In his relentless effort to raise teacher quality in Tennessee, Kevin Huffman will cut the salaries of most new teachers.
The ax will fall most heavily on teachers who get an advanced degree.
You see, the way to improve teacher quality is to remove any incentive for additional education. If it can’t raise test scores, why bother?
Huffman got a law degree, but maybe that doesn’t count. He worked for Teach for America and was its communications director before becoming Commissioner in Tennessee. Maybe that’s what really counts.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What part of a teacher’s life hasn’t been destroyed by the likes of “W”-“Jeb” and ALL his corporate vultures? I honestly can’t think of one!
The Gates juggernaut continues to role over teachers. Bill loves to point to the study that his foundation did that found no improvement in test scores of students taught by teachers with Master’s degrees. A pithy summary from a Huff Post story:
Duncan told the American Enterprise Institute . . . that master’s degree bonuses are an example of spending money on something that doesn’t work. . . .
billionaire Bill Gates took aim at school budgets and the master’s degree bonus.
“My own state of Washington has an average salary bump of nearly $11,000 for a master’s degree – and more than half of our teachers get it. That’s more than $300 million every year that doesn’t help kids,” he said.
“And that’s one state,” said Gates, the co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, at a speech . . . in Louisville to the Council of Chief State School Officers. Gates also took aim at pensions and seniority.
“Of course, restructuring pay systems is like kicking a beehive,” he acknowledged.
Of course, if you use invalid measures of teacher effectiveness, you come to invalid conclusions about the causal factors. But these guys take it on faith that the criterion-referenced tests are valid measures.
Gates should know. He and his cohorts at Microsoft in the 80’s and 90’s—while they were making more money than God—were pulling a sleazy trick by making more than half of their employees work as “independent contractors”, effectively screwing them and their families out of medical care, vacation pay, sick days, retirement and much more. This egregious, underhanded game went on for a very long time until Microsoft was sued and paid their way out of what would have been a big embarrassing trial.
I know about this because my brother was one of the people who received a hefty settlement about ten years ago for the years when they employed him in that same sleazy way.
Bill Gates isn’t all bad, but there is a side of him that is arrogant, dismissive, smirky and mean-spirited. He could do nothing but good with his money—if he wanted to. Why is he spending so much of it on the destruction of American education?
And remember, all of his billions can’t change the fact that whenever Bill Gates speaks, we’re all listening to a college dropout.
Have you ever noticed how many rear end kissing profiles were on the national news about Gates? Tom Brokow kissed his rear to write a bio about him. Arne Duncan sat on an NBC stage while Gates put on a propaganda show about charters on Ed. Nation. Did you see the comments the Fed. Judge made about Gates after the Anti-trust case years ago? He described him the same way you did-arrogant, etc. He thinks he knows it all and wants to keep pushing until he gets his way. He has done a tremendous amount of damage out here. He seems to have little compassion for American workers.
Advice to teachers: Float like a butterfly. Sting like a bee.
I used to be intimidated by the brashness of Mohammed Ali. I was very young (and very white).
It would appear that after teaching in Tennessee for 20 years, with a family of 4, you would only have increased your income by $7,000 (without mandated continuing ed), and you would have lived your and your families life at about 1/3 above the poverty level.
Speaking of Luddites! Tennessee needs to be educated about Finnish educators who have the respect of the whole community and earn salaries commensurate with doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants….and they are all unionized.
America shows little to no respect for educators, nor for education. They use sham language, but actions speak far louder than words.
Evidence piles up that this bogus “reform” wave has nothing to do with learning and teaching while it is profoundly focused on lowering the wage package of public schooling, by replacing professional educators with TFA newbies. This attack on the wages of the workforce began in earnest 40 years ago when the union-heavy northeast was de-industrialized, first to the “Sunbelt” south where labor was poorly organized, then abroad and to Mexico. In higher ed, the de-professional breaking of wages began at this time also with the displacement of f/t prof’s with p/t adjuncts. This is a labor war we are in heavily disguised as an educational war.
Looks like it to me. But it’s also about maintaining monopolistic control of education markets.
Kevin,
Do you also propose cutting the salaries and qualifications of the teachers at Harperth Hall?
What or where is Harperth Hall?
Where one, most likely both eventually, of the Rhee/Huffman girls attends school: http://www.harpethhall.org/
What are the salaries and qualifications of the teachers at Harpeth Hall?
See the link, search for yourself, most of their teachers, administrators, deans of this and that have at least a master’s degree.
He isn’t sending his girls to a TN public high school and what he wants for other people’s children is not what he wants for his girls…par for the course in TFA “leadership” circles.
Couldn’t find it in the link.
