Vote Set On Next-Step Teachers Contract

New Haven teachers will vote Thursday night on a second landmark labor contract that would begin to tie pay raises to job evaluations and add incentives for teachers who work in difficult schools.

The New Haven Federation of Teachers (NHFT) struck the deal with the school district last Wednesday, according to union President Dave Cicarella. The deal came in the 11th hour as a state-mandated deadline threatened to send the contract to binding arbitration. 

The three-year agreement, which runs from July 1, 2014 to June 30, 2017, affects 1,640 teachers and other school-based staff in the city public schools. It still needs to be ratified by a simple majority vote. Teachers are set to vote on the proposal Thursday during a membership meeting from 4 to 8 p.m. at Wilbur Cross High School. If teachers don’t ratify, their fate will be left to a panel of three arbitrators.

The contract builds on 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 teachers; and allowed for failing schools to be overhauled as ​“turnaround” schools under outside management. The contract gained national attention for the way the union collaborated with the district.

Four years later, union leadership has agreed to raise the stakes of the new evaluation system by adding monetary consequences. Those who score on the bottom two levels of the five-point scale, ​“needs improvement” or ​“developing,” would be denied automatic raises unless they take extra training sessions in May or June. Those who score ​“effective” or higher are being offered leadership positions as teacher ​“facilitators.”

The contract also allows teachers to get extra pay in exchange for working in ​“hard-to-serve” schools.

School Superintendent Garth Harries said the goal is to retain more teachers and increase the ​“professionalism” of the job. He said the contract aims to change the conventional model, where all teachers work the same hours, with similar job descriptions, and pay is tied only to seniority. ​“That’s not a particularly professional conception,” he said.

The contract says ​“it’s not OK just to march along, and everybody gets a raise no matter what they do,” said Cicarella (pictured).

In striking the agreement, New Haven follows a national trend toward tying teacher salaries to job performance. Harries insisted New Haven’s model is not ​“merit pay,” which he defined as simply paying teachers more or less based on how their kids perform. New Haven’s contract would create ​“differentiated pay” for teachers, combined with different responsibilities for the job.

The changes come as New Haven aims to ​“calibrate” its four-year-old evaluation system. Teachers have complained that the scores they receive are inconsistent: They vary too much based on who is assigning the grades. The district is trying to improve the system through a $53 million federal Teacher Incentive Fund grant it won last year.

Cicarella took heat from his membership in 2009, when he refused to release details of the proposed labor contract in advance of the vote. This year, he initially refused to do so, then, facing blowback, released details of the proposed deal in an email to teachers Wednesday, one day before the vote.

Cicarella, who won reelection unopposed after the past contract, has been collaborating with the school district to change longstanding union work rules, and add more teacher accountability based in part on test scores. That stance has gained him national applause for raising the bar of the profession, as well as criticism for helping the national reform movement chip away at one of the nation’s largest remaining labor unions.

The latest agreement would also grant teachers an average 11 percent pay raise over three years; extend teachers’ work day by 15 minutes; and eliminate one of the paid days off for Rosh Hashanah, according to a copy of the agreement obtained by the Independent. Read on for more highlights.

“Automatic” Raises

For the first time, the contract would end the practice of automatically promoting every teacher to a higher pay grade at the end of each year.

Like other unionized municipal workers, teachers get paid on a step scale based on two factors: education and years served. A rookie teacher with a bachelor’s degree starts out on the first step, making $43,759 per year. At the end of each year, her pay automatically goes up one ​“step” — in this case, to $45,357. She can also bump up her pay by getting a higher degree.

As it stands, teachers automatically move up each year until they maximize their salaries at the 16th step. Under the proposed deal, most teachers would keep climbing the steps.

But advancement would not be automatic for everyone. Teachers are graded on a five-point scale based on goals teachers set for how their kids will improve on tests, as well as 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—would not get a raise unless they attend new training sessions aimed to help them improve their craft.

“To earn that raise, you need to go to these additional professional development sessions,” Cicarella explained.

“It’s not punitive,” he said. ​“These are people that, for whatever reason, have performance deficiencies.” The training will be ​“tailor-made,” he said. ​“We think it’s fair.”

“Every classroom should have effective teachers in it,” Cicarella said. ​“There has to be something tied to it.”

The contract already allows the school district to fire low-performing teachers if they don’t improve by the end of one year. The district has focused on giving teachers extra support rather than firing them: In the first two years of the evaluation system, it has pushed out 2 percent of the workforce due to poor evaluations, including some tenured teachers, and helped others to ​“up their game” and hang onto their jobs.

The new training sessions for low-performing teachers would take place in May and June. They would be tailored to each teacher’s particular weakness, such as classroom management, Cicarella said.

