A No-Strings-Attached Raise?

Imagine a job where, four years after you began your career, you are essentially guaranteed a 50 percent raise, generous healthcare benefits, and, best of all, your pay raises are not connected at all to your performance. It sounds cushy and far-fetched, but according to a report recently published by The Boston Foundation this is the situation for Boston’s 5,905 public school teachers.

According to the report’s findings, Boston teachers are able to reach the top of the pay scale in just nine years, the shortest amount of time for the country’s 75 largest school districts. The 183-day work year and 1,220 contractually required hours are shorter than teachers in most other cities. Moreover, the average teacher salary in Boston is $72,000, which is about $13,000 higher than the state average (though not Cambridge, where the average teacher salary is $85,000).

Public school teachers deserve high salaries. The work they do is just as important as that of brain surgeons and corporate lawyers; yet their salaries don’t come close to comparing. Unfortunately, however, it is far too easy to interpret The Boston Foundation study as justification for cutting the salaries of BPS teachers (this is the interpretation that the Boston Teacher’s Union is eager to take), especially with the district’s current $63 million budget shortfall.

The strategic release of the report, titled “The Real Cost of the Contract,” coincides with current contract negotiations between Boston Public Schools and the Boston Teacher’s Union. Richard Stutman, president of the BTU, summarized the report’s argument in his own words in an e-bulletin as: “we [teachers] earn too much money for the little work that we do.” In his weekly BTU e-Bulletin to members, Stutman took issue with the Foundation’s claim that “BPS teachers contractually have a shorter school day than their counterparts around the country.” The teacher workday goes beyond the school bell, Stutman argues, and includes grading work, parent-teacher conferences, planning and preparation, etc. Fair enough. But having a contract that details down to the minute how long a teacher can teach (282 minutes for elementary, 307 minutes for secondary) is not what’s best for Boston students and not what’s best for American students to remain globally competitive.

The second premise that Stutman contends in the statement is the report’s claim that teachers are “overpaid” (the report does not explicitly argue this and never makes use of the word). With the high cost of living in Boston, the need to take graduate courses every several years, and the out-of-pocket expense teachers spend on school supplies, teacher salaries are not out of line with similarly educated local jobs, he argues. (He also succeeds, in what feels like a low blow, in mentioning that The Boston Foundation president earned $570,000 last year.)

To be sure, being a great teacher requires a lot of work and a lot of hours. And great teachers deserve six-figure salaries. The recent arguments coming from BTU, however, would have you believe both of these ideals are in jeopardy. It makes sense that Stutman would want to have his members believe that The Boston Foundation’s report seeks to cut salaries and accuse teachers of being lazy. It’s a distraction from the report’s implicit purpose: that great teachers need to be rewarded as such and bad teacher need to be fired. Simply put, teaching needs accountability. It can feel odd to talk about such a revered profession in such blunt terms, but as Michelle A. Rhee said when she recently spoke at the IOP, teaching is a privilege, not a right. And Boston public school students deserve a teaching force that reflects that idea.

In the broader education reform movement, the seemingly ordinary phrase “accountability” has been an incredibly politically charged word. When unionists and traditional liberals hear the word, they imagine “teaching to the test,” No Child Left Behind, test scores, tests, tests, Scantrons, and more tests. Understandably, teachers are reluctant and often outright unwilling to have their salaries linked to a composite standardized test score. (The conveniently forgotten truth, however, is that no one is advocating such a one-dimensional scheme.) For the new crop of private sector and corporate types interested in education reform, the need for “accountability” in public education is a no-brainer. To them, it’s frustrating that goal-oriented and bottom-line driven philosophies are so lacking in public education.

The report avoids making such arguments (the word “accountability” is mentioned only once) and instead wades through the 300-page contract and lays out the cold, hard facts of the BTU contract. The most troubling aspect of the contract is not that a teacher can earn a 50 percent raise in four years; rather, that such an increase can occur regardless of whether or not that teacher’s students are learning.

Anthony C. Hernandez ’12, a government concentrator, lives in Kirkland House.