few moments.

It establishes instructional leadership teams of the highest quality teachers to lead continuous performance improvement efforts in the schools. It grants authority to the superintendent to transfer and assign teachers voluntarily or involuntarily according to the operational needs of the district and the educational needs of the students following a set of procedures that are prescribed in the agreement. It extends the work day for teachers and provides increased learning time for students. And it provides a critical shortage differential, recognizing market value of certain difficult-to-staff positions, provides distributive leadership opportunities for head teacher, test coordinator and the two instructional leadership positions that I mentioned earlier, and it provides opportunities for instructional staff to remain in their positions in classrooms or working with other teachers rather than to have to chose to go into administration just for economic advancement issues.

Jake Jacobson: Superintendent, what does "distributive leadership" mean?

JB: Basically means that we're establishing a way in which leadership gets disseminated to a variety of individuals within the organization, in this case, the head teacher at the elementary school, the test coordinator who has a specific set of responsibilities, and the leadership positions of "teacher leader" and "instructional leadership specialist."

OK, so some details on these. The first one is knowledge, skills and results as a fundamental feature of the compensation system. For the teacher leaders and the instructional leadership specialists, these knowledge, skills and results are established as fundamental bases for compensation for the those individuals. And there are separate salary bands for these two new positions which will...I'll show you in just a moment.

This compensation issue is basically eliminating seniority as the primary determinant of salary increases. After the 2006-2007 school year, no teacher may move to the shaded steps on the far right [of the PowerPoint display] where you have the longevity steps of 15, 20 and 25. The teachers that are in those particular areas will be grandfathered to stay there, but there'll be no new movement to those steps, and that changes the configuration a little bit.

We've also eliminated credit increments between the masters and the doctorate, so that in the basic salary schedule by the end of year three, in 2008-2009, more than 42% of the salary boxes are essentially eliminated from the current salary schedule. Those 53 boxes that get eliminated streamline the salary schedule substantially and then kick in to a different kind of salary schedule for those individuals who want to continue to advance. Essentially, what happens is is as a result of this streamlined schedule, it "incentivizes" teachers to access both the teacher leader salary band and the instructional leadership salary band. The teacher leader salary band is indicated here [on the PowerPoint] by "Level Three" and the "Level Four" for the instructional leadership specialists.

The reason that you see two sets of salary bands here is that we maintain the notion that we wanted to have a difference for those individuals who were "critical shortage teachers" and those who were not "critical shortage teachers." So there's actually two sets of salary bands as there are two separate salary schedules as teachers progress through the, through the system.

The knowledge, skills and results is an important feature of this, and this [PowerPoint graphic] is kind of an illustration of the "value added growth model." And I don't want to dwell on this, but essentially if you look at, if you look at the green horizontal line, that would be sort of the baseline of student performance. And then the blue line that cuts across would be an expectation of growth for students for a given year. So that students...the dots...the yellow dots that would appear above that blue line would be students that were substantially performing at a rate greater than their predicted growth, and the students below the blue line would be students that would be performing below their predicted growth.

So, if you look at the graphic or the scatter gram on the right side of this [PowerPoint], what you would see is Teacher 1, Teacher 2, Teacher 3, and Teacher 4. And, based on what that, what the data looks like, Teacher 1, which is where the red dots are, would be the teacher that's getting consistent growth in, over and above what students would normally, predictably have in a year. Teacher 2 is sort of, kind of bouncing around; some of it is above, some is below. Teacher 3 is almost right on the line. And Teacher 4 would be consistently getting student performance that would be below the predicted growth.

In terms of recognizing teacher talent, the new provisions provide a mechanism for redistributing teacher talent to the most needy schools. We're going to do that by establishing a new staffing formula that will allocate instructional leadership specialists and teacher leader positions with extra positions for high-needs schools. So, if a school is identified as in needs [sic] of improvement, there'll be a base-line allocation for the numbers of instructional leadership specialists and teacher leaders for all schools based on student enrollment, but in those schools that have greater needs, there'll be an additional kicker so that we can get the stronger teachers assigned to those schools based on the needs.

