MDCPS Balancing the Budget off the Backs of their Teachers

As subtropical storm Alberto washes away Miamians Memorial Day weekend plans, it seems fitting to pause and reflect on how superintendent Alberto has washed away Miami teacher pay during his ten year tenure. The first step to permanent teacher salary suppression took place during the Great Recession when step advancements were withheld for three years and teachers were never advanced accordingly on the step schedule when the economy recovered, thus delaying the ever evasive lifetime journey to the top of the pay scale.

After negotiating away the steps entirely in September of 2015 with the assistance of current FEA Vice President/FEA Presidential candidate and former UTD President Fed Ingram, the current maximum teacher pay of $72,750 has become an unattainable Promised Land for all but a few thousand teachers who through dumb luck reached the top of the pay scale before steps were abolished. The withholding of steps for three years followed by the removal of the step schedule altogether, has permanently suppressed the salaries of mid to late career teachers in Miami Dade and the result has been a massive savings for the district.

Thanks to my teacher hoarder colleagues, I happened to have a salary schedule from 2000 forwarded to me and to my surprise, there are many mid-career teachers (16-22 years experience) working in MDCPS who would have made more money 18 years ago than they do today!

All Miami teacher salaries have lost considerable value since 2000 but the losses for mid-career teachers are staggering.

Although superintendent Carvalho was not in charge when mid-career pay started to be collectively bargained away by UTD in favor of raising top pay and beginning salaries in 2005, his denial of steps for three years during the Great Recession and the subsequent removal of grandfathered teachers from the step schedule has caused financial devastation for mid to late career teachers working for the MDCPS. Granted Mr. Carvalho works extremely hard leading the 4th largest school district in the nation but is it fair that his salary has more than kept up with inflation over the past decade while not a single teacher’s salary in the MDCPS has come close with keeping up with inflation?

Perhaps UTD could bring these charts to the next round of bargaining sessions?

In a rare moment of transparency for both the district and UTD at the last bargaining session, there was mention of a mysterious $50 million that was transferred into the general fund that could be used for salaries in December of 2017 just weeks after teachers voted yes to a 2-2.67% raise.

There was no mention of where this $50 million dollars that could be used for salaries suddenly appeared from, why it wasn’t used for 2017-18 teacher salaries, and where it went after December 2017. It’s kind of like if you and your spouse went to buy a house, he insists that there is no way you can afford the house you really want, so you settle for a smaller house, sign the contract, and the next week your husband transfers $50 million into your checking account. You might be like, “WTF? Why didn’t you tell me we had an extra $50 million lying around before we signed the contract for the smaller house?”

Some are wondering exactly where this extra $50 million came from, and my wild theory (which may be totally off base), is that it is a reflection of how much money the district is saving on teacher salaries since they delayed step advancements for three years and then transitioned to a percentage based salary advancement. The former step schedule was based on an average step increase of around 3%. But the steps were so unequal in Miami Dade that some teachers at the bottom of the pay scale received 0-0.75% for the first 13 years with the promise of receiving 5-18% step increases in their mid to late career. Only now that the steps were thrown out, they are looking at a future of 2-3% increases in a booming economy thus ensuring they will never reach the advertised $72,750 maximum pay.

After running the math on this rainy Memorial Day weekend regarding the salary savings to the district on mid to late career teacher pay using first hand statements of 2017 salary, the 2013 step schedule, and a public records release of how many teachers were at each step as of 2014 before steps disappeared from the system, I compiled the following chart.

Miami Dade Teacher Salary Savings After Removal of Steps 

These numbers are neither perfect nor exact, but the savings are significant and the number coincides with the mysterious $50 million that appeared only after teachers agreed to a 2-2.67% raise. It makes one wonder, what if UTD hadn’t presented a 2-2.67% offer (worth approximately $30 million) to the bargaining unit? What if they had demanded more? What if teachers had voted down the contract and forced the district and union back to the bargaining table? Would the mysterious $50 million suddenly have appeared and been used to increase salaries for the 2017-18 school year?

Further proof that the mysterious $50 million is coming from the savings since steps were eliminated can be seen in this chart which shows that the amount spent on salaries has decreased $200 million despite a $100 million increase in the General Fund. Note there is a $50 million decrease from 2016-17 to 2017-18. These numbers were compiled using numbers made available on the districts financial affairs website under Executive Summaries.

