In 2001, when Mario Zinga and I were designing City Charter High School, we contemplated how to build a human resource model that would create and sustain the faculty described above. Our experience in our careers in the Pittsburgh Public Schools and in the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers was positive on the one hand, but limiting on the other. We experienced an amazing decade in the 1980's under the leadership of Superintendent Richard Wallace and union president Al Fondy. Teachers were seen as an invaluable resource to the education effort and were supported in terms of professional development, curriculum development, professional stature and compensation.
Unfortunately, during the decade of the 1990's, the district experienced five different superintendents, many changes in school leadership and a greatly diminished interest in developing its teaching and leadership corp. The emphasis moved to high stakes testing, a more programmed curriculum and far less classroom and school support. The District was looking for a prescriptive model that would raise test scores. That was naive at best, disastrous at worst.
When we left the district to start a charter school, we believed that the school's success was dependent upon an outstanding faculty and empowering leadership. And we did not believe that an outstanding faculty happens simply through the hiring process. Outstanding faculties are developed by supportive and data driven schools with strong leadership.
This is the story of the faculty development model that City High calls "Competency Based Staff Promotion".
Background
It would be fair to say that the initial impetus for City High's faculty development model was a reaction to the contract we worked under in the Pittsburgh Public Schools. Pittsburgh's contract is typical of most Teacher Union/District contracts across the nation. Although Pittsburgh salaries are higher and benefits are better than most. That is due to the diligent efforts of Al Fondy and the PFT in creating a professional wage and a well thought out due process agreement.
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| PFT Current Contract 2015 |
By building a model that is based on time served, quality of work is divorced from compensation. This is fair in terms of guaranteeing that all people are treated without discrimination. This is unfair if one believes that compensation should reflect a teacher's worth to the organization in terms of student achievement.
To their credit, the PFT and PPS have been working since 2010 on a progressive compensation model (funded by the Gates Foundation) called "the Career Ladder". This model provides increased salary benefits in exchange for tying compensation to the quality of a teacher.
• Recognizes and rewards differences in teacher practice based on multiple measures accumulated across years and grounded in student growth.Currently, 15% of the faculty use this new Career Ladder model and 85% use the traditional model. New hires must use the new model. It will take some time and data analysis before the District gets a handle on the end result of this new compensation model.
• Enables teachers at Professional Growth levels 3 and 4 to assume roles, via Career Ladders, that reward them for working with the highest need students and taking on additional responsibilities.
• Allows the opportunity to recognize tenure as a milestone.
Traditional teacher contracts are simply union pay scales. You knew what you were going to earn for your entire career and you move up the salary ladder based on experience and your continued employment. That model exists today in the vast majority of school districts in the United States.
There is no discrimination in traditional salary schedules, for better or worse. Great teachers, good teachers, average teachers, poor teachers and incompetent teachers make the identical salary. There are no financial incentives to get better at your craft. There are no financial incentives to see your students achieve.
Many teachers work hard because inherently, they went into teaching to empower students. And that is what they will always do. But it takes a huge amount of time and effort to become expert at your craft and give your best for 35 years. In some sense, once you "hit max", there is a disincentive to working that hard and putting in all that time. This is an important point. This is not about firing bad teachers. This is about building a system where every teacher is rewarded for constantly working to improve at their craft. It is about a system to create and support "professional educators", not simply to protect "education workers."
Assumptions
When we set out to build our model, we had a number of assumptions.
- Human Beings in general and employees in particular respond to incentives, particularly financial incentives.
- It is important to financially incentivize the desired behavior.
- Compensation models should push workers to improve at their craft.
- The model must explicitly define the behaviors that are intended. It is extremely important to take time and effort in defining what the desired behaviors are in great detail.
- Scaffold the desired behaviors so growth can occur over time.
- Trust in good teachers. If you incentivize becoming expert at teaching, test scores will be excellent without needing a central prescriptive curriculum.
- Don't incentivize test scores. If you financially incentivize test scores, two negative by-products will occur. First, all efforts exclusively will go into increasing those test scores. Second, cheating will occur.
- The model should be cognizant of the timeline and growth patterns of a career educator.
- The model should promote the concept of becoming a "lifelong learner."
- The model should be transparent and have safeguards that maintain integrity.
The first step we took was not to use time served or advanced study as a measure of how salary was determined. The number of years taught or the degrees earned is not a determiner of expertise.
The second step was to identify career plateaus to be achieved over the lifetime of a quality educator. Note that the titles for these plateaus originate in traditional trade unionism and describe the growth of a craftsman over time: Apprentice, Journeyman, Expert and Master (this has subsequently been renamed Education Leader.) The graphic below notes the plateaus and the components that need to be addressed in each. Also note that the Administrative Leadership step is listed for those teachers interested into moving into an administrative role.
How It Works
*The Promotion Rubric that describes the model in detail is available to the public.
Let's assume that you are a new teacher at City Charter High School. First, order of business is that you are given an employee handbook that describes your responsibilities, salary, benefits, etc. Here is what you see regarding salary schedule.
Current 2014-15 salaries are Apprentice ($40,000), Journeyman ($53,000), Expert ($66,000) and Master ($80,000).
As an Apprentice Teacher you start at $40,000 with full benefits and are enrolled in the state retirement system (PSERS). You are given a Promotion Rubric where you can read every detail about what is expected of you and how you will be evaluated. You learn that you will make $40,000 for as long as it takes for you to become proficient at the 15 components listed above. You can get help from a Peer Coach, your colleagues, your teaching/looping team and/or the administrators who are all expert at helping develop teachers. You will be observed 2-3 times a year and can request additional observations if you desire. Each observation is considered an opportunity to learn how you are doing and how you might improve. You are required to visit other teachers classrooms and observe them teaching.
