Lecture 15: " DIFFERENTIATED STAFFING"
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Preview Question
By what criteria ought teacher's salaries be determined?
Today I have a tough job. That is to convince you of a practice that isn't at all popular, but which should be the wave of the future. I'm talking about differentiated staffing. This is perhaps the most biased lecture you'll get this semester because I believe that unless we have differentiated staffing, we can't have any of the breakthroughs that's needed in the teaching profession. I feel that this proposal is very important, but I warn you it's my bias.
The major idea behind differentiated staffing is that different teachers should be paid differently according to how well they do their job and the different responsibilities they complete. How else can you get teachers doing the kinds of things they need to do to be great teachers, unless you differentiate their pay and their responsibilities? I am not speaking about merit pay. Merit pay is awarded to excellent teachers who do outstanding work, but beyond receiving a financial bonus, they continue doing exactly the same work that other teachers do.
In differentiated staffing, once you identify the best teachers you have earmarked a precious resource. The task at hand is to get these outstanding teachers to influence the lives of more kids. Under the old system, the reward for consistently good teachers was to reduce their class size because it's easier to teach a smaller class. That results in a great teacher influencing fewer kids. The other common result of being a great teacher is that they go on to become administrators, which ends their teaching of any kids. That's the wrong direction. I want to take those great teachers and figure out how we can get them to teach and influence even more students. I'm going to try and convince you that there are ways to do that.
I've been working for 25 years to bring my proposal into effect and unfortunately I've been quite unsuccessful. For example, at one point I controlled the budget to initiate my reforms! I was chief consultant to the National Defense Education Act and had 500 million dollars to be spent on differentiated staffing. I was dismally unsuccessful. We arranged the project so that schools would be granted a share of the money if they could show that they were practicing differentiated staffing. You wouldn't believe all the scams that the teachers in the schools around the country played in terms of avoiding a new system of differentiated status and pay for differentiated responsibility. The majority of the schools just changed the names of programs they already had going, made them sound like differentiated staffing programs, and walked away with their share of the money.
To understand the concept of differentiated staffing, we must think of different professional levels. The lowest level is the paraprofessional. A paraprofessional would be the student going out and becoming a volunteer in the PRIME program. They're available to do whatever the teacher needs. It could be tutoring, stapling or anything. Paraprofessionals generally have 1-2 years of college. They are different from clerks or technicians in that they aspire to be a professional, but are presently unqualified to do the full work.
The next level is the ASSISTANT TEACHER. These are students doing their practicum and occasionally teach. Usually, when assistant teachers teach there's a teacher present. Assistants are not really regarded as teachers, they are just considered knowledgeable in certain areas and utilized to make presentations when the teacher wants a break or is swamped. This is a fair and reasonable system. The next level is INTERNS. Interns are students of education during their student teaching year and have full responsibilities in classrooms. I make the distinction between interns and student teachers because the student teacher is similar to the assistant teacher but is really just training, whereas the intern is considered a predictable staff member. As a predictable member of the staff, the intern can be counted upon to do things that a regular teacher would ordinarily do (like taking full responsibility for your classes). The difference between an intern and a regular teacher is that interns have very close supervision. In our PRIME program, you'd have a PRIME supervisor who is paid $2,000 to help you during the year. During the first part of the year you actually co-teach one class with your PRIME advisor so you can see how they solve the day-to-day problems of teaching. The ASSOCIATE TEACHER is a different level, a sideways level. The associate teacher is fully prepared and credentialed, but for whatever reason chooses to only work part-time. I argue that we don't use part time teachers enough. The way schools are organized now; part-time teachers are a pain in the neck because the school is only geared to deal with full-time teachers. There are a lot of people who could be very effective part time associate teachers. For example, I would like to have the conductor of the Virginia Symphony be the orchestra teacher in a high school. That would be a great resource. That teacher would come in maybe two hours a day conducting the orchestra and helping with the advanced rehearsals. They would definitely need some staff to give support, but that could be worked out. I use this example to show that associate teachers are not low level teachers, they're just there part-time or there to do a specialized task. The FULLY PROFESSIONAL TEACHER is the person who has "been there, done that", is trained, performs well and can be counted on. Above the professional teacher is the master teacher, or mentor. You will recall, I was saying in the last lecture that I firmly believe that teachers should be paid the same as administrators. The highest paid teachers and administrators should be paid the same. The highest paid kindergarten teacher and