I have several friends who work at schools similar to Harpeth. All had Master’s degrees or PhD’s when hired. I know that because they were coming out of the same graduate program that I came out of. I also know that none had teaching certification.
But my other question was what are the salaries of teachers at Harpeth Hall? Do you know?
I will write to Kevin and Michelle tonight. As soon as they get back to me, I will you know.
Thanks!
It would be interesting to know. These fancy private schools that everyone likes to hold up as a benchmark may not treat their teachers as well as many seem to think.
Typo…let you know….see here:
http://www.harpethhall.org/podium/default.aspx?t=151830
Harpeth Hall actively recruits teachers with advanced degrees and experience. The families who send their girls there expect it. Go to their website and check it out.
What are they paid (said the broken record)?
FLERP
Tomorrow morning posts contain pay schedules
Those with advanced degrees cut the most
https://docs.google.com/file/d/1zW_THj7mS4OEiv2WgAl4mLVj2_zZGMpmMI-JoqHqljRm-TFazMpqlpRhvNqv/preview?pli=1
I think FLERP was asking about the salary of the private school teachers at Harpeth Hall, not the public school salary scale.
Given the rapid rise in online graduate education degree programs, is it possible that earning a graduate degree in education is now a very distorted signal of the ability of a teacher to teach? I have in mind Dr. Ravitch’s posting about the “false proxy” trap (https://dianeravitch.net/2012/11/19/the-false-proxy-trap/).
Perhaps we should be working harder to reward teaching rather than giving schools of education a slice of the teacher’s increased earnings.
Do you think online coursework is a red flag for bad teaching?
Most who post here think that virtual schools are worthless for K-12 education. Perhaps they have doubts about it at the graduate level as well.
Any thoughts about the main point of my post?
I haven’t a clue how good or bad education schools are. I do know that there is a great deal that can be learned and taught about teaching well. Simply introducing a would-be history teacher to the technique of document-based questioning using primary source materials is worth the whole cost of credentialing, for example. My own education school classes, years ago, were something of a joke, but I suspect that they have improved. I do wish that the linguists would work more with the folks who run reading programs, for I have met a lot of reading people who were persisting in notions that a little linguistics education would disabuse them of. On the other hand, I have met a few people who taught in reading programs who did, in fact, know a great deal about the science of child language acquisition that informed, in valuable ways, their notions about how reading should be taught (these were not mainstream folks, however). I suspect that English methods instructors could learn a LOT from their colleagues over in the journalism school about how to teach people to do competent functional writing. And I do wish that a LOT more emphasis were placed, in teacher education, on subject area content knowledge, though it is my understanding that there has been, in recent years, considerable improvement in this area. I know that Dr. Ravitch shares my feelings there. There is much, MUCH, that we have learned in recent decades about learning that has not made its way, at all, into our pedagogy, but again, there are positive signs–cognitive psychologists working with education professors to develop pedagogical approaches based on new understandings of how people learn. I sincerely doubt that advanced education degrees, these days, are as useless as they were years ago. There’s still a lot of practically illiterate edubabble, to be sure. But there’s also some real work being done, if one digs for it.
That is not at all an unreasonable hypothesis, TE. However, the way to respond to the situation, if that is the case, is to improve the quality of graduate education programs, not to stop paying teachers for continuing to educate themselves.
On the subject of online education, I wanted to say that I am a big fan. I LOVE the fact that a kid in Cameroon with a $100 laptop and access to electricity from a windmill generator can get online and take AMAZING coursework. This is so beautiful that it brings tears to my eyes, and I know, from my own personal experience, how much one can learn from online courses. I take a lot of them. They are a candy store. Many are astonishingly good, as good as anything I ever got in a brick and mortar school.
However, I’ve spent a LOT of time in the past few years studying the crap that is being foisted on students as K12 online instruction. I could easily write a fat book on how awful most of this stuff is, an expose that people would find, I think, extraordinarily shocking. In lieu of the book, let me say that most of the current online offerings in K12 amount to no more than worksheets on a screen with cartoon characters, treating isolated, abstract skills, and imparting almost no new world or procedural knowledge, but surrounded by a lot of sophisticated marketing hype. Some of these K12 programs are so misrepresented that what they are doing probably constitutes fraud. I’m quite serious about that.
A quick story: Many years ago, I had the great honor to edit a text by a physicist named Uri Haber-Shaim, a pioneer who worked with Fermi in the old days. He told me about how when television first hit the scene, he and his scientific colleagues were extraordinarily excited about the possibilities. In particular, he said, they thought: We can beam the very best teachers in the world into every classroom. “Look,” he said, “instead, at what has become of this medium. How it has been debased.” And there were tears in his eyes, thinking of what had been possible but was never realized.
Same story today. But I am hopeful. If you happen to be interested in learning, say, introductory statistics, you can go online right now and download or read, online, for free, any of four or five really SUPERB college-level stat texts. And more and more that sort of thing is available. I just sent a friend a list of 60+ great, free online lecture series that I had winnowed from thousands now available. The big textbook houses don’t like this kind of thing, at all. That’s why they are working so hard at building artificial gateways for students to which they, and they alone, will be able to pass their “approved” materials.
Wouldn’t it be best to concentrate on what we are actually interested in instead of the proxy?
Linda,
Was that helpful?
Yes, TE. Definitely.
Not nearly distorted as the salaries for advanced degrees of economists.
My point is not about the field of study so much as the structure of the contract that guarantees a specified salary increase for an advanced degree from any accredited university.
It would be interesting to see the fields in which teachers do get doctorates. Is a music teacher likely to get a doctorate in music from a school of music? Is a high school physics teacher going to get a doctorate in physics from a school of liberal arts and sciences?
Please tell all of us about the qualifications and salaries for teaching economists. Spread some light on your profession and area of expertise.
In higher education? Typically an earned Ph.D. In economics is required, though people with a Ph.D. in mathmatics or statistics also are hired as economics faculty.
Starting salary is negotiated on a case by case basis with the individuals being hired, generally the salary is higher at research universities and in fields that are of high interest. There is often an issue of salary inversion, that is the most recently hired faculty member at a given rank has the highest salary.
Increases in salary are primarily based on peer evaluation of performance. The largest increases tend to come as counter offers to other institution’s offer of employment. The next largest salary increases come from promotion to assistant to associate (generally if a faculty member is not promoted from assistant to associate they lose the job), from associate to full, and for a few, from full to distinguished. There can be salary increases for individuals within faculty rank as well, also the result of peer evaluation.
In my department these procedures have resulted in a range of salaries. Some long time faculty earn in the low 70’s, new assistant professors will be earning around 100 depending on field, and distinguished professors will earn north of 250.
Economics salaries tend to get pushed up because of opportunities to work in private industry and government. The same is true for fields like business, engeneering, and law. Salaries in the humanities ten to be a good deal lower.
If your interested in salaries broken down by academic rank and institution, here is a good data place to look:https://chronicle.com/article/2013-aaup-survey-table/138291
Linda,
Was that helpful?
Perhaps if we saved billions by cutting testing we could pay teachers a bit more. I let Public Ed this year to finish my doctorate. I figured at that top pay scale they would find a reason to ditch me anyway.
EXACTLY, MEG!!!
Maybe Huffman needs to know that.
I want to wake up from this nightmare to the aroma of frying bacon and my mother humming a gospel song.
Word.
“Swing low” would be a good one for a lot of folks to hear and sing.
“Humble thyself. . .” Best words. Ever.
want to see a headline that reads
“How Teachers Cut Kevin Huffman”
Are salaries decided state wide in TN? In IL they are bargained for by the teacher’s unions (ie teachers) with the local school board (ie local tax payers and parents)…at least for now they still are.
I also wonder what he is thinking in the way of attracting new business to their state….why would any young talent move to TN if their children are being taught by an underpaid staff. No decent teacher will stay or move to TN.
Cee, we lost the right to collective bargaining in TN.
No collective bargaining in TN? Then according to the Rheeformers, the billionaires’ boys club, the Walmarters, the libertarians, the Ayn Randians, the privatizers, the Gates dynasty, TN must have the best education system in the universe.
Little collective bargaining in higher education or those private schools where all those fancy folks send their children. I am not sure it is essential for quality.
Does collective bargaining only deal with labor issues, or does it address learning environments?
No doubt collective bargaining agreements reflect the desires of the membership. Given the comments about the learning environments at the variety of private schools, it seems that collective bargains is not a necessary condition for a good learning environment.
I don’t underdstand how that is the case? I thought bargaining can result in certain conditions, and not just certain levels of pay.
I’m not understanding you.
Bargaining can cover whatever the parties involved want it to cover.
But that was my point . . .
I don’t think we are disagreeing.
By the way, did you verify that Dr. Ravitch deleted my posts for length and frequency?
Diane, would you care to verify?
Shades of North Carolina! I wonder how many other states are doing this or have plans to move in this direction. The “National Day without a Teacher” is sounding better and better.
Huffman and Haslam are guided by a different set of standards than those they impose on teachers.
When Huffman was sworn into office, he was the best-paid agency head making $200,000 per year, up $20,000, or 11 percent, from his predecessor. Gov. Haslam then stated, “In government we’re never going to pay what they do in the private market. But if we’re going to attract great people, we’re going to have to at least make it comparable.”
Are salaries and benefits for public school teachers in Tennessee comparable with salaries and benefits in the private school market?
Does no one know?
I can’t speak for TN, but in my state (CT) private school teachers makes 20% to 40% less than their public school counterparts.
After teaching in East TN for 20 years as a special educator, I decided to get my Ph.D. because I wanted to learn more about teaching reading. I am in the final stages of my dissertation and am sick at the thought that I will not be able to pay off my student loan of $15,000. (I worked full-time and paid for the rest of it by teaching art classes, selling stained glass and working extra jobs during the summer and on nights I didn’t go to classes. I am 60 and guess I will be working until I drop dead at this rate.
I think the difference in private school staff advanced degrees is that they are not degrees in education –they are advanced degrees in the subjects being taught. So the focus is on content, not process (which is common in elite academic circles). I was told point blank by the director of my major’s department at my small private liberal arts college, when I told him I was going to get a Masters in a school with a path for Education (albeit I ended up with an MM, not an MEd) he said that that was fine for teaching public school but never for an institution like the one I graduated from (which I can somewhat respect, albeit only a handful of my college professors actually struck me as gifted teachers). That said, I think these young TFA saviors come up with answers because they think they are expected to come up with changes and be “radical ” just for the heck of being radical. Talk about pressure for a kid. What an embarrassment. Thank goodness I had family members along my upbringing I respected who had never had the privilege of going to college and would roll their eyes at some rookie thinking he had the answers.
I took a bold move today and withdrew from the program I was enrolled in to get my add-on licensure in administration (for NC). Until I see these professors and institutions that prepare teachers for the education field fighting the good fight, they will not get one penny of mine. Furthermore why would I want a certification add-on that might be obsolete in the next few years.
I had to do something to make a statement even if it is only my household to whom it matters. I will continue to teach and be thankful for the opportunity to do so, but leadership preparation in the current climate is hard to prepare for.
I still believe that Gates MEANS well, that he really wants to follow in the footsteps of Andrew Carnegie in his old age, Carnegie who funded schools for black kids throughout the South and built libraries in small towns all across America (like the one that I went to a couple times a week when I was I kid). He’s clearly a brilliant and a compassionate guy. But he’s doing a lot of damage in K12 education. A little knowledge can be a very, very dangerous thing.
Why does it matter whether or not he MEANS well? How he spends his money defines his intentions. Why should anyone care what Bill wants to leave behind as his legacy? In fact any man who is more interested in leaving behind a legacy than he is in doing good work is sure to be getting it all wrong. And where do you get the idea that he is a ‘brilliant and compassionate guy’? All I see is an egotistical ignoramus.
It doesn’t
How ironic that those who push the CCSS recite the line about preparing students for college and career. They turn around and tell teachers that their college degrees don’t matter and their career choice is not a profession. After all, any TFA newbie with 5 weeks of training is acceptable.
If Mr. Gates is worried about spending money on things that don’t work, he should take a look at what his own foundation does. Then take this hint from an old teacher with a couple of those “useless” degrees: read real peer-reviewed scholarly research. Fund what everyone knows is useful. Pay for breakfast programs, after school programs, music, the arts, dental care, medical care, school nurses, school libraries, guidance counselors, repairs to unsafe older school buildings, sports teams, playground equipment, and field trips to museums and historic sites.
It is degrees in things like education or humanities that are worthless. College = business degrees and law.
So Alan, I guess it is not important for the vast majority of students to be “college and career ready” after all. According to your stated point of view, only those who want to be business leaders, bankers, hedge fund managers and lawyers should be pursuing a career through higher education. Why is it that we need all of those expensive tests again? (or were you merely being facetious?)
WAKE UP Tennessee. This initiative is being driven by Bill Gates. The Memphis Initiative funded by Gates was to give bonuses to teachers for performance not training and experience. What Huffman is doing sounds like Gates dream. Time to kick BILL GATES out of Tennessee on his butt. Between the government and Bill Gates who really runs education is TN. …….I say it is the feds and Gates. But the state has the power to kick them both out. You might just find education gets much cheaper and returns to being the good system we had in place before 1979 when the communists got their wish for a federal dept. of education.
I have a great idea…let’s put into practice in the plush corporate board rooms, Bill’s construct of how to lower costs! Starting with the bloated, outrageous money that flow like the river into these cads pockets. Bill is happy as a pig in sh– to cut teachers’ benefits with abandon. Let’s have the public demand that he and his cronies adhere to the same financial principle.
Anyone who harbors the thought that Gates and his cabal of jackals have their “hearts in the right place, too bad their naive” flies in the face of their destructive actions!