Common Misconceptions

A comment today by Gideon is so representative of the pro Fair Student Funding model that I thought it was worth commenting on separately here. Gideon comments:

You state "The opinion piece wrongly says that under the old system, richer school districts got more money. In truth, the money was for the salaries of more senior teachers who transferred into those schools." That's exactly the problem: more experienced teachers go to the least challenging schools with the least need; as a result the schools with the lowest poverty end up spending far more per student than the high poverty schools.

I don't know Gideon, but this sounds like the comment of an admin or someone who has only heard the mayor's spiel of FSF. I have worked in what Gideon would call a "challenging" school for most of my career. What made it challenging was a lack of discipline, violence, gangs, crime in the streets, and a huge turnover of the least senior people. That's right...least senior. I put in 20 years in that school, and I watched hundreds of new teachers come and go once they discovered how difficult it was to maintain discipline in such a tough neighborhood, and how dangerous it was to leave your car on the street, assuming you could find a spot within walking distance of the school. At any given time, at least half the staff had 3 years or less of experience. The problem here was not one of funding, but that conditions in the school made it hard for anyone to do a good job. It's ridiculous to think that teachers should spend their entire careers in buildings that are unsafe and where conditions make many classes unteachable. If the mayor and chancellor actually fixed the schools--made them places where people wanted to work, there would have been no need to dream up FSF as a fix.

And your argument about using Fair Student Funding to discriminate against senior teachers doesn't make sense. You yourself state that it takes 5 years to become a proficient teacher, but fail to note that most teachers don't improve significantly beyond 5 years.

Proficient isn't excellent. Many teachers become proficient in five years, but excellent takes a lifetime of experience. I don't know who dreamed up the myth that teachers don't improve after 5 years, but it's nonsense. I get a little better every year. I'm much better now that I've been teaching more than two decades than I was after my fifth year.

And let's take your argument to its logical conclusion. If teachers don't improve after 5 years, why not just sign teachers up for 5 year tours like the armed forces does? After that, you're out. Would that make the system better? Would you want your child educated by such a transient workforce?

Ignoring the ATR problem doesn't make it go away. It was caused directly by FSF, no matter what they mayor and the Daily News say. Principals have no incentive to hire senior teachers, and that is discrimination, pure and simple. Young teachers are more pliable and cheaper, but they certainly aren't better.

FSF is just a way to claim the schools are getting better without doing a damn thing. If BloomKlein ever get serious about fixing the schools, they will focus their energy on making every school a safe, pleasant place for teachers and students alike to be.

Fair is Foul

If we want to get anywhere in the current contract negotiations, we have to look for what's really wrong and try to address it. While getting us days off for swine flu and requiring counseling memos before LIFs are nice ideas, they will do nothing to address the fundamental problem facing teachers today--the insane "Fair Student Funding" fiasco.

There's nothing fair at all about FSF. Under it, schools get a set amount of money per student and have to pay for everything and everyone out of that pot of money. It's one of those things that sound good in theory--poor schools would get as much money as schools in richer districts. There's nothing inherently wrong in that, and it sounds so democratic, and so...sooo.....so darn fair!

And yet, it's anything but. The reason richer districts often got more money than poorer districts is that teacher salaries used to be paid for by the city, not individual schools. Since senior teachers often wanted to go to those schools, they got more money to pay for those teachers. The amount of money spent on other student needs was essentially the same. So instead of doing things that would make teachers want to stay in poorer neighborhoods, like fixing the schools and reducing crime, the city decided to try doing it on the cheap by putting salaries in the hands of principals. They, in turn, responded by hiring only newbie teachers who they could hire for far less than experienced educators.

Oddly, you would think that principals would be at the forefront to end FSF. After all, if their claim to want to hire the best teachers is true, they would certainly want the option of hiring the best veteran teachers without taking a punch in the pocketbook. Still, I have never heard an admin complain about FSF. They simply go out and hire cheaper teachers.

That leaves the UFT to try to do something. God help us. I'll tell you right now, no matter what the negotiators come up with regarding the ATR, rubber room, and open market issues, nothing will change as long as FSF remains in place.