college professor should be paid the same, the highest paid teacher and a well-paid doctor or lawyer should be paid the same. For that to happen, you have to have this very special category of master teachers or mentors. In a school like Lake Taylor High School, with a staff of 125, you would have maybe six master teachers, about the same administrators. In an elementary school you might have about two master teachers. Who are they? They are leaders of their professions who are able to help other teachers and are outstanding professionals called upon as consultants. In the US, one of the reasons why things don't work well is because only 47% of the money spent on personnel in schools, on average, is spent on teachers. That means more than half is spent on administrators. What happens when your weak teachers require specialists or administrators' help? You need to hire those administrators, who are expensive and you have even less money left for teachers. Then their salaries get worse and quality of teachers gets weaker. It's a downward spiral. If there's going to be change, you have to reconceptualize the role of the senior professional teacher or mentor in the classroom. Presently, senior people get gold stars on their rooms and are maybe paid a little more. I think it is very unfortunate.
HORIZONTAL DIFFERENTIATION SKILLS:
PRESENTATION, COUNSELING, CONTENT AND INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN
In addition to the vertical differentiation, we have horizontal differentiation. Horizontal differentiations are different tasks that teachers do that aren't necessarily hierarchical. In other words, one of the skills of a teacher is presenter. I happen to be a pretty good presenter; that's not an ego statement, I've just had a lot of success as a presenter. Put me in a class as a facilitator, and I'm really not very good at that. Why? Because I talk too much. If I'm put in a group of ten or twelve people, I can't resist talking. The facilitator has great listening abilities. In one-on-one situations I like to listen. I would argue that the presenters' skill is no more important than the facilitator. These are parallel professional skills which different people have in different combinations. The skill of a counselor, the one-on-one skill, the person who's able to help others, is another set of skills. Typically in the schools today, the counselors are above teachers. I don't agree. I think counseling is another skill, a parallel skill.
Then you have the content specialist. It's really neat to have someone in the school who knows "all there is to know" about US history so they're at your disposal. This is the person who can develop new curriculum units or the interdisciplinary units, figuring out how things fit together. This person always has a store of really neat anecdotes to kind of liven things up. Like, for example, do any of you know who used daylight savings time first? Adolph Hitler used it was during WWII. So anytime you have nice things to think about daylight savings time, you've now found something you can be grateful to Hitler for. It's that kind of anecdote that kind of livens up the situation. These are all content skills.
The other side of the content skill is the instructional design skill. These are people who know how to put courses together. Unfortunately, the way the world works is that teachers tend not to be very good at instructional design. Every teacher has his/her own particular instructional design. Each teacher designs his or her class a different way. Rarely do you get someone who mixes it up. Because it is hard to always be doing something different and new, try new things because it's easy to get into a routine and it feels comfortable. To always try new things is hard, so have a specialist at instructional design around to say: "Hey, did you ever think about doing it this way? Or perhaps you want to try this?" For example, a tele-TechNet class has a lot of elements of instructional design to it. Everything from "do you have a course pack or not?" to "what is the balance between quizzes and papers, the balance between group work and individual work, and how much emphasis should there be on deadlines?" All of these things are issues of instructional design, and they're all very important things. Some we do okay in and on some of them we don't do as well. But instructional design really makes a difference in terms of the class. Like, for example, I have an embarrassing example of that from the day before yesterday. We have really been trying to encourage people to take their quizzes early. We have been practically standing on our heads to get people to take their quizzes early. I have news for you. There were nineteen people who took their quizzes on Tuesday. And I was delighted, but they weren't rewarded very well because we forgot to put up group quiz four on the web. So after you happily take your individual quiz on Tuesday and you click "send me the group quiz", you get group quiz three. It took us a day to find that out and fix it. So anyone who took the quiz before noon on Wednesday was rewarded by not being able to get the group if you were ready for it. That's not a very good reward. We've been working really hard to get people to do the group quizzes early and what's your reward? You get hassled. You do it late, and you get hassled, you do it early, and you get hassled. After a while you think, "anything I do I'm going to get hassled". That's a bad example of instructional design. Don't think instructional design is simple or that I've just learned how to do it and I can do it well. Wrong! The instructional design is something that is an issue that will be with you for your entire career as a teacher. And the more you are aware of this as an element, the more you're going to have to work on it to become the teacher who doesn't do everything from a set pattern. And I know some teachers in the classroom who never change their ways.
