Last Friday, D.C. City Council Chairman Kwame Brown announced he would propose legislation to reform another one of former D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s policies, the IMPACT teacher evaluation system. The IMPACT system has been exacerbating problems of educational inequity and cyclical poverty in the city’s schools, and the Councilman’s proposal stands a chance of changing that.
Under current arrangements, teachers who reach the “highly effective” status under IMPACT can earn an additional $10,000 per year if they work in some of the poorest schools. There are additional payments of up to $10,000 for teachers whose students do better than expected in the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System and incentives of up to $5,000 for teachers in high-demand areas like special education.
Even so, a troubling distribution of good teachers exists in DCPS. Of the 663 deemed “highly effective” by the latest IMPACT evaluations, only 71 work in the forty-one schools of Wards 7 and 8, while 135 of the top educators work in the ten schools in wealthy Ward 3.
The reasons for this are obvious. Although the bonus sums are smaller for teachers who earn high IMPACT grades in wealthier school districts, they are easier to attain.
Then there is the issue of job security. Teachers can be dismissed for poor scores on the evaluations, and it routinely happens. It’s much more attractive for teachers, especially inexperienced ones, to take the hit in their salaries in exchange for classrooms full of motivated, financially-secure children who are likely to do well on the CAS tests no matter what. Brown’s proposal would exempt new teachers in the District’s poorest schools from assessment for a few years.
Brown isn’t just focusing on teacher evaluations, however. He says he is also looking at incentives outside the school system to get the best teachers into struggling classrooms, using other states as his guide. For example, California will cancel out portions of school loans for teachers going into low-income or rural schools. Maryland will cover up to $11,000 of debt if a teacher stays in the profession for four years. Illinois offers low-interest housing loans, and Mississippi has a plethora of tuition reimbursement programs for both undergrad and graduate teacher education.
These are all good ideas in theory, but they become more difficult in practice in D.C. Besides budget issues constraining new spending, any property incentives would have to be sizable to provide an adequate incentive for teachers to move into the District from Virginia or Maryland. There’s also not a lot of concrete evidence that these incentives work in other states. Many are quite new.
Even so, Brown is pushing the educational debate in D.C. in the right direction. Teacher accountability is indeed important, but it should not cost struggling schools the good teachers they need.
Even current DCPS Chancellor Kaya Henderson, Rhee’s former employee, has expressed initial support for Brown’s plans. Educational reformers of Rhee’s ilk tend to forsake the interests of teachers in return for what they say is a focus on results for kids. This has been part of the justification for breaking teachers’ unions nationwide: the educational system is not there to serve educators, but the students.
While that may be true, the line can’t be drawn so clearly. The happiness and comfort of teachers obviously has an impact on their ability to teach well and where they choose to teach. It is refreshing to see members of the policymaking, administrative, and teaching communities find a place where their interests—and the interests of the students—all align in addressing the impacts of poverty on DCPS.
One hopes this signals a new focus on economic factors, as well as teacher accountability, in the educational discourse here. Only through this paradigm shift will we begin to see improvement in a system still struggling to come to terms with massive amounts of economic and achievement inequality.
Give Gavin fair compensation for being highly effective at gbade@georgetownvoice.com
Henderson and crew will never ever admit their system doesn’t work. It’s part of a belief system — not based on data or empirical research or even common sense. It’s what they deeply believe, which is that all children will succeed at the highest (the highest!) levels if they have highly effective teachers who have high expectations for their students. This is DCPS Dogma that is impervious to the evidence that we see now that it isn’t working.
Where you see economically disadvantaged kids needing more services, they see a sad lack of highly effective teachers in economically disadvantaged areas (as proved from their IMPACT scores) and the impossibility of forcing the plethora of highly effective teachers from their pleasant perches in NW schools. Rather than take the chance of sending teachers over there to fail, they’d rather continue browbeating the “less effective” teachers already working with the most problematic kids.
They can’t admit it’s easier to teach in NW – that goes against their dogma. They can’t admit that there are fine and ultra-dedicated and harder working teachers in Anacostia that can’t pull their kids scores up high enough because of the kids’ deficits, not the teachers.
Please, you’re a reporter — ask tough questions of Henderson and crew and watch them obfuscate and sidestep. Their core beliefs are being proven wrong and they can’t handle it. THey know nothing but testing kids, evaluating and hiring and firing teachers and principals and insisting on “high expectations.”
They have no idea how to address the real problems and no interest in tackling something that hard and unglamorous. They were in for a quick miracle — scores soaring with their magic touch. And it almost worked until they were caught cheating and scores plummeted.
They are having a serious case of cognitive dissonance that the kids are paying for. Teachers, too, but children first, right?