Attract and Retain
It seems that school systems have no problem attracting qualified teachers.
What’s a school district to do when it receives thousands of applications a year for teacher vacancies?
If it’s like the Milwaukee, Kenosha, Waukesha and other school systems throughout the state and country, it contracts with the Gallup Organization to help winnow the ranks of eligible candidates to a manageable number.
So can we freeze their compensation packages until the pile of resumes for each open position becomes more manageable?
Distircts may recieve thousands of applicants, but that does not mean that they are all qualified. Just like in the private sector many people apply that are not qualified. The problem comes in that schools do 99% of their hiring in a short period of time. It is difficult at best to get this job done in the time allowed.
As for teacherinsight, I have taken the test and it has its limits. Many of the questions that are asked are not answered well in a multiple choice format. Fewer schools use this today than in years past. It is not used in the West Bend School District.
Owen, you must be obsessed with the democrats proposal on health care to have added that last comment. The reality is that many people want to teach, because they remember school fondly and truly want to teach. It is not for the benefits, although they are great and few, if any, turn them down.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on June 25, 2007 at 0658 hrs
What does the number of applicants have to do with freezing compensation packages? I don’t see the connection you’re trying to make. Perhaps you can explain, instead of just leaving the implications to the reader, as if we all knew what you were thinking based on code words. Are you implying that because the compensation package is so attractive, districts see a lot of applicants? And that there’s a problem here?
If your business was facing a glut of applicants for a position, would you think that your offer of compensation was too high? Or that there was simply an abundance of applicants on the market, and that you’ll be able to pick the best at the price you’ve offered? And that’s a problem? It doesn’t logically follow that you’re offering too much. As anyone can imagine, and as the article points out, not all applicants are qualified. Businesses need all sorts of methods to sift and winnow.
Posted by John Foust on June 25, 2007 at 0827 hrs
I agree with Owen that a little more supply and demand action would help to more efficiently allocate resources. For example, when you hear stories of hundreds of applicants for a single teaching job, it is almost always an elementary position. At the same time, it is very hard to find a high school math or computer science teacher. Perhaps we should pay less for the former and more for the latter, and the market would respond.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on June 25, 2007 at 0850 hrs
The purpose of compensation is to attract and retain qualified employees. If a company is receiving hundreds of qualified applicants for each open position, then it is an indication that the compensation level is higher than the market demands. If there are very view qualified applicants, then it is an indication that the compensation being offered is too low.
According to the story, many of the school districts cited are being inundated with so many applicants that they have to hire an outside service to filter them. And, according to the story, they fear that the outside company is weeding out too many qualified applicants. This indicates that not only are the applicants who ended up getting the jobs were qualified, but also that there were many other qualified applicants. If the school districts are getting so many qualified applicants, that’s great, but it means that we could save some tax dollars on compensation and still have qualified teachers.
Posted by Owen on June 25, 2007 at 0856 hrs
I agree, Charlie. Compensation should be flexible enough to adjust it to the market. If that means paying math teachers more, then fine. If that means paying 2nd grade teachers less, that’s fine too. The point is that the level of compensation should have a rational basis instead of being arbitrarily set by whatever the union negotiates that year.
Posted by Owen on June 25, 2007 at 0858 hrs
The purpose of compensation is to attract and retain qualified employees. If a company is receiving hundreds of qualified applicants for each open position, then it is an indication that the compensation level is higher than the market demands.
You’ve ignored the RETAIN part of your own statement. In MPS, it’s typical to hire new teachers right out of college, have them teach no more than four years, then (now that they’re “proven”) have them head off to the burbs (I personally know six teachers who fit this profile).
It’s not difficult for any public school district (at least as far as I know) to have many more applicants than it has positions to fill. But keeping them in MPS requires compensating them well—unless we only want 24-28 year old teachers in MPS.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on June 25, 2007 at 0912 hrs
So how would one differentiate between a market with a glut of applicants, and an offer of compensation that was “too high”? Perhaps it would help for us to search for facts about any measurable glut or shortage in the teaching market. There are other factors as well - there are districts where many teachers would like to work, other districts not so much. As with any discussion of state issues, the situation for large urban areas is quite different than the rural areas.
The article is talking about the efficacy of screening tools. It’s easy to have an armchair quarterback view of a school district. I humbly suggest that the average person is no more qualified or informed enough to direct the HR department at a school district any more than they could step in to run the HR at any other comparably-sized private business. They’re often one of the largest employers in a small city. I encourage you to attend a few school board meetings. What happens when that math teacher shifts jobs to become a second-grade teacher? They lose their benefits? Yes, I agree the unions make a mess of it, but the entire situation is not so easy to simplify.
Posted by John Foust on June 25, 2007 at 0915 hrs
With an unemployment rate of less than 5%, it’s hard to argue that there is a glut of applicants just because there are a ton of people looking for work.
Posted by Owen on June 25, 2007 at 0919 hrs
BTW, JF. I sit on a private school’s board and Charlie who commented above is the School Board President of West Bend. Kris in comment #1 also sits on West Bend’s school board. I think that there is plenty of insight into this issue.
Posted by Owen on June 25, 2007 at 0923 hrs
Part of the glut problem at those schools is that they are urban schools and do pay better than say Northland Pines or Hurley. Part of that is the market and part is the location. There is also the fact that in many places around the state the quality of life is not what teachers/nonteachers are looking for. Many people not just teachers prefer to be ner a larger city that has more to offer in the way of entertainment and just general cultural opportunities. Not only do people leave MPS they also leave small districts to go to big districts for some of the reasons that I listed and many more.