What we are going to be doing is establishing instructional leadership teams at every school, and the teachers that are in that leadership group as the instructional leadership specialists and the teacher leaders will be involved in both the design of the school improvement plans and in monitoring and basically looking at the execution of the implementation of the school improvement plan so that you'll have this core of teacher leaders that will be working on a continuous basis on looking at how we can improve the overall performance of students in the schools.

The authority of the superintendent, I mentioned that earlier. You know, that's a significant feature that allows us to go ahead and do the reallocation of teachers and do...and place people where they're most needed...Yes.

CVR: ...[unintelligible]...just go back quickly? How would this differ from the authority of the superintendent prior to the contract?

JB: It's not substantially different, but what this establishes is, in the contract it establishes, a more clear delineation of that authority. It was there before, but it was sort of implied, and there were some little controls here and there.

Increased Student Contact. In the former contract, the elementary students had about 370 minutes a day of actual contact with teachers. In the new contract, that increases to 400 minutes, and so essentially what you have across the year is an additional 5400 minutes of actual student contact between the teachers and the students in this new contract. At the secondary level, the increase is about 2700 minutes, so, translated, you have about 90 hours more of actual instructional time at the elementary level and about 45 hours at the middle and high school level .

Compensation Levels for Critical Shortage Areas recognizes the market value of certain difficult-to-staff positions and creates the critical shortage differential for teachers certified in math, science, special ed and English language learners. There's actually two compensation schedules that were agreed to: one for regular teachers which is represented in the top schedule and then the differential for teachers in the critical shortage areas below.

The distributive leadership positions, as I mentioned earlier, they're listed here. and rewarding teacher talent...I think what we want to show you is a comparison of the salary schedules. Unit A is the teachers, and at the Level 4, what we're talking about, the instructional leadership specialists, you have a salary band there for 10-month salaries that range roughly from $65,000 to close to $72,000. The Level 1 salary band for assistant principals for the 12-month salary starts at $69,700 and progresses up to $72,000, $74,000, $76,000. The reason that we're showing this is to sort of illustrate that teachers that are in that top salary band for instructional leadership specialists can really remain in that salary band, and they don't have to make the decision to become an administrator, and they can make a very good competitive salary on a 10-month salary schedule as opposed to moving into the administrative ranks.

Some additional Provisions. The contract establishes the Springfield Learning Center to produce "best in class" lesson plans for teachers and professional development on how to use the plans. It strengthens the professional criteria for department heads with a focus on leadership and leadership experience. And it redefines preparation so that it emphasizes the professional dimensions of developing lessons, the use of materials, and, preferably working with their colleagues in doing that.

So that's basically an overview. There may be some individual questions that members of the control board have, but those are kind of the main highlights. Tom?

Thomas Gloster: Dr. Burke, we added in the budget certain projections as to level of participation that the volunteers would make in these programs, and I wonder if you could tell me how you feel the teachers are responding to this and whether we're at projections or not.

JB: Yeah. Well, we had originally projected somewhere between 120 and 170 people for the instructional leadership specialists. The initial applications were a little more than 130, and as we established a selection process for that--which was a very rigorous process-we ended up actually selecting 80 of the instructional leadership specialists n the first round. We are going to be re-posting that later in the year when we have an opportunity to really debrief and review the whole selection process. There are some individuals who applied who have been making requests for an appeal which was part of the process, and we're instituting an appeal process for those individuals now. But the 80 people that were initially selected are very...very, very excellent individuals, and we're very happy with that selection. I do need to point out that there were some people that were already in collaborative professional development teacher positions that are similar to the instructional leadership specialist positions who chose to stay there and not apply for this year, and we allowed those individuals to do that and for their principals to keep them in those positions.

AL: Any other questions? Thank you very much.

Executive Director Phil Puccia: Thank you, Dr. Burke.