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By Jeff Horwich, Minnesota Public Radio
October 9, 2001
 | Real Audio |
In most cases, terms like "free agent," "signing bonus," and "salary cap" would typically refer to professional athletes. But this fall they could be just as valid when talking about the Marshall school district, or a few others around the state competing to find new ways to pay their teachers.
Among hundreds of millions of education dollars, the Legislature set aside $8 million for a few districts willing to make bold experiments in teacher compensation - experiments that may stand traditional notions of collective bargaining on their head, and could tie teacher pay to student performance.
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In Marshall, the district has already been toying with some new ideas for two years. The administration and teachers' union there might rightfully be called progressive, creative or maybe subversive, depending on whom you ask.
Call it what you will, says school board member Jeff Cruz. They're really just responding to a looming shortage of their most important resource.
"Because science and math and special education and coaching and some of these positions were getting very hard to fill," he said. "You have to start doing something that allows you to be competitive with other districts and competitive with the street."
The street; the business world. Superintendent Tom Tapper says today's teachers and prospective teachers are more entrepreneurial than the old breed, and young people are bypassing his 2,400-student district for greener pastures.
"Chemistry people will come in out of college today who would be great teachers," he said. "We start them at $25,000, $26,000, or maybe $30,000. They walk into Pillsbury or General Mills and they start at $45,000 and a $5,000 signing bonus. We may not be able to match that, but I think we can do a lot better."
With school districts across the state feeling similar pressures, the Legislature set aside $4 million dollars for each of the next two years to encourage pilot programs in what's called "alternative compensation." Many lawmakers also see alternative compensation as a way to address an older goal: tying teacher pay to student achievement.
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Districts that want the state money can offer to convert anywhere from 25 percent to 100 percent of their teachers to an alternative pay system next year. They won't all get the assistance; $8 million is only enough to cover about three percent of the state's classrooms.
But the fact that the program exists at all is a clear stab at the status quo, which is based on just two criteria: years of experience and the teacher's level of education. This system of "steps and lanes," the traditional grid used to determine teacher pay, has been around more than half a century.
Band teacher Wayne Ivers is the lead negotiator for the teachers' union in Marshall. He says the Legislature's requirement that districts receiving the state grant money completely scrap the current pay structure could be the deal-breaker in many districts.
"It has to be gone. That is the deal," he said. "That is the fear-factor for many of the faculty. [Steps and lanes] disappears. Because that's a constant. I can look at that, and see, 'well, I'm here this year, and I'll be there next year.'"
Ivers calls the prospect of alternative compensation "exciting, but scary as hell." Nothing in Marshall is set in stone; like most districts, the way teachers get paid in Marshall will be forged in the heat of biannual salary negotiations going on this fall. But in a recent vote, the faculty in Marshall's five schools voted by a 2-1 margin to give serious consideration to some of the new and progressive proposals from the superintendent and the school board.
The system would continue to base pay partly on tenure and higher education credits, but would add a number of criteria to the mix. For example, says Superintendent Tapper, the district would have some flexibility to pay higher salaries to teachers in positions that are hard to fill, or are subject to tougher competition from the private sector.
"It doesn't say they're any more valued in the classroom. It simply says, 'because you have a background in chemistry, because you have a background in special education, because you have a background in mathematics, you probably have a better opportunity to be compensated at a higher level either in another school district or in industry,'" he said.
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The teachers' negotiator, Wayne Ivers, says these new inequities will be a hard sell for some teachers.
"People are saying that because they have a license in math and they're teaching math doesn't make them a better teacher, or any more important than me, a language arts teacher, because there are more language arts teachers. Or me, because I'm an elementary teacher, because there are a billion elementary teachers.
"But you can't find a math teacher so all of a sudden they're worth more than I am just because you can't find them."
One prong of the plan already in place in Marshall allows the district to bargain with teachers who receive a job offer somewhere else. In the year it's been in effect, the district has made counter offers to four teachers, and managed to keep one - a business teacher.
"We were somewhat lower," said Superintendent Tapper, "but in weighing her situation and what she wanted to do and, we hope, the quality of our school here, she decided to stay here. But she improved herself on the salary schedule."
Another proposal would compensate teachers for extracurricular or committee activities with a bump in pay that is modest but permanent. Ivers believes many teachers are open to the idea as long as access to these opportunities is fair.
Mary Broderick, the president of the St. Cloud teachers' union, has seen a presentation of the Marshall plan. She doubts districts can ever really compete with the private sector, and worries the market-driven ideas behind alternative compensation will cheapen the profession.
"That's not always maybe the kind of teacher we think we want, or that we value, or that we think we are, as people who've been around a long time," she said. "A lot of us probably went into teaching because that's what we love to do... and because we think we can make a difference and that was important."
As a union negotiator, she worries allowing districts the do things like paying teachers based on the demand for their field will weaken their ability to bargain as a unified group.
"The whole concept of collective bargaining, the whole reason it was put in, was that so everybody is treated the same way, everybody is equally as valued," she said. "And if we need to raise the bar as far as how we're compensating teachers we need to do that for all teachers."
Ivers knows his negotiating team is playing with ideas teachers in other communities wouldn't touch.
"We're kind of out on a limb," he said, "and we know that if we end up with some kind of an agreement that has all this alternative-based compensation, the state is going to be looking at this, and ours is going to be what gets sent to other places. [People will say] either, 'ok this works' or 'they were really stupid there, they shouldn't have done this.' And we don't want to be [seen as] the stupid people. So we know that we're kind of in a magnifying glass, we're in a fishbowl here."
Even a well-thought-out plan like Marshall's has to clear a number of hurdles to get the state money. The Legislature wants alternative teacher pay tied closely to student achievement, not just to the district's teaching needs. In the past, linking teachers' salaries to the performance of their students has met with strong objections from teachers. Marshall's current plan gives a $300 bonus to individual teachers if they meet certain school-wide goals that they and the principle agree on, but officials there agree that might not be enough to qualify for the state aid.
Interested districts face another big challenge from one another. The Department of Children, Families and Learning will award the money on a first-come, first-served basis to districts that qualify. Teachers and administrators say they feel the pressure to act quickly. State officials say they've given out at least 15 applications, and the race is on.
For more information
•Leaders Urge Caution On Alternative Pay, a commentary from the state teachers' union.
•A national overview of alternative compensation from the University of Oregon
•A summary of the K-12 omnibus spending bill passed in special session by the Legislature. For alternative teacher compensation, see sections 53, 54, and 55.
•An overview of Session 2001 - education issues
• Addressing the teacher shortage
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