.6 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.

Review Question

Why is funding of secondary importance to the process of systematic preparation for staff differentiation?

	Why is funding of secondary importance to the process of systematic preparation for staff differentiation?	Answer Here
	No ferret question