Mr. Carvalho should be praised for his economic stewardship of district funds during his tenure, however, his fiscally conservative nature might be bankrupting his workforce at the expense of growing an ever larger surplus in the General Fund (monies that could have been used for salaries). As of June 30th 2017, the General Fund surplus was stated as $222,269,017 according to the FLDOE. When Mr. Carvalho became superintendent in 2008, the General Fund balance was only $32,629,633.

As we enter the 2018-19 bargaining season, let the mysterious $50 million be a lesson for both the union and MDCPS employees, when the district says they have no new money for salary increases, there’s probably $50 million worth of old money in a secret vault somewhere on N.E. Second Avenue just waiting for you to demand that it be used.

A Modest Step Proposal for MDCPS

As collective bargaining begins for the 2018-19 school year and the teacher compensation task force is set to hold its first meeting, Kafkateach decided to spend five minutes creating a revised step schedule that could conform to the mandates of SB 736 and allow the grandfathered veteran teachers to have some semblance of a financial future working for the MDCPS.  Because union leadership has apparently caught Royal wedding fever and is too busy on Facebook posting irrelevant nonsense like this

Kafkateach has taken it upon herself to find a financially feasible solution to the quagmire of how to solve the abysmally low mid to late career teacher compensation in Miami Dade County Public Schools. Upon careful consideration, I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to fairly compensate mid to late career teachers for the financial injustices forced upon them through a career’s worth of being undermined through UTD’s collective bargaining, would be to bring back steps. It couldn’t and shouldn’t be in the form of the whacked out South Florida version of steps where teachers spent the first half of their career earning $0-$300 salary increases only to be rewarded with an $8,000 step at the end of their career.

That schedule was a collective bargaining abomination and would be financially impossible to implement according to SB 736 which mandates that the highly effective salary adjustment be higher than the largest step increase and the effective salary adjustment be 50-75% of the highly effective adjustment.

Salary adjustments.—Salary adjustments for highly
  627  effective or effective performance shall be established as
  628  follows:
  629         (I) The annual salary adjustment under the performance
  630  salary schedule for an employee rated as highly effective must
  631  be greater than the highest annual salary adjustment available
  632  to an employee of the same classification through any other
  633  salary schedule adopted by the district.
  634         (II) The annual salary adjustment under the performance
  635  salary schedule for an employee rated as effective must be equal
  636  to at least 50 percent and no more than 75 percent of the annual
  637  adjustment provided for a highly effective employee of the same
  638  classification.

Contrary to what South Florida union leadership repeatedly told their members, SB736 DID NOT MAKE STEPS ILLEGAL! Quite the opposite, the law states that grandfathered teachers were to remain on the grandfathered step schedule and they could only choose to opt into performance pay by relinquishing their continuing contract status.

Instructional
  576  personnel on annual contract as of July 1, 2014, shall be placed
  577  on the performance salary schedule adopted under subparagraph 5.
  578  Instructional personnel on continuing contract or professional
  579  service contract may opt into the performance salary schedule if
  580  the employee relinquishes such contract and agrees to be
  581  employed on an annual contract under s. 1012.335. Such an
  582  employee shall be placed on the performance salary schedule and
  583  may not return to continuing contract or professional service
  584  contract status. Any employee who opts into the performance
  585  salary schedule may not return to the grandfathered salary
  586  schedule.

Many Florida districts continue to use a step schedules and developed step schedules that could comply with the performance pay law without bankrupting districts. Somehow South Florida districts have implemented their own versions of SB 736 by doing away with steps altogether and using a maximum flexibility percentage based salary adjustment “schedule” that can be used by districts to bankrupt their teaching workforce instead.

For teachers that spent their entire teaching career earning 0-0.75% salary adjustments in anticipation of earning 5-15% salary increases in the second half of their careers, 2% salary increases for the foreseeable future is not going to cut it. A $750 retention supplement is not going to cut it either. Mid to late career teachers in Miami need to see major gains to compensate them for the financial losses they have already incurred. The only way to do that, is to bring back a step schedule that can comply with mandates of SB 736 while honoring the work of their veteran teachers by placing them on a new step that would better mirror what they should be making at this point in their career had they started in a normal district with equal step increments or started under the current performance based pay.