Let me give you an example of how the rubric describes what you should be doing concerning a specific component - lesson planning. Note that teacher behaviors are graded as Advanced, Proficient, Nearly Proficient or Needs Significant Improvement.
As the teacher gets feedback from their observations and evaluations, he/she gets a sense of how they are moving forward. The rubric is long (over 40 pages) and detailed. There is no doubt what you should be doing and or how quality teaching is being measured. Our experience suggests that sometime from the second year to the fifth year of experience most teachers are approaching proficiency in all 15 components. At that point they begin the promotion process as articulated below.
If a teacher works for over 5 years and is not nearing proficiency at the 15 components, he/she often concludes that this is not the school for them or possibly not the career for them. Generally, both the teacher and administration agree that moving on is a wise decision. It is important to note that City Charter High School does not have a union, does not follow tenure laws and has an at-will employment policy. Thus if the school has a mediocre teacher, who does not appear to be able to adapt and grow in expertise, he/she is let go.
Finally, the Education Leader step (Master Teacher), is a very unique concept. In my teaching and supervisory experience in the Pittsburgh Public Schools, there would often be an expert teacher who would retire after 35 years. The teacher was exceptional, had developed an extraordinary curriculum and a multitude of resource materials and changed the lives of thousands of students. Yet when the teacher retired, he/she did not pass any of their expertise onto the next generation of teachers. That is the role of the Education Leader at City High. They work with young teachers and help them to become expert at their craft. They are training the next groups of leaders at the school. And they are compensated for doing so.
Lessons Learned
City High's Compensation-Based Promotion Model has created a culture at the school of support, accountability, growth and teacher professionalism. And it has produced outstanding student achievement.
- In a model where you are compensated based upon performance, faculty is much more willing to help and support each other.
- In a looping model, faculty become extremely close on their teams and intimately aware of each others strengths and weaknesses. This provides an additional support mechanism.
- Administrators are perceived as educators who can help you improve your craft, rather than strictly evaluators.
- A Peer Coach (who is an expert teacher and works well with his/her colleagues) is one of the most cost-effective positions a school can have.
- Expert teachers produce outstanding test scores while providing a more balanced and thoughtful curriculum.
- The model vests teachers in the school which leads to much less turnover.
- Teachers have a clearly defined career path that leads to increased compensation, success and professionalism.
- With teachers who are struggling, there is a clear understanding and framework for how to get better.
- Students benefit.
- Teachers benefit.
- Poor teaching is not tolerated.
- The Administration, the Peer Coach and the Master Teachers must be fair, consistent and supportive.
- If at any time the decisions made lack integrity or are based on the financial condition of the school rather than the proficiency of the teacher, the model will fail.
I'll leave you with this story from the Best Practice Brief referenced below:
I came into City High with a few years experience at a more traditional school, so I was hired in at the “journeyman” level, rather than as an “apprentice.” I quickly realized that things work a lot differently around here, but my teaching partner was a great mentor. I learned so much working in the same classroom every day, talking about what went well and what didn’t. I watched a couple of other people go through the promotion process, and towards the end of my second year I started to feel like I was ready to try it. One thing I’ve noticed is the administrators here want you to come to that decision yourself, to be proactive about it.
The first step was to sit down with Richard Wertheimer (CEO and school co-founder) and go through the rubric. We worked through every competency on the rubric, talking about where I thought I was in terms of my performance and where he thought I was. It was a pretty brutally honest conversation. You have to be ready for that. We checked some right off—he told me it was just a matter of gathering the evidence and writing it up. We identified two areas where I really needed to focus and neither of them was a big surprise to me—classroom management and differentiated instruction. I got some very direct feedback and we really looked at the rubric and talked very concretely about what was proficient in those areas and what was not.
From there I worked with Mario Zinga (school co-founder) on how to put the portfolio together. He was helpful in terms of making suggestions about what kind of evidence would demonstrate something. I also looked at the portfolios of a few people who had already made it through the process. That gave me ideas of the kinds of artifacts that would work for a specific competency, whether that be student work, a lesson plan, or materials from a special student activity I helped run. For a few of the competencies I requested a formal observation and feedback from Wertheimer. He is a busy guy and it wasn't always easy to get on his schedule, but those observations were central. I also continued to get a lot of feedback from my teaching partner. Having those standards on the rubric really allowed me to experiment more deliberately with my practice and then reflect and adjust. Needing to actually collect the evidence and write it up made me see some of the things I was doing differently. Every component of the rubric is just so detailed.
I'm an English teacher so writing the narrative wasn't that bad for me—I found the reflection useful. But I know some people have struggled with the amount of writing involved and the school is looking at alternate ways to present evidence, like recorded interviews. The size of it was daunting at times, but it forces you to really look at the kind of teacher you are. You have something to measure yourself against. I would say it also helped me understand the City High philosophy in depth. You have to think about not just your practice but how that fits within the specific design of this school. It actually made me think about my job more broadly—how the responsibility of a good teacher doesn't end at the classroom door.
If I were designing a school I would definitely use this kind of system. It promotes the idea of constant learning and improvement and it probably attracts people who are willing to go the extra mile. When the leadership team voted to promote me it was so validating. You know that really means something as a professional, that it is not just an automatic step but you have earned it."
References
There are two documents that describe the City High model in detail. One is a best practice brief written by an evaluator of the City High program and the other is the Promotion Rubric used to evaluate teacher competency.
Competency-Based Staff Promotion
A City Charter High School's Best Practice Brief
Catherine Awsumb Nelson, Ph.D., June 2011
http://cityhigh.org/publications/competency-based-staff-promotion-june-2011/
City Charter High School
2014-15 Promotion Rubric
http://cityhigh.org/flipbooks/promotionsrubric/offline/download.pdf
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