EVALUATION SKILLS AND GRADING SYSTEMS
Another skill is evaluation and teachers are not very good at this. I really think that teachers need to learn how to use the skill of evaluation in a very different way. I'm going to try and teach you the skill of combining grades this morning. You may be confused because it's complicated and it's an issue that most teachers don't do very well. We're going to have three students: Students A, B, and C. Each of these three students is going to take three tests during a six-week period. One rule is that we don't which grades came first or last. It's not important. All three tests should count equally. One is no more important than the other is. Every single one of these is equally important. You are equally thrilled about the way the students performed on all three tests. Let's just say for the purposes of our grading that on every test, one student gets an A, one a B, and one a C. Everyone did equally well. The point is how do you combine these grades to tell me who the top student in this class is?
Student A grades: 20, 10, 30
Student B grades: 19, 20, 28
Student C grades: 18, 15, 29
These are the three sets of grades. Now I want you to tell me what grades they should get. Who is the top student, the middle, the bottom, or are they all tied? Do you understand the mission?
Okay, how many say that student A was the top student? Nobody here. Anybody in Virginia Beach? Nobody. The middle student? How many think that student A was the middle student? 2 people here. So how many here think student A was the bottom student? Okay we have a forest of hands, let's say we have 24.
Student B. How many say B was the top? We have a forest here 22. Middle? Student B? Nobody. Bottom? Student B. Nobody.
Student C. There must be a forest in the middle. Am I correct? How many think that student C is the middle student? Okay so we have a forest. 21.
Notice that you have now agreed that B is the top, C is the middle, and A is the bottom. Is that correct? I would point out how professionally irresponsible you are. Because I would point out to you that student A was the top student in the class on two of the three of exams, and you put that student on the bottom. And student B did the top on one, middle on one, and the bottom of the third exam. This is your top student? And the student that got two out of three of the top grades in the class is the bottom student. Come on. What is going on here? You can see why I say that so many teachers goof up at all levels. Right here at ODU you are getting professors who are giving awful grades because they don't know how to combine grades.
The rules are that one student got an A, one a B, and one a C; remember that rule? It wasn't that student A failed one test; he got a C. What you really did, if you look at your scores, is you didn't pay any attention to tests one and three and you used test two as your entire grade. Because A is the bottom, B is the top, and C is the middle. You didn't pay attention to any other scores; you paid attention only to test two. You didn't intend to do that, at least you shouldn't have, because that wasn't the rule of the game; the rule of the game was you should pay attention to all three tests equally. What went wrong? What happened? Well, it's the concept, and you had it right, that when the range is only two versus the range being ten, that the range being ten absolutely overwhelms the other. So it doesn't make any difference what the students get on the tests with a low range. This is an extreme, but very real, example of what goes on in classes. We don't realize how to combine grades. To combine grades accurately, you have to have ranges of ten or two for all of the grades.
To make the ranges ten, you have to multiply 20 times 5 is a hundred and 18 times 5 is ninety, now you have a range of ten. This becomes ninety-five.
You have a range of two to make that ten, this has to be 150, 140, and 145. Now we can add them together. 110 and 150 is 260 and 255, is that right?
And 90, 105 and 145 is 250. So the right ranking for these is student A gets and A, student B gets a B, and student C gets a C.