For the purposes of being too lazy to bust out a calculator and bad at math with a readership that is also pretty bad at math, Kafkateach used a uniform step adjustment of $1,000 to show that steps are not incongruent with performance pay.  Some late careers might moan, “I should have been at the top of the pay scale four years ago!” but the steps could be adjusted to be a little higher overall or a little higher at the end of the pay scale to reduce the number of years it takes to get to top pay. Teachers’ years of experience would be honored and mid career teachers would be placed half way up the pay scale instead of stuck at the bottom after 15-18 years. Keep in mind that a current 15 year veteran makes $46,000, a current 22 year veteran makes $55,000 and a 25 year veteran makes $61,000. This pay scale would be a vast improvement over what they currently make and would provide them with a pathway to the top of the pay scale.

Example of a SB 736 Compliant Step Schedule

Of course critics will say that the law mandates that districts use their 2014 grandfathered schedules. But the law also states that teachers were supposed to remain on the grandfathered step schedule and only voluntarily opt into performance pay.  South Florida districts haven’t been following the law for the past three years and the state doesn’t seem to be cracking down on them. So why not bring back a kinder gentler version of steps and honor the years of service of your veteran teachers by placing them where they should have been all along?

 

 

Seven Years Later, a Performance Evaluation of Florida’s Performance Pay Law.

 

 

Hard to believe it’s been seven years since Florida passed SB 736, a law which was meant to boost student achievement by financially rewarding highly effective educators while ridding the system of ineffective teachers. That’s if you were actually naive enough to believe the publicly stated aims of Florida legislators, in which case I have a Miami bridge to sell you.

Florida politicians love to create evaluation systems for teachers, so I think it’s only fair to evaluate the performance of Florida’s performance pay law.

Strand 1  End Tenure

Stated Goal: Boost student achievement by ending job security for teachers.

Performance rating: Unsatisfactory

According to a recently released study by the Brookings Institute on the effect of ending tenure in Florida on student achievement, the authors concluded, “We find limited and circumstantial evidence that Florida’s tenure reform slightly increased student test achievement in math and reading.”

You can read the full Brookings report on teacher tenure here

Actual Goal: Strip teachers of job security rendering them too scared to criticize the privatization of public eduction or protest low salaries. Create an equal playing field between charters and public schools so no Florida educator would ever have job security again.

Performance rating: Highly Effective

As educators from West Virginia, to Oklahoma, to Arizona hold mass rallies and walk outs to protest low funding and low pay, Florida teachers have yet to hold any mass rallies against chronically low salaries and education funding from the state.

 

Strand 2:  Teacher quality and recruitment

Stated goal: Raise student achievement by improving the quality of instructional services in the public schools by recruitment and retention.

Performance rating: Unsatisfactory

According to a Huffington Post article published last fall, “Almost three months into the school year, thousands of public school students in South Florida still don’t have a permanent teacher —a problem expected to get worse as more educators flee the classroom and the number of those seeking teaching degrees plummets.”

Actual goal: Make sure Florida schools are staffed by a cheap and temporary workforce that has no interest or ability in pursuing a lifelong career in education.

Performance rating: Highly Effective

The use of temporary J-1 visa holders as teachers has doubled over the past seven years: “Because the foreign teacher is working on a visa considered a “cultural exchange,” the district does not have to offer them the perks and benefits a regular teacher would get. States increasingly using the program to hire teachers include Arizona, California, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, and Nevada.

There were 2,867 J-1 visa holders placed in U.S. schools in 2017, up from about 1,197 in 2010, according to the U.S. State Department. The J-1 visa is temporary, lasting about two to three years.

Critics say the foreign teachers don’t hold the same credentials as local educators and are a legal loophole for districts to pay even lower teacher salaries. Plus, critics say, it’s not solving the overall issue – teacher shortages.” http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/05/14/school-districts-increasingly-hiring-foreign-teachers-to-fill-shortages.html

Strand 3: End seniority based layoffs

Stated Goal: Retain teachers based on educational program needs and the teachers’ performance evaluations

Performance Rating: Unsatisfactory

Florida teachers may be surprised to find out that next year who gets surplussed at an individual school will not be based on seniority but on their VAM score. This means that a well regarded teacher who received a perfect score on their observational performance measures by their administrator, may be involuntarily transferred because they