DUH!

So, you want some advice on pay?

Pay more and you will retain more teachers. That's what Arkansas found. The problem is whether or not they retained the teachers they wanted to retain AND eliminated the teachers they didn't. Arkansas raised all salaries. They did not raise salaries strategically. When will districts learn that to increase results pay must be increased strategically, and not to everyone regardless of performance or promotion of the educational philosophy.

Another DUH moment was seen in Washington state when high schools forfeited almost $2 million each because they would not violate the state collective bargaining agreement to provide pay enhancements to teachers. It's another case of ignoring strategic pay.

If you will be in New Orleans for the national conference, please stop by my presentation on strategic pay where I'll give some tips and methods of creating your own strategic pay system.

(Note: These examples were found in the May 14, 2008 volume of Education Week, page 5)

Do you want value from your teacher?

A common method for running a business is to look at those areas of the business that add value and increase your spending in those areas. You then look at areas that don’t add value and either reduce spending or outsource them.

A method of evaluating teachers using the valued added concept has come under fire recently. The method says that teachers should be evaluated on the results they show in children’s education. This makes a lot of sense, but as with most concepts, the trick is to get it right in implementation.

I’m sure all of us who answered the question posed in the title would have answered yes, but we might not judge the value of a teacher quite the same. Academic achievement is certainly one of the components, but what about attitude, integrity, character modeling? What about the ability to motivate students to try and to strive?

In addition, until teacher pay systems actually reward a contribution of value to a school, it will be hard to motivate and attract those really talented individuals.

As charters often have the ability to ignore set pay schedules and pay for value added, they are the perfect testing ground for a system where value added measures are used to fuel the strategic pay system. A school can set up its definition of what adds value as well as a system that appropriately rewards different levels of value added.

Online Learning - A Way for Charter's to be more competitive?

Clayton Christensen is a business professor at Harvard. However, he recently published a book focusing on education. One of his conclusions is that within the next 10 to 12 years 50% of high school courses will be taught on line.

Assuming he is even close to on target, isn't this an area where charters could be extremely effective?

Here is why. Charters are normally led by innovative and creative people. Christensen says that online courses are "disruptive." In other words, they are so different from what people normally do that it's tough for existing structures to embrace them and make wholesale change. Charters specialize in wholesale change.

Also, Charters' biggest financial challenge is buildings. Where do you find them and how do you pay for them? Online courses eliminate much of the building expense. There is no need to issue bonds or to run a capital campaign.

Charters seem poised to take advantage of this not so new technology and create great programs to help students achieve their goals. It just takes those with some vision and a willingness to disrupt people's thinking about what makes up a great high school.

We can do it. Let's lead the way.

Who Wants a Financially Healthy Charter School?

The main reason for charter school failure is not academic mismanagement or low test scores. It isn’t lack of parental involvement or increases in bullying. The main reason for failing charter schools is financial mismanagement.

Financial mismanagement comes in two flavors. The first is intentional mismanagement. Directors or principals defraud the school. They buy themselves nice cars and pay themselves high salaries, then close the school. While I have heard of these cases, fortunately they seem to be relatively rare.

The second and more likely type of financial mismanagement occurs when schools focus so much on their educational philosophy and providing educational programs and buildings that they fail to emphasize financial forecasting, internal controls and budget management.

Here are a couple of tips:

Hire a financial professional with good forecasting and budgeting experience. If you can’t afford to hire someone full time, allocate funds for a consultant.
Plan some cushion into the budget. Most financial results turn out worse that the plan, even when you think you are being realistic.
Look out over a few years to determine the long term result of short term decisions. Salary increases today create ongoing obligations for the future.
Use conservative assumptions for pupil count. You can always spend more, but it’s difficult to spend less.
Make sure money is handled by the right people and segregate duties.
Purchases an accounting system that allows you to track encumbrances against budget in real time. This allows you to report to principals appropriately as well as catch requests before you exceed your budget.
Make sure you track cash as well as accounting expenses. Sometimes cash goes out before an item is recorded as an expense. Make sure you have adequate reserves.

There is no way to absolutely ensure economic success for a charter school, but adhering to these basic principles can mean the difference between failure and long term success.

Colorado Doubles Charter School Capital Construction Funding

Great news for charter schools in the state of Colorado. The legislature approved a total of $10 million for capital construction to charter schools for the 2008-09 school year. That's double last year's total. This isn't going to make everything perfect for charter schools. For example, The Classical Academy's debt payments on facilities total approximately $2.5 million. The capital construction funding will provide approximately $580 thousand. That's still almost $2 million funded by the school's PPR (approximately 10% of the PPR funding). For this reason, charters are still at a disadvantage.

The best news about this is that the funding received bi-partisan support. While charters are still underfunded and often operate in inferior buildings, this is a great step for the state to recognize the important role that charters have played in the educational environment in Colorado. Many charter high schools rank in the top ten in the state. As funding improves, charters will be less second class citizens and more of an integral part of the Colorado eduational landscape.

Do Any Democrats Favor School Choice?

Education Week has a good review of the Democratic candidates’ positions on education in the February 27th issue (front page). It seems that for choice proponents, Obama has a bit of an edge. He has said that he’d consider vouchers, while Clinton has said that vouchers are not an option.

Both have endorsed mild forms of merit pay, although Clinton wants teachers and unions to have input. We all know what unions want. Better pay for some, maybe. As long as it doesn’t mean that bad teachers are let go or get a reduction in pay. Clinton also endorses increases for all school employees at schools that succeed. Of course, this doesn’t encourage an individual teacher to stand out, and it rewards those who are just along for the ride.

Clinton does support market factors in determining pay for hard to find teachers, which is a strength of her position. On the other hand, Obama sticks to the check box mentality for extra pay. He has suggested that extra skills or tasks might warrant new pay. Depending on what he means by this, it could be just another check box mentality. If he means that learning skills that are in great need would be rewarded, then that may make some sense. Still leaving much of this up to schools and individual districts or to charter schools competing with traditional district schools for teachers gives a better picture of what really motivates people to teach as well as ensures capable teachers and not just teachers with certain degrees or certificates.

Pay: What is Important?

I have had a brief absence from this blog, but I'm back with some interesting observations and recommendations based on a couple of articles from Quality Counts by Education Week back in January.

The articles dealt with pay for performance and the fact that working conditions are more important to teachers than pay. My observation of these two articles is what probably should have been obvious, especially to those of us in charter schools. Great teachers with great hearts want evironments where they are respected and where they are supported. This can mean a lot of things, but most of all it means that the ability to teach in a disciplined environment is more important than money.

However, it doesn't mean that money is irrelevant. In fact, pay for performance, or what I in a slightly different model that I call Strategic Pay is gaining ground. At its best, strategic pay aligns teach performance and other aspects of the teacher that align with the school's goals. A strategic pay system rewards performance that increases the value of a school's brand.

Strategic Pay, when done right, encourages teachers to both perform well in the classroom and model behavior the school seeks in employees.