10-to‑1 Contract Vote Buoys School Reform

By an overwhelming majority, teachers ratified a new labor contract that stays the course of school reform at a transitional moment in New Haven — and begins to redefine teachers’ careers.

Teachers Thursday approved the new, three-year contract by a vote of 775 to 79 at Wilbur Cross High School.

The agreement, which runs from July 1, 2014, to June 30, 2017, affects 1,640 teachers and other staff in city public schools.

Click here to read it; click here for an in-depth story outlining the details, which include ending automatic raises for lowest-performing teachers and offering incentives to teach in the toughest schools.

The contract follows a landmark agreement settled in 2009 that allowed the school district to start grading teachers based in part on student test scores; made it easier to fire tenured teachers; and allowed the district to hire outside management to take over failing schools. The contract gained national attention for the way the union collaborated with the district on the plan.

Four years later, the progenitor of the city’s school change drive, Mayor John DeStefano, is preparing to end his 20-year tenure in office. A new mayor, Toni Harp, will take office in January. A new superintendent, Garth Harries, took over in July.

Thursday’s vote indicated that despite these changes, New Haven’s brand of school reform will continue its course, at least for now. The contract keeps intact the district’s three-year-old teacher evaluation system — and builds on it by creating new leadership roles for teachers who score well. The contract also mandates that low-performing teachers go to extra training sessions before getting pay raises.

“At a time when there’s a lot of change in New Haven, and at a time when there’s a lot of questions about school reform nationally, teachers are not only affirming the course of our work in New Haven, but they’re extending it,” said Superintendent Harries.

He pointed to Bridgeport and Hartford, where superintendents are being ousted.

The 10-to‑1 vote ​“shows just a complete buy-in from the teachers” on the direction of New Haven’s school reform, said New Haven Federation of Teachers President Dave Cicarella. ​“Everyone’s on board with what we’re doing.”

Teachers who supported the contract cited healthy raises — 11 percent over three years, on average — in a tough economy. Others welcomed the opportunity to take on new leadership roles with extra pay. Critics, who passed out flyers urging a ​“no” vote, expressed cocern about beginning to tie pay-related decisions to the city’s nascent job evaluation system. Others felt teachers were voting under the gun: They received a summary of the contract only one day before the vote, and if they did not ratify it, it would have been sent to binding arbitration.

The bulk of the changes in the contract — including pay raises and the extra stipends for teacher leaders — will be paid for through a $53 million federal Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) grant the district won last year. The contract now heads to the school board for approval Tuesday.

Thursday’s vote drew 857 teachers to Wilbur Cross, where they asked union leadership about the major changes in the deal:

Raises Not Automatic

For the first time, the district will end the practice of issuing automatic raises (called ​“step increases”) to every teacher, regardless of how they perform.

Teachers are graded on a five-point scale based on two factors: goals teachers set for how their kids will improve on tests; and their ​“instructional practice and professional values,” as measured by classroom observations.

Those who score on the bottom two levels, ​“needs improvement” or ​“developing” — which represents about 7 percent of the workforce—will not get a raise unless they attend up to 10 hours of extra professional development in May or June. 

Teacher Leadership Roles

All teachers who are rated ​“effective” or higher, the top three levels of the scale, will continue to get annual raises.

They will also be eligible for new leadership jobs, combined with up to $10,000 per year in extra pay.

As with the ​“teacher facilitator” jobs that have already been created this fall, teachers would take on extra responsibilities without having to leave the classroom.

Hard-To-Serve Schools

The contract calls for creating new roles, and extra pay, for teachers who work in ​“hard-to-serve” schools. A committee of teachers and administrators will determine what ​“hard-to-serve” means.

Longer Day

The contract adds 15 minutes to teachers’ workday, and allows schools to assign teachers duties during another 15-minute period teachers had before school, effectively creating a new half-hour block of time. That time will be used for professional collaboration, according to Harries.

Each school will determine exactly how to use the time.

Salaries Going Up

The contract calls for using the federal TIF grant to pay for salary increases. On average, teachers will get a 3.75 percent raise in Year 1, followed by 3.74 and 3.69 percent raises, according to Cicarella. The percentages won’t be the same for every teacher: Teachers advance on a salary schedule, going up one ​“step” per year, with raises of between $1,400 and $3,500 per year.

For example, a beginning teacher with a bachelor’s will make $43,759 in Year 1, $45,357 in Year 2, and $47,408 in the final year of the contract.

Dave Low, the union’s vice-president for high schools and a member of the 12-person union negotiating team, said those raises would not have been possible without the federal TIF money. The school district has been scrambling lately to resolve a $3.5 million structural deficit. Without the outside money, teachers would be looking at zeros, Low said.

“There’s no way we don’t get frozen” if not for the federal grant, Low said.