“We’re envisioning that they be teacher-led, teacher-run,” he said.

The sessions would be funded either by the $53 million TIF grant, or by a $1 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that the district was awarded this week, but has not publicly announced, he said.

Harries said the training requirement aims to acknowledge that ​“if you’re a struggling teacher, or even a developing teacher … your job is different.”

“Fundamentally, your job is to get your teaching practice better.”

Unlike many other municipal workers, Harries said, ​“most teachers work far more hours” outside of the required 6 1/2‑hour work day. The requirement aims to start ​“taking that time and making sure it’s devoted to improving practice.”

Under the proposed deal, all the steps would remain at the same pay level, except for the highest one, which would be raised to $82,000 for someone with a bachelor’s degree. At the top ​“lane,” as it’s called, teachers with a PhD earn between $52,618 and $91,217.

Teachers who move up a step would get an average raise of 3.75 percent in year 1, followed by 3.74 and 3.69 percent raises, according to Cicarella.

Harries said if all teachers move up on the salary scale without leaving, the contract would cost $13 million over the three years. But in reality, the cost will likely be lower, he said, due to attrition. Many teachers leave urban schools each year and are replaced with less-costly, younger teachers. 

Hard-To-Serve Schools

The proposed contract aims to keep teachers from

fleeing New Haven in part by acknowledging that working in certain schools is more difficult.

New Haven’s school system is a system of haves and have-nots, where magnet schools tend to have more stable populations of kids, and more money, while a small batch of neighborhood schools bear the brunt of handling transient and disruptive kids, often with fewer resources. Harries, who took over as superintendent in July, has vowed to address this equity problem.

The contract calls for treating teachers differently if they work in ​“hard-to-serve schools.”

That means they may receive different work rules, ​“job-embedded and targeted training,” extra responsibilities — and extra pay. Each school would determine what that would look like. The contract doesn’t spell out how to define a ​“hard-to-serve” school: a Reform Committee of teachers and administrators would figure that out.

Teacher Leaders

The proposed deal also creates a new career path for teachers who want to take on leadership roles without leaving the classroom. It’s called a teacher ​“facilitator.” Teachers maintain a full course load, and also take on a new responsibility: They run professional development sessions with their peers on a topic of their choice.

The initiative already kicked off this fall with a teacher leader ​“boot camp.” Sixty-four teachers have now returned to their schools and begun meeting with their peers. In return, they get an extra stipend. To get into the competitive program, teachers had to score ​“effective” or higher on the teacher evaluation.

The teacher leaders are being paid more, Harries said, but there’s more to it than money.

“It’s trying to recognize and retain quality folks,” he said. ​“It’s not trying to use money as a means to motivate them. Compensation is a component of a teacher’s professional trajectory,” which includes other roles and responsibilities. The goal is to keep good teachers in New Haven, so they don’t get poached by suburban schools.

Longer Day

During contract negotiations, labor and management haggled over how much to extend teachers’ 6.5‑hour school day. The district sought to extend it, in keeping with surrounding towns.

The union agreed to leave the school day the same for kids, and extend it from 6.5 to 6.75 hours for teachers.

In reality, the extra 15 minutes equates to an extra half-hour per day, Cicarella explained: As it stands, teachers are required to show up 15 minutes before kids arrive. But that time is ​“unencumbered,” meaning they can’t be assigned duties during that time. The new contract would allow schools to assign teachers duties during those 15 minutes, and also add 15 minutes to the end of the day.

Each school would decide how to use the time. Schools could combine the time to add new planning sessions during the first half-hour of school, for example. Teachers would have to ratify any changes made to the work rules governing how their individual school allocates that extra 15 minutes.

These changes build on an agreement in the current contract that allowed for more flexible work rules—including a longer school day—at failing schools that are identified for ​“turnaround” experiments. 

The contract also calls for teachers to pay more into their health care plans. The contract does not cover pensions; those are governed by the state.

Christmas Threat Was A Bluff

As a preamble to the proposed contract, Cicarella wrote out a list of the Board of Education’s initial offers — offers that would have slashed teachers’ contractual rights.

Proposed changes include:
• ​“Eliminate all class size limits”
• Increase school day to 8 hours
• ​“Eliminate all holidays presently in contract (Thanksgiving, Christmas, Columbus Day, all Jewish Holidays, etc)”
• No personal days in June
• ​“Eliminate the ability of a teacher to grieve an established policy or practice.”

Harries said Cicarella’s list is ​“an accurate description of a negotiation position.” But it was a negotiation tactic, he said: ​“It was no one’s expectation of where we should land.”