The issues that keep Tacoma teachers and school administrators apart are mostly financial with a bit of seniority tossed in.
How to respond to the latest in a series of state-imposed cuts is a key difference that nearly caused – and might yet cause – a strike. A 1.9 percent cut in the state’s distribution of salary money could bring a reduced work year for teachers and/or a reduced school year for students.
Last week, the district gave up on a proposal to increase the average class size by a student or two, a wise move because of the way that issue resonates with parents.
If it were my money (and I guess some of it is), I’d worry less about financial issues and more about substantive ones that might affect how students learn.
These are issues like more rigorous evaluations that have consequences both positive and negative. The talks also could have focused on taking steps to reward something other than experience and education levels, to offer more pay to those who get the highest evaluations or take on the toughest assignments.
Boosting training and development programs and holding teachers harmless against pay cuts and layoffs might be enough to get movement on seniority and tenure.
But with one exception, these aren’t being discussed. Because of good fiscal management, the district has money. What it lacks is a reform agenda.
Just a year ago, the Seattle Education Association agreed to a contract that began to move away from an industrial labor-management model and toward a professional and collaborative one.
If Seattle, with one of the strongest teachers unions in the country, can talk about these issues, then Tacoma certainly can as well.
Seattle teachers, for example, agreed to phase in the use of student test data as one means of evaluating teachers.
That new system responds to the concern that teachers in low-performing schools will suffer disproportionately because it looks at how students improve when measured against their earlier performance, not against all students.
While state law requires improved evaluations including the use of student growth data, Seattle moved well beyond those mandates.
The contract also moved toward what is called “mutual consent” which lets principals – with input from current teachers – choose new staff. It also limits the practice of forced-placement of teachers based on seniority and blocks the transfer of poor-performing teachers.
Some of the new rules about teacher placement apply only to Seattle’s lowest performing schools but they are a start.
The National Council on Teacher Quality said Seattle is one of the few districts with a National Education Association-affiliated union with “a contract that eliminates the role of seniority in teacher assignment and permits student-performance data to factor into teacher evaluations.”
The contract helped Seattle win a $12.5 million grant that paid for extra training and financial incentives for teachers and principals.
Tacoma and its union have decided to let a marginally improved evaluation system at Jason Lee Middle School, one of Tacoma’s schools with federal grant money aimed at improving poor performance, to be an experiment that may be adopted district-wide.
While that system does begin to use test data, negative consequences still only apply to the rare times when teachers are given the bottom rating of unsatisfactory.
Yet the reason for the state’s new mandate of a four-tier system is to also focus help and eventually sanctions on teachers who languish in the second-to-the-bottom tier.
The sleeper issue is Tacoma’s request to have some degree of principal approval in teacher placement and to use evaluations as one criteria for assignment of displaced teachers.
It is an issue of importance to some teachers, who fear being passed over for personal reasons. And the union has termed it a strike issue, demanding that seniority and other objective factors determine which teachers get openings in other schools.
But Seattle’s teachers union managed to negotiate ways to implement it fairly, and Tacoma’s can, too.
I figure Tacoma students, Tacoma parents and Tacoma teachers deserve a contract at least as innovative as the one approved last summer by the Seattle teachers union.
Peter Callaghan: 253-597-8657
peter.callaghan@thenewstribune.com
blog.thenewstribune.com/politics
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