We Are Not Alone, Part III

Back in December, I posted an article which made a plea to the members of the Hilliard Education Association (HEA) – the teachers' union – to begin thinking about how to enter a new phase of their relationship with the people of our community. Hilliard has been a fast-growing community for a couple of decades, and we have a long tradition of supporting our schools generously. But growth has slowed with the general economic situation in our country. With this recession, the growth of personal incomes has also fallen. Indeed, a number of people in our community are struggling with declining incomes and layoffs. I certainly have friends who have lost their jobs, and even some where both husband and wife were laid off within weeks of each other.

Each of us can and usually does form an opinion as to how much teachers and other school employees should be paid. Some will make comparisons to other professions and say teachers should be paid commensurate with engineers or bankers, especially since teachers are expected to earn Masters degrees early in their career. Others observe that if we place high value on the education of our kids, then we should place high value on the teachers as well, and pay them accordingly.

I belong to the school of thought that teachers should be paid a competitive wage. In other words, we should be willing to pay our teachers enough so as to recruit and retain teachers who can and will perform up to and beyond our expectations. The trick is coming up with a way to quantify our expectations, and to figure out if our pay policies are helping or hindering the achievement of those goals.

We have a few quantitative measures of performance available to us. The Ohio Department of Education publishes Report Cards for each school district which give an indication how our kids perform on standardized tests. Another is the remediation rate as published by the Ohio Board of Regents, which shows that 26% of the Hilliard kids who take a college prep curriculum in high school need remedial English or math once they reach college.

But we mostly rely on qualitative factors and our emotions. Do we feel our kids are getting a good education? Is my kid having a good experience in school? Does my kid like his/her teachers? Do I like my kid's teachers? That's okay – feelings and emotions are valid evaluation tools.

So let's say that in general, we're satisfied with the performance of our teachers and staff. Now how do we go about figuring out what they should be paid?

In the private sector, that's usually pretty easy. The management of a company will pay just enough to recruit and retain employees who will perform the functions required at the level of quality demanded. Employers who aren't willing to pay this amount – whatever it is – will find it difficult to fill positions, or will discover that they end up hiring people unable to perform up to the employer's expectations.

There have been times and situations in the American economy when the employers had the upper hand. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, people flocked from a life of scraping by on subsistence farming to the potential of a steady wage earned working in America's new factories. Industrialists like Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie had all the cheap unskilled labor they would want and more, and so could run their operations on a highly profitable basis, becoming incredibly wealthy in the process.

Gradually the workers began to organize, and found that if they spoke in one voice, they could substantially equalize the power of the two parties – ownership and labor. The two sides fought vigorously, and sometimes violently – trying to find that point of equilibrium where the ownership was making enough profit to keep running the enterprise and the employees earning high enough wages to make it worth coming to work every day.

We're now entering a new stage in American labor relations. As labor costs have continued to rise over the last few decades, an increasing fraction of manufacturing operations have been shifted out of the US to other countries with workers willing to labor for significantly less than their American counterparts. This wound has been slowly bleeding for a long time, causing pain here and there as factories have closed down. Now we're hemorrhaging jobs, which is both a cause and effect of our global recession. America's largest manufacturing concern – General Motors – may soon cease to exist. It will certainly never be the GM of Alfred Sloan's time again.

Consequently, the power of the labor unions, such as the United Auto Workers (UAW) has declined as well. Both management and labor are struggling to find a way to keep the company alive, and everyone is making concessions. My objective is not to demonize the labor unions here – the leaders of these failing firms have been idiots, mainly because of their short-term orientation.

But the point is that there are, I expect, tens if not hundreds of thousands of laid-off UAW members who would work for a fraction of their former wages just to have a job again. This current economic event is causing a reset of all labor rates in our country, at all pay levels.

Except in the public sector, and especially in school districts in middle-class suburbs.

Here in the Hilliard School District, our teachers and staff received a 3% base pay increase in 2008, are getting another 3% increase this year, and will receive an additional 3% in 2010. On top of that, all teachers earning less than $76,769/yr (in 2009) will get an additional 4.15% step increase each year. For a teacher with 13 years experience and a Master's degree (which all are now required to have by their 10^th year of teaching), the current contract sets the pay to $68,712 in 2008, $73,712 in 2009, and $79,072 in 2010. That's an increase of $10,360 in just three years, or 15% in total.

Are they being overpaid? That question can't be answered in isolation. We have to bring in a couple of other factors to the analysis.

How about the first test – are we having any trouble hiring and retaining good teachers? I don't have any facts in this regard, but it is my understanding that a great number of people apply for every open teaching spot in Hilliard City Schools. My eldest daughter is a teacher, and I can attest to the challenge a new college graduate has getting a job in a well-regarded public schools (and it's much harder for a music teacher, as she is). So I have confidence that our pay scale is sufficient to recruit new teachers.

How good is it for recruiting experienced teachers? Turns out that we can't find out because the HEA agreement disallows the transfer of more than 10 years of service (Article 29, C), and since seniority dictates all kinds of important stuff, a teacher with 20 years of experience in Dublin, for example, would be nuts to transfer to Hilliard and give up 10 years of seniority.

How about retention? Are we losing experiencing teachers because the pay scale is too low? How about new teachers? Common belief is that more teachers leave the field in the first five years than in the rest of their careers. That's probably true, as young teachers find that their romantic visions of being a teacher vastly differs from the reality of being in a classroom every day. Lacking the data, I'll go with this observation: no one in our school leadership – Board, Administration or HEA – is talking about there being a retention problem.

Employee compensation is not a topic that typically comes up at levy time – not in the affluent I-270 suburbs around here at least. But that is changing. Members of the New Albany levy campaign committee were outraged when a substantial part of the proceeds of the levy they worked to pass was used to give district employees a pay raise. Where did they think that money was going to go when nearly 90% of a district's operating expenses are salaries and benefits?

A group called EducateWorthington has been formed to bring this issue of compensation out in the open – a parallel effort to ours here in Hilliard. I've had the privilege to meet Mike Alfred and John Herrington, and remain in dialog with them. I'm also grateful that Marc Schare, a member of the Worthington Board of Education, frequently comments on this blog. EducateWorthington recently organized and hosted a community meeting, much like those our grassroots group started in November of last year (yes, Mr. Fedako, we're still alive).

Members of the Hilliard Education Association and the Hilliard Local of OAPSE: You have our future in your hands. I encourage you to be empathetic members of our community, and think about what you will offer to the taxpayers who have supported you so generously over the years, and are now collectively feeling more pain and anxiety about their financial futures than ever before in their lives. You don't have to wait until your current contract expires. You can take action right now – today – to stretch our levy dollars without affecting programming or services.