The Non-Crisis

There's a yucky phenomenon in public education. In Phoenix, it was called RIF (Reduction in Force). In Alachua County it's called Notice of Non-Renewal. No matter what you call it, it means the same thing. You're unemployed.

For those who don't know how most public school teacher contracts work, here's a quick lesson on how they work (at least up until this summer):

When a teacher first gets hired by a school district, the teacher is offered an annual contract. That's exactly how it sounds: the district has agreed to hire you for one school year and that's it. If things work out, you work well with others, you do your job and meet professional expectations, AND the school (i.e. the Principal) wants you back, then some time in the spring, you get offered another annual contract and you teach for another year. After a certain number of years of annual contracts, the teacher becomes eligible for what some call a continuing contract. Here, it's called a Professional Services Contract. But the colloquial term for it is tenure.

Tenure is controversial lately, because some people think it saddles schools with bad teachers. But that's another story. Several good reasons exist for tenure. The one I've always liked the best is that it provides a degree of job security for a job that is stressful, underpaid, and largely devoid of perks. One of the reasons I got into teaching is because I wanted job security as I raised a family.



The annual contracts essentially serve as a probationary period, and if the principal decides he likes the teacher, he can recommend them for tenure. This doesn't mean the teacher can slack off and show movies for the rest of their career, but it does mean they can focus their energies on teaching and becoming a better teacher, rather than constantly looking for the next job. A teacher with tenure can comfortably establish roots in their community instead of being a transitory human band-aid. Everyone should want a teacher who is vested in the community they strive to educate.

Because I had tenure in Alachua County before (I gave it up when we moved to Phoenix) my new "probationary" period is only 1 year. In other words, since I've returned to GHS, I am eligible for tenure (again) after just one year.

Last month, I had a meeting with my principal, who regretfully gave me a Notice of Non-Renewal. I got RIF'ed. Pink-slipped. Come June, I would be unemployed.

While this was troubling, it wasn't a complete surprise. In Phoenix, the annual contract teachers were RIF'ed with alarming regularity. Most of the time those teachers were rehired, if they hadn't gone elsewhere while waiting. That is the danger in RIF'ing good teachers. While a principal might be able to rehire the teacher once the "budgetary concerns" are figured out, the teacher may have already taken another job elsewhere. No matter how kindly it's done, it's a crappy way to deal with teachers. It's a morale-killer.

I wasn't planning on looking for another job. Dr. Dixon assured me that it was not something to lose sleep over, that he was confident he'd be able to rehire everyone who wanted to stay at GHS, and if things took a turn for the worse, if it looked like it was something I should lose sleep about, he'd immediately let me know. Dr. Dixon is a straight-shooter, so I took his word. I didn't lose any sleep.

Although it still caused a nagging, slight feeling of unease.

The worst part was the thought of having to go to another school, while Sofia is at GHS. I've gotten used to being at the same school as Sofia. We ride together. I know her teachers. She warms her lunch up in my room. The pride I have for the GHS band that she marches in is intertwined with the pride I have for MY school, and the school that my wife graduated from. It would feel wrong to be at a different school.

This morning I got an email from Dr. Dixon. He congratulated me that I had officially been reappointed, and he was recommending me for a Professional Services Contract.

The potential crisis is a non-crisis. Deep breath.

Remember how I said tenure was controversial right now? The Florida legislature and our current governor (who's never governed anything before) have passed a law that abolishes tenure for teachers. Starting July 1, 2011, no school district in Florida will be allowed to offer continuing contracts. Every teacher hired after July 1 can only be offered annual contracts. Yes, that rustling sound you hear is the sound of your child's teacher mailing stacks of resumes instead of teaching him how to read.



It's my understanding that teachers who have tenure before July 1 can choose to keep their continuing contract and not be eligible for performance-based pay (where bonuses are paid for certain student test-scores), or give up their tenure for PBP. I haven't given it much thought, because I honestly think the whole law is going to implode and be thrown out or amended. The State of Florida is already LAST in the country for per capita educational spending, and they just slashed the education budget even more. I don't think they'll have the money to pay for all the testing that will be required for PBP, which will be extremely expensive, nor will they have the money that will be required for the bonuses.

Here's an example using fictitious but plausible numbers. Let's say my salary is $30,000 a year. With PBP instituted, let's say a high-performing teacher earns a $10,000 bonus to their annual salary. Where's that money going to come from? The state just cut the budget, so it's obviously not coming from them. So to make the numbers work, the base salary for everyone gets lowered to, say, $24,000. Research has shown that merit pay (PBP) does not improve student achievement. In fact, not much that I do as a teacher in the few months I have my students is going to make or break the standardized test-scores of my students. Here's what research has proven: If I have students who grew up in homes where literacy was encouraged, those students will test fairly well. If I have students who come from homes where literacy was not encouraged, the students will test on the poor side. So something as arbitrary as my teaching assignment could determine whether my salary is $24,000 or $34,000. If you were a teacher and you knew that the classes you were asked to teach were probably not going to earn you a bonus, would you stay and adjust your personal budget to live off $24,000 or would you move to another state where the salary schedule was more reasonable? And yet, the legislature argues that this will improve the teaching profession and attract brighter, more effective teachers.

And what about the teachers who teach electives like driver's ed? Do they get a $10,000 bonus because most of their kids pass the end-of-the-year driver's ed test? Are you telling me that the driver's ed teacher is a more effective teacher than the English teacher who teaches remedial reading, and worthy of a higher salary, just because the driver's ed kids tested higher on road rules than the reading kids did on reading comprehension?

There are so many holes in this form of teacher pay that it's mind-boggling that it's now the law. I could write post after post about how the corporate-backed politicians are molding the school systems for their own greed, duping the uninformed populace with false pretenses of "encouraging student achievement." But this post is already too long, and since the only person probably still reading is my mother, I'll close things up soon.

The bottom line is things are crazy in Florida right now. And I don't just mean confused-crazy. I mean like axe-murderer crazy. But I'll be at GHS next year, doing my thing, turning kids on to books, giving them tools to be better writers, making a yearbook, trying my best to subversively ignore that 300-pound gorilla in the room, the F-CAT. And I'll be at the same school as Sofia. And that's all that matters for now.