Student A grades: 20, 10, and 30
Student B grades: 19, 20, and 28
Student C grades: 18, 15, and 29
This tends to be really confusing. What's going on here is that you have two choices. One is to understand it and the other is to avoid it. You can avoid this problem if you always put standard grades into your grade book. If you always change your grades to standard grades, a, b, c, then you can add them together. But if you leave them as points, you can't add them together.
Teachers give meaning to points however they choose to. Points don't mean anything until you give them meaning. I didn't tell you what the points should mean. I'm only saying if you were equally satisfied with the performance on all three tests that's one of the premises. If you really believe that on each test, one student got an A, one got a B, and one got a C, then how do you combine the grades? Notice that in the class we have here, we use raw points because we choose to have the points that we give you criterion-referenced rather than norm-referenced. In other words, 90-100 is always an A, 80-89 is always a B, and 70-79 is always a C. And remember, whenever we get a result that we don't like, for example if we goof up on a question, what do we do? We add a point to you or we do something so that the points that goes in the book mean what we want them to mean. And we say, by the way, that we know everybody needs some slack so we always give you an extra point. A 21-point quiz but we only count it for 20. All of that is deliberate. It has nothing to do with arithmetic; it has to do with instructional policy and how we're going to run the class. But having decided that, then we can add the points together fairly because we know what we're adding. If you wanted one of those tests to count double, you'd change those scores to 3's, 4's, or 5's and then double the 5 to 10. It then counts double because it will also double the range. In fact, what I recommend that you do (this is the easy way so you don't have to remember all this garbage), is that you always enter the scores in your grade book as standard scores. And I recommend a twelve point scale: A, A-, B+, B, B-, 12, 11, 10, ... so your top score is always 12 and your bottom score is always 0. So you know what grade you are giving and you always enter that grade. Then if you want something to count double, you double it. At the end of the semester you have a bunch of scores and the ones you want to double, you double, and the ones you want to leave the way they are, you leave. Then you add them all up and you divide by however many trials you had to come up with your average. If your average is 11.2 then that's an A-. That's a very easy, automatic correction and you don't have to remember anything about this range bit. But if you start entering raw points in the grade book, you're going to be penalizing people who you don't want to penalize. I'm not telling you whether the quiz should count double or triple or half, or the homework paper or anything else. You decide what its going to count, but after you've decided, let's have it count for what you've decided rather than something else. Standard scores. Okay. One more time.
Back to our original example of A, B and C. The problem on that example was that test two had a range of ten. In other words, student A got a 10 and student B got a 20. That just didn't feel the same to you as student A getting a 30 and student B getting a 28. In other words, 28 looked a lot closer to 30 than 10 did to 20. Mind you, the way you assign points is arbitrary. People sprinkle points like salt and pepper. Points mean whatever you, as the teacher, say they mean. But after you've given them, the way you combine them together doesn't always mean what you think they mean. And to combine them together, they have to be in some sort of a standard currency. Like, for example, if I buy a ping-pong ball for a dollar and I'm going to sell it for a Yuan when I go to China, one Yuan doesn't necessarily equal one dollar. I need to know what the conversion rate is. The conversion rate between Yuan and dollars is 8. So, I have to multiply Yuan by 8 before I get something that's equal to a dollar. So if I have ping-pong ball in the US for a dollar, in China the same price would be 8 Yuan. So if you have one grade that has a different level of range than another grade, you have to convert it so that you're talking about the same unit of measure. The way you do that is you always enter standard scores. If you enter points you have to worry about being very sophisticated in terms of knowing how to deal with range. If you enter standard scores you don't have be sophisticated at all. So the lesson is always enter standard scores. That's the lesson. Always enter standard scores so that you automatically correct for any differences in points.
As you recall, the first category we dealt with was the differentiation in staff hierarchy and the second was the category of the horizontal specialization. The third is professional relationships, how to deal with other professionals in different categories. Example: teachers have to deal with administrators. So one specific skill you have to have as a professional teacher is how to deal with other administrators. Another kind of skill is how to deal with supervisors. Administrators are the lawgivers and supervisors who are theoretically there to help you. Another professional category is the staff developers, the ones who know how to help teachers obtain new skills and are able to apply them. If this were a staff development session, we would have to follow up this lecture presentation with some opportunities for you to practice until you understand the new concept. Its not the kind of thing where you get an expert to blow into town, give you a lecture on a topic, and then leave you just sitting there looking in your notebooks.