Also, most districts will negotiate with hard to find teachers, but not for the ones that are plentiful. It works the same in the private sector.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on June 25, 2007 at 1120 hrs
Great… then several of you have heard Mark Twain’s remarks about school boards, and I won’t repeat the joke.
I think Owen’s original remark jumps to unfounded conclusions. He said that if there are lots of applicants, it means they are paying too much. I disagree; it seems like sloppy logic driven by unhappiness with the costs of the public educational system. There’s all sorts of reasons why there may be many applicants for a position, as well as other reasons why a district might offer higher pay than other districts. In Milwaukee SD, they have a residency requirement, so they’d naturally have a larger pool of potential applicants because of the city’s population, and the ease by which a teacher could move between schools within the same district. Any single opening might have many applicants. As Charlie points out, some positions require more esoteric skills and presumably would have fewer applicants, but that’s not news and not part of the article.
Milwaukee already pays more than many districts, due in part because of the need to provide incentive to work in schools that are poorly regarded. What would “freezing compensation” do to fix that situation? If districts recently laid-off teachers, that could contribute to any perceived glut. The general unemployment rate may have nothing to do with the unemployment rate of certified teachers. As far as I’ve ever heard, there’s many more licensed teachers than there are positions. This wasn’t true a decade ago. Then there’s that qualifier of what makes a “quality teacher”. Districts do need to find mechanisms to weed out the unqualified.
Posted by John Foust on June 26, 2007 at 0953 hrs
That Mark Twain - what a card. There’s also that old quote about the critic who shows up after the battle is done and shoots the wounded. It’s always pretty easy to take shots from the cheap seats. But back to the point. All Owen means is that it would be nice if school districts could pay individual teachers based on their performance and to further let the market decide what someone is worth. You could create a painting and declare (in a contract) that it is worth a million dollars, but if nobody is willing to pay that, it is not really a million dollar painting. This would also help in getting rid of bad teachers. Ironically, some of the worst, burned out teachers are the most highly paid. On the other hand, there are some great teachers who are grossly underpaid. Until we get over the notion that teachers are commodities and instead are professionals, the public will never get the best return on their tax dollars.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on June 26, 2007 at 1053 hrs
Charlie,
It’s comments like that that I want to hear from more school board members. Here here.
Posted by Owen on June 26, 2007 at 1215 hrs
I don’t mean to flog this dead horse, but Owen’s original suggestion is that freezing compensation would reduce the number of applicants for an open position. He clarified it with his belief that if there’s “too many” applicants, the wage must be too high; if there’s too few, it’s too low. For starters, there many be many applicants but you don’t know if there are “many qualified applicants” until you screen them. I say his assessment is simplistic. There are many other factors at play, both in the public and private sectors. Is that your experience in West Bend, Charlie?
I have great sympathy for the notion of school districts being able to tweak compensation to attract difficult-to-fill spots. As a school board member, I would think you’d understand the difficulties in fairly defining “good teacher” or “bad teacher” as well as how to adjust compensation to reflect that. The same is true in the private sector; I don’t think we should expect any different in the public sector.
Merit pay isn’t an easy system to implement in either place. Performance? Who deserves more cash? A suburban teacher whose well-fed and preschool’d kids deliver good test scores? Or a downtown teacher with kids with below-average scores? A phy-ed teacher who gives good grades? A special needs teacher? Does a lousy teacher get to benefit from being on a team of better teachers? By “the market” deciding, you really mean a school board setting a wage or bonus, right?
Also, contracts are defined between two parties. Contracts with one person are called “talking to yourself.” Price is set between buyer and seller. If I can sell a painting for $1M, does that make me a good painter?
Posted by John Foust on June 26, 2007 at 1221 hrs
John - I don’t intent to minimize the difficulty of performance review. It’s no different in the private sector. I’ve been evaluated by my bosses for years. As a small businessman I am now evaluated by the market. It’s brutal but a great way to make sure the best products at the right price survive. As to teachers, it would never be the school board (bad micromanaging), but a combination of principal opinion, peer review, client (kids and parents) evaluation, improvement in test scores, etc. Somewhere along the line we must find a way to reward the best teachers and encourage the bad teachers to seek another line of work. A table of seniority and degrees is just not good enough. And, if you can sell your painting for a million you might not be a great painter (to be judged by the ages), but you are a successful one.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on June 26, 2007 at 1448 hrs
As any good free-marketer knows, it doesn’t necessarily follow that a product that succeeds in the market is “best,” just as in the case of that painting. It might simply be popular. “Best” might be something else entirely. I might be able to argue six ways that Lindt chocolate bars are the best, but Hershey sells more.
So if I’m a hard-nosed physics teacher, actually requiring the kids to actually learn what they should know, I might get poor reviews from students and their parents. Other teachers might not even like me. Maybe the principal doesn’t like the attention he gets from unhappy parents and students. The kids might not get ‘A’s. So I’m a bad teacher, right? Just like NCLB, there are plenty of incentives to teach to the test and game those criteria that might land me a raise. Does a teacher who moonlights as a coach get extra points for taking the team to state?
Posted by John Foust on June 26, 2007 at 1514 hrs
I suppose some would be happy in a monarchy where an elite few decide what’s “best” for the unwashed masses. I personally have a basic faith that people will act in their own best interests and that things work out well for society. Sure there are imperfections in a free market, but it’s still the most efficient way to allocate resource. I think in micro economics they call that the theory of the second best. As to your teacher example. you have too little faith in parents. And maybe that teacher should try and collaborate better with his peers. I’m not a big fan of NCLB, but if the test actually contains what we want kids to learn, then I’m happy to teach to the test. And, if a coach takes his team to state, I think that’s good - don’t you?
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on June 26, 2007 at 1746 hrs
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