Comparability, Continued

AFTies Ed and Michele return from summer vacation and weigh in with a pair of thoughtful posts (here and here) on the "comparability" debate. They're right in saying that forced transfers aren't an ideal--or in many cases, even practical--solution to the teacher distribution problem, and that we ought to focus on creating schools for low-income studetns that veteran teachers would actually want to teach in.

But both they and Major Kate Walsh are framing the possible solutions too narrowly. It's true that finding a way to get more experienced teachers into high-poverty schools would be one way of complying with the proposed changes (which would require schools to use actual teacher salaries--not, as is current practice, made-up salaries from an alternate universe where teachers aren't paid more for experience--in calculating school spending for the purposes of ensuring equitable funding). There are also at least two other ways to comply:

1) Districts could stop giving automatic pay raises based merely on years of experience, and instead use that money to boost pay for teachers who are higher performing and who are willing to teach in high-poverty schools.

2) Districts could reduce class size in high-poverty schools.

The first option is obviously hugely controversial and not something many local teachers unions are going to embrace right away (although I think more are starting to move in that direction.)But the section option is straightforward to implement and should be palatable to pretty much everyone--isn't class size reduction high on the AFT and NEA school reform agendas? That way if you've got a situation like Kate imagines, where "a go-getter principal...has hired a lot of young, energetic staff and is starting to make real progress," you're giving that principal the money to hire even more go-getters. It might mean freeing up resources from other parts of the district budget to pay for more teachers--but again, that's a union-friendly reform.

And while it also might mean increasing class sizes in the lower-poverty schools, this would on balance be a net-plus tradeoff, since the veteran teachers would presumably be better able to handle a few more students per class. Moreover, the extant research is pretty clear that class size reduction is far more effective for at-risk students than others, so the result would be lowering class size where it will do the most good and increasing it where it will do the least harm.