We start with a “workforce tsunami” that is about to sweep away the basic underpinnings of our teaching-era schools. As shown in the “Did You Know” video on this page, over 1.7 million teachers and principals - more than half of today’s educators -are eligible to retire in less than ten years. On a small scale, retirements can make room for new teachers with fresh ideas, optimism, and enthusiasm. But when the scale is so large and you combine these retirements with the reality that 1/3 of new teachers leave in the first three years, we are pouring water into a bucket with big holes, draining teachers faster than we can replace them.
What will happen if half the nation’s teachers and principals leave their schools – taking decades of experience with them, and leaving behind a generation of young, inexperienced, and highly mobile teachers in their wake? Will this destabilize the education workforce—or provide an opportunity for innovative staffing solutions?
What’s the educator profile in your community –how many seasoned educators are approaching retirement? How many once-eager novices left before they had a chance to become top-notch teachers? Are there staffing policies that encourage experienced senior teachers to remain while taking on new roles-- teaching mentor, learning coach, content expert—perhaps on a flexible or part-time schedule? Or are pension policies forcing out the experienced, high quality teachers you’d like to keep? Are the skills of young teachers or second career entrants being shared with colleagues in learning teams? What is happening in your state, district, or school—and what would you like to see happen?
Friday, March 13, 2009
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The Portland Education Association, Portland, Maine, is a member of the Teacher Union Reform Network (TURN). In this organization are a number of local unions who have negotiated career ladders for their staff, steps that make an easy transition to the more full blown use of veteran and retired teachers in learning teams as the recent NCTAF policy brief describes.
ReplyDeleteIn Portland we have negotiated a salary system that moves completely away from experience and degrees as the basis for salary growth, and places the full emphasis on continuing professional development. As we expand and develop this system, we see the ability to develop teacher leaders among our experienced staff members, by offering and organizing professional development opportunities that not only move teachers toward true "professional wages", not bonuses, but also allow us to locally develop PD strands in which we can grow our own local experts to lead a variety of learning team style initiatives.
We must gain better exposure for these types of approaches to teacher development and compensation, support development of locally effective variations, and move the national conversation away from the very limiting emphasis on simplistic "performance" and "merit" pay schemes. These schemes violate the Bill Gates concept you quote about supporting committed teachers to simply improve their practice, in favor of substituting a perception that teachers do not work hard, and as smart as they know how, and are sitting around waiting for more money before they will really try.
The URL attached to my name line is a site at which we try to provide information for our members on the design and workings of our salary system.