District administrators - Important players with whom you will share professional relationships. They are different from building administrators in that you don't have daily relationships with them but you have to know the direction they're going so you can anticipate what to do.
Parents and community leaders. Learning to deal with them is a big part of learning how to make things work better.
Teacher unions - An important factor in the professional relationship field. There are different unions to choose from, namely the NEA, SVEA, and AF of T. You have to figure out what your relationship is to a teachers union or other professional associations like the math teacher's association or the elementary teachers association, or the urban teachers association or the Montessori association to name a few. You also need to learn how to deal with universities. After you become a teacher, hopefully you'll still want to deal with universities, not only for your own education, but also as a resource for schools and their professional development. A good example of school/University partnership is the PRIME project in Norfolk. As a PRIME intern, one task is working in the six special schools that have a special relationship with ODU and the community. Through PRIME, ODU has arranged for the Navy to enter into a 10-year partnership with PRIME to supply mentors to the six prime schools on duty time.
The relationship between state departments of education and teachers is often not well defined. Teachers tend to blame state departments of education for many regulations, even though they don't understand the fine points them. Most teachers rely on administrators to tell them what regulations they need to pay attention to, which are okay, but it's not okay as a professional because you're just doing something that someone else tells you without knowing yourself. I think that puts you in a weak position.
Funding agencies present another relationship for teachers to develop. More and more, teachers have to get involved in the grants game. I don't like that because it distracts teachers from what they ought to be doing. It takes time to hustle for grants. But that's the name of the game these days, and if you don't go out and hustle grants, your school won't have as many resources. Bad system, isn't it? But that's the system.
Support staff - The people who serve as the go-betweens to make things happen. I can deal directly with the bus people, or I can have someone who is the coordinator of field trips so they can really make things happen for everybody's field trips. If you're on your own and you have to make all of the preparations for field trips, then you won't take too many. However, if there's a facilitator, then you will. In the same way, guest speakers are support staff but they also need to be facilitated. For example, it would really enrich almost any class I can think of to have a submariner come and talk to a bunch of secondary students. They would really like that, and you could relate it to almost anything and any subject in the curriculum. It's an intrinsically interesting thing for kids to have someone who's been on a real submarine come to their class. Do you realize that that's really easy to do here in Hampton Roads? The average teacher wouldn't know how to go about making that happen, and by the time you spend a couple of hours figuring it out, you're not going to do that very often, are you? You really have to have a bug in your bun and really want a submariner to come and be willing to spend hours getting it organized. But if you had someone organized to facilitate guest speakers, then you could go make a request from that person and it would be taken care of. Then teachers would make many more requests for guest speakers.
Security and monitoring personnel present an interesting challenge. The teacher should know how to use security personnel when they need them. They should be able to alert staff to dangerous situations and foresee difficulties.
IMPLEMENTING SYSTEMS FOR STAFF DIFFERENTIATION
Do I make the case that teaching will not really be a profession until we have the potential to have teachers that are paid differently and have different levels of responsibility in the schools? Yes, I realize that I'm talking about huge differences. Like a mentor teacher may be getting paid twice or three times as much as some of the most junior members of the staff of a school, not just a small stipend. Now, a PRIME advisor gets an extra two thousand dollars. That's a start. But remember that my goal, my objective, is that the highest paid teacher and the highest paid administrator is paid the same. I think principals now in Norfolk are paid something like eighty thousand dollars. I would like the highest paid teacher in Norfolk paid that amount, about double what they're now paid. Have I made the case? Yes.
Class Discussion
Dr. Allen: How soon do you think this is likely to happen? (Laughter!) Oh, now I hear lots of giggles.
Student: I don't think it will happen for a while just because of the traditionalist of people, I think maybe in the next three or four generations, maybe.