“Professionalism”

The above changes begin to redefine the conventional definition of a teacher’s job and pay. Traditionally, all teachers are paid based on two factors: seniority and education. They move up the pay ladder each year. If they want a major increase in pay or responsibility, they must leave the classroom to become administrators.

The new contract ​“moves towards professionalism” for teachers, argued Low. It empowers teachers, he said, by letting them lead without leaving the classroom.

New leadership positions include the ​“teacher facilitators,” who are training groups of their peers in topics of their own choosing; as well as new mentors recently assigned to help beginning science teachers. Low said the union has collected ideas for 15 more types of leadership positions like those.

By creating these positions — and treating teaching as a career — New Haven will try to stem the churn of teacher turnover in its schools, he said. And it will recognize and value good teaching.

Teachers heard these arguments in a closed meeting with union leadership inside the auditorium at Wilbur Cross. As they streamed out, most teachers said they were pleased overall with the contract.

“11 percent? Are They Kidding?”

“I’m happy they reached an agreement,” said Paul Jones (pictured with his wife and fellow teacher Ashley Jones).

He said the change requiring low-performing teachers to go to extra professional development sounds ​“reasonable.”

“If we have a system in place to identify people in need of improvement,” it makes sense to help them improve, he reasoned.

Ginny Seely, a 13-year teacher Truman School, said she braced for the worst as she opened her email containing details of the proposed contract. She said given the economy, she was afraid there would be no increase in pay.

She found herself pleasantly surprised: ​“11 percent? Are they kidding me?”

She also embraced the requirement of extra training for struggling teachers. ​“I wish I had that,” she said. Beginning teachers always struggle, she said. ​“All of our first years were awful.”

Another teacher, who declined to give her name, said she voted ​“yes” because ​“I don’t want to go to into arbitration.”

She said the contract looked good overall: ​“No pay freeze,” and ​“they’re not increasing my class size.”

She was less comfortable with the ways that the contract begins to use to the teacher evaluation to make pay-related decisions.

But ​“I don’t really see there is another option,” she said. ​“We could get really screwed in arbitration.”

“Merit Pay”

A handful of teachers wrote up bright green flyers urging their peers to vote ​“no” on the contract.

The flyer dropped the M‑bomb: ​“Merit pay.”

“By tying step increases to performance and rewarding ​‘high-performing’ teachers, we are establishing merit pay,” the flyer reads. ​“Merit pay is not good for children. There is no research showing merit pay has a positive impact on learning.”

Leslie Blatteau, who teaches at Metropolitan Business Academy, agreed.

“Tying performance to pay is divisive,” she said. It threatens the collaborative relationship teachers have at school, and weakens the union, she argued, by separating teachers into different pools and making them compete over ratings.

Another teacher, who declined to give her name for this story, said she had been rated ​“needs improvement” last year. She said she feels the city’s teacher evaluation system depends too much on the whim of the person who’s doing the grading. About half of a teacher’s grade is based on a supervisor’s classroom observations. Teachers flagged as poor-performers in November get their scores checked by an outside validator, which is supposed to ensure fairness. Teachers across the district said Thursday that the implementation of the teacher evaluation system varies from school to school. This teacher said the system is too unreliable to start using as a basis for a teacher’s pay.

Cicarella (at right in photo) later declared the district will never adopt ​“merit pay,” where a teacher’s salary is based on how kids perform on tests.

“Over my dead body,” he said. ​“We’re not paying for test scores.”

Harries and Cicarella said they agree that compensation should not be based on test scores. They said New Haven’s model aims to ​“differentiate” how teachers are paid based on taking on different roles and responsibilities. Salaries would not be automatically triggered by test scores, but tied to a career trajectory, they said.

Low said it’s a ​“big leap” between the changes to New Haven’s compensation system and merit pay.

Low said the contract’s not divisive: ​“We’re not creating a separate class of teachers,” but rather lifting the entire workforce.

Nothing prevents teachers who score ​“needs improvement” or ​“developing” from getting raises, he added. All they have to do is attend up to 10 hours of extra professional development, which will be teacher-designed and teacher-led. ​“No one outside your control” can prevent you from getting the raise (provided that you improve enough to improve your rating and hang onto your job), he said.

“Everyone is entitled to their step [salary increase]. They just have to work a little harder to get it,” said Marianne Maloney (pictured), chief union steward, who also sat at the negotiating table.

Depending On Outside Grants

Critics of the contract also took issue with a clause that calls for reopening the contract if the TIF money is not available to pay for the raises. Cicarella said that won’t happen because the U.S. Department of Education has already approved using the money for raises for three years.

Others questioned who will pay for teachers’ salary increases in three years, when the grant money runs out.

Low replied that the grant money allows New Haven to continue leading the nation in school reform. In three years, he reckoned, ​“we’ll be in a better position to get more grant money.”

Union and school officials plan to discuss the contract further at a press conference Friday at 1 p.m. at Hill Central School.