DC School Reform Now Explores How the Contract Helps Students

News outlets, political blogs, and opinion columns have generated much discussion about how the proposed WTU Contract would benefit teachers.  At this point, we have heard a lot about how it increases salaries by an unprecedented 21.6%, provides retroactive pay, defends the right to due process, and offers many new options to excessed employees.

DC School Reform Now believes that the Contract also benefits the greatest stakeholders in DC – our children.  This memo lays out how we believe the Contract will support student achievement.  If you agree, please help us spread the word.

The contract enhances professional development to ensure that teachers have the time, resources, and knowledge to plan effectively.  Teachers bear enormous responsibility for teaching our students: research has shown that the best teachers are capable of eliminating the black-white student achievement gap within as little as four years.[i]  At the same time, teachers cannot give their best performance without the skills, knowledge, resources, and especially the time to plan effectively.  The contract ensures that every teacher will inspire their students by:

• Providing every teacher with a set of explicit expectations for student achievement and an outline of the district and school-level support they will receive to meet those expectations
• Offering teachers at least ten days of school-wide professional development, and at least one day of leave for personal development and reflection, so that they can continually adapt their instruction to meet each student’s needs most effectively
• Establishing three district-wide Teacher Centers, housed at selected schools, where teachers can organize, share best practices, and receive support whenever necessary
• Offering an array of resources for new teachers: assigning them experienced mentors, giving them three days of intensive training at the start of the year, and offering ongoing support throughout their first three years

The contract encourages schools to value self-reflection, improvement, and adaptation to best serve the needs of individual students.  Education professionals cannot work in a vacuum: they must constantly re-evaluate their best practices and revise their routines according to what works best for their students.  And when teachers are not given the tools to identify personal areas of growth, students suffer in stagnant, un-engaging classrooms.  The WTU Contract ensures that all principals and teachers value professional growth and adaptability by:

• Offering a new performance pay system that highly values teacher evaluations and teachers’ unique skills and contributions to the school community above and beyond the classroom 
• Establishing a working group to review the IMPACT evaluation system, so that teachers have a say in how evaluators address their performance 
• Forming a working group of national experts to evaluate IMPACT and ensure that teacher evaluations remain fair, comprehensive, and helpful

The contract implements new programs and allocates additional funds to ensure that both individual schools and the District serve all students effectively.  Students arrive at school with different financial resources and diverse needs for specialized instruction, responsive counseling, and other kinds of academic and emotional support.  Teachers and the District must meet halfway to ensure that these levels of support are available to students at every school.  The WTU Contract codifies such support by:

• Piloting a Student-Teacher Advisory program that places small groups of students with teachers and ensures that every student gets the opportunity to discuss their interests, background, and academic progress with teacher-mentors in an intimate setting
• Forming Support Teams, made up of teachers and parents, that target chronically absent or tardy and/or academically at-risk students and provide them with additional support
• Piloting “Twilight Programs” to form a community for older high school students
• Developing more alternative high schools that innovate in order to reveal the talents of unengaged or underperforming students
• Doubling the start-up funds for each classroom so that teachers can provide the resources their students may not be able to afford

The contract ensures that DCPS teachers will be the highest-performing and most sought-after professionals in the country.  Our children deserve professional educators who are capable, persistent, and dedicated.  DCPS must attract and retain the best and brightest talent in order to ensure that students excel academically.  The WTU Contract ensures that DCPS can attract and retain the best teachers by:

• Offering performance pay raises to teachers with excellent records of improving student achievement, so that such venerable teachers are among the highest-paid in the country
• Stipulating that in the event of an excess, records of accomplishment matter more than seniority, so that the District retains and honors its highest-achieving professionals regardless of their age or tenure

By ensuring that DCPS can attract and retain the best teachers, placing teachers’ professional growth first and foremost, and emphasizing that teachers, schools, and the District at large must remain adaptive to the needs of various kinds of students, the WTU Contract represents a victory for students who too often remain unengaged and unmotivated by their education.  Spread the word: reach out to friends, colleagues, and neighbors and share how specific proposals in the contract will help all our children. 

 

 

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[i] Gordon, Robert., et. al. “Identifying Effective Teachers: Using Performance on the Job.”  The Hamilton Project. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 2006. http://www.brookings.edu/views/papers/200604hamilton_1.pdf