Dr. Allen: Three or four generations, whoa! Well that's something I definitely won't be around to watch. What do you think?
Student: I really agree with the idea, but I don't see it happening because there are too many people out there that don't see teaching as a professional white-collar job. Teachers haven't been looked on in that way.
Student: I think that teachers should be paid more.
Dr. Allen: All teachers or differentially?
Student: It's a nice thought, but where's the money going to come from?
Dr. Allen: There are two issues: 1) having differentiated staff with more money and 2) having differentiated staff by reallocating the money. I would argue that the principal is important enough that I would have differentiated staffing even if I didn't have more money. It doesn't necessarily require more money to have differentiated staffing. One obvious way is to reduce the number of administrators instead of paying them less. I wouldn't plant a bomb downtown in the school district. I would handle it by attrition. I would take someone who is paid a lot as an administrator and put them back into the schools as a teacher and recognize that they're making much more than other teachers there. That's part of the transition cost because I want to strengthen what goes on at the schools and strengthen the profession of teaching. It's one thing to say that this is a nice idea, and it's another to talk about the way in which we might go about in facilitating this. I would argue, no, my actions speak louder than my words, getting a two thousand dollar stipend for PRIME advisors is a small amount, but two thousand dollars, incidentally, is a fairly visible amount of money as an increment for having an extra responsibility. This is an increment that is not related to spending extra time in the summer, this is just an increment for having a more senior responsibility in the context of the school day. And that's a cost neutral program. That isn't costing the school district any money at all because in the intern program, the three interns gets $8,000 each, the PRIME advisors gets $2,000 each, and there's still a little money left over from what an ordinary beginning teacher's stipend and benefits equal. I don't see the society giving us enormous amounts of money to do this all at one time. But I don't see the profession organized in a way to go in that direction systematically right now. That's my lament; I think we really need to get organized.
How would this affect tenure programs? One approach is that you could be tenured as a professional teacher and you could have additional stipends for differentiated responsibilities. Another is that you are actually promoted to the status of master teacher and you become tenured as a master teacher. You could go through a probationary period as a master teacher the same way you go through a probationary period as a principal or anything else. There is nothing about the tenure system one way or the other that is necessarily related to differentiated staffing. I could have differentiated staffing in a tenured environment, or I could have differentiated staffing without a tenured environment.
I firmly believe there is a way of getting more money by coming together as a profession. What happens now is that no one speaks with the voice of the profession. I haven't heard anyone here disagreeing with differentiated staffing. I presume there are people who haven't spoken up because this certainly is a very controversial position in the schools. If what happens is that every time someone comes up with an idea like differentiated staffing and you have half the people support and half the professionals oppose it, then you have the public left watching the professionals duke it out among each other and there's no clear-cut mandate to the public. In other words, if we could ever get the profession united and go to the public and say, "this is what it's going to take to educate your kids", I think we'd get a lot further. But right now we have such a fragmented profession, we don't have any way of going about systematic experimentation. There's no way of implementing the results of experimentation after you have results. So there's lots of experimentation that's taken place that give lots of good results that just don't get implemented because we don't have the mechanism to do the experimentation systematically, and we don't have the mechanism to translate the experimentation into practice. We are also so suspicious of having anybody telling us what to do; we don't want big government. Instead we just waffle around in a state of anarchy. I think we need to have a combination of better regulation and more local control. Right now, the problem is that nobody's in charge. Since we refuse to have a national curriculum, nobody's in charge of curriculum. So we just wander around doing it the best we can. Yes, if we put someone in charge of curriculum, we might put the wrong person in charge, or the people in charge might do things we don't like. All that's true. But I think we'd be better off if someone was in charge so that there'd be something to push against and something to be accountable to and something that we could change. I think we're stumbling toward that, but I still think we're stumbling in a very uncertain way. Anyway, here I billed this as my most controversial and biased lecture of the semester and I can't even get you to disagree with me. Either I did a good job or a bad job or you just plain don't care. I think you do care. I hope that I was able to at least suggest some alternatives that you'll find useful in the future .