At a Springfield Finance Control Board meeting on Monday, December 18, Springfield Schools Superintendent Joseph Burke presented information about the new Springfield Education Association teacher contract. Following is an excerpt, edited for brevity, of a transcript by resident Sheila McElwaine.
Superintendent Joseph Burke: It’s a pleasure to give you a brief update on where we are with the final teacher contract. Let me run through this with you and talk about the landmark features of this contract and some of the key things that are in it. I’m going to give just an overview first and then I’ll go into some specifics.
The contract establishes pay increases based on superior performance and results for teacher leaders and instructional leadership specialists, two new positions that we’ve created in this contract.
It eliminates seniority as the primary determinant of salary increases.
It eliminates steps and COLAs both as the basic pay schedule and establishes a different kind of pay schedule and salary bands for experienced teachers and the teacher leader and instructional leadership specialist positions based on excellent performance and results.
It installs a “value added growth model” as the method for measuring success in teacher performance.
It provides a mechanism for redistributing teacher talent to the most needy schools, and I’ll come back and talk about that in a few moments.
It establishes instructional leadership teams of the highest quality teachers to lead continuous performance improvement efforts in the schools.
It grants authority to the superintendent to transfer and assign teachers voluntarily or involuntarily according to the operational needs of the district and the educational needs of the students following a set of procedures that are prescribed in the agreement.
It extends the work day for teachers and provides increased learning time for students.
And it provides a critical shortage differential, recognizing market value of certain difficult-to-staff positions, provides distributive leadership opportunities for head teacher, test coordinator and the two instructional leadership positions that I mentioned earlier.
It provides opportunities for instructional staff to remain in their positions in classrooms, or working with other teachers, rather than to have to chose to go into administration just for economic advancement issues.
Board member Jake Jacobson (pictured below, right): Superintendent, what does “distributive leadership” mean?
JB: We are establishing a way in which leadership gets disseminated to a variety of individuals within the organization: in this case, the head teacher at the elementary school; the test coordinator who has a specific set of responsibilities; and the leadership positions of “teacher leader” and “instructional leadership specialist.”
Some details on these: the first one is knowledge, skills and results as a fundamental feature of the compensation system. For the teacher leaders and the instructional leadership specialists, these knowledge, skills and results are established as fundamental bases for compensation for the those individuals. There are separate salary bands for these two new positions.
This compensation issue basically eliminates seniority as the primary determinant of salary increases. After the 2006-2007 school year, no teacher may move to the shaded steps on the far right [of the table], where you have the longevity steps of 15, 20 and 25. The teachers in those particular areas will be grandfathered to stay there, but there’ll be no new movement to those steps.
We eliminated credit increments between the masters and the doctorate, so that in the basic salary schedule by the end of year three, in 2008-2009, more than 42 percent of the salary boxes are essentially eliminated from the current salary schedule.
Those 53 boxes that get eliminated streamline the salary schedule substantially, and then kick in to a different kind of salary schedule for those individuals who want to continue to advance. Essentially, what happens is a result of this streamlined schedule. It incentivizes teachers to access both the teacher leader salary band and the instructional leadership salary band. The teacher leader salary band is indicated by level three and four for instructional leadership specialists.
The reason you see two sets of salary bands is we maintained the notion that we wanted to have a difference for those individuals who were critical shortage teachers, and those who were not critical shortage teachers. There are two sets of salary bands, as there are two separate salary schedules, as teachers progress through the system.
Knowledge, skills and results is an important feature—an illustration of the “value-added growth model.” The green horizontal line would be the baseline of student performance. The blue line that cuts across would be an expectation of growth for students for a given year.
The yellow dots above that blue line would be students substantially performing at a rate greater than their predicted growth, and the students below the blue line would be students performing below their predicted growth.
On the right side, you see teacher one, two, three and four. Based on the data, teacher one—the red dots—would be getting consistent growth above what students would predictably have in a year. Teacher two is sort of bouncing around; some of it is above, some is below. Teacher three is almost right on the line. Teacher four would be consistently getting student performance below the predicted growth.
The new provisions provide a mechanism for redistributing teacher talent to the most needy schools. We’re going to do that by establishing a new staffing formula that will allocate instructional leadership specialists and teacher leader positions with extra positions for high-needs schools.
There will be a baseline allocation for the number of instructional leadership specialists and teacher leaders for all schools, based on student enrollment. In those schools that have greater needs, there will be an additional kicker, so we can get the stronger teachers assigned to those schools based on the needs.
We will establish instructional leadership teams at every school. The teachers in that leadership group—as the instructional leadership specialists and the teacher leaders—will be involved in both the design of the school improvement plans, and in monitoring implementation of the school improvement plan. You’ll have this core of teacher leaders working, on a continuous basis, on how we can improve the overall performance of students in the schools.
The authority of the superintendent is a significant feature that allows us to go ahead and do the reallocation of teachers, and place people where they’re most needed.
Mayor Charles Ryan: How would this differ from the authority of the superintendent prior to the contract?
JB: It establishes a clear delineation of that authority. It was there before, but it was implied.
Increased student contact: in the former contract, the elementary students had 370 minutes a day of actual contact with teachers. In the new contract, that increases to 400 minutes.
Across the year is an additional 5400 minutes of actual student contact between the teachers and the students in this new contract. At the secondary level, the increase is about 2700 minutes. Translated, you have about 90 hours more of actual instructional time at the elementary level, and about 45 hours at the middle and high school levels.
Compensation levels for critical shortage areas recognizes the market value of certain difficult-to-staff positions, and creates the critical shortage differential for teachers certified in math, science, special ed and English language learners.
There’s actually two compensation schedules that were agreed to: one for regular teachers, which is represented in the top schedule, and then the differential for teachers in the critical shortage areas, below.
The distributive leadership positions are listed here. Rewarding teacher talent: I think what we want to show you is a comparison of the salary schedules.
Unit A is the teachers, and at level four, instructional leadership specialists, you have a salary band for ten-month salaries that range roughly from $65,000 to close to $72,000. The level one salary band for assistant principals, for the 12-month salary, starts at $62,700 and progresses up to $72,000, $74,000, $76,000.
We’re showing this to illustrate that teachers in that top salary band for instructional leadership specialists can remain in that salary band, and they don’t have to make the decision to become an administrator. They can make a very good competitive salary on a ten-month salary schedule, as opposed to moving into the administrative ranks.
Some additional provisions: the contract establishes the Springfield Learning Center to produce “best in class” lesson plans for teachers and professional development on how to use the plans. It strengthens the professional criteria for department heads with a focus on leadership and leadership experience. It redefines preparation to emphasize professional dimensions of developing lessons, the use of materials, and, preferably, working with colleagues in doing that.
Board member Thomas Gloster: Dr. Burke, we added in the budget certain projections as to level of participation that the volunteers would make in these programs. I wonder if you could tell me how you feel the teachers are responding to this, and whether we’re at projections or not.
JB: We originally projected somewhere between 120 and 170 people for the instructional leadership specialists. The initial applications were a little more than 130. As we established a selection process for that—which was a very rigorous process—we ended up selecting 80 of the instructional leadership specialists in the first round.
We are going to be re-posting that later in the year, when we have an opportunity to debrief and review the whole selection process.
There are some individuals who applied making requests for an appeal, which was part of the process, and we’re instituting an appeal process for those individuals now. But the 80 people that were initially selected are very excellent individuals, and we’re very happy with that selection.
I do need to point out that there were some people already in collaborative professional development teacher positions, similar to the instructional leadership specialist positions, who chose to stay there and not apply for this year. We allowed those individuals to do that, and for their principals to keep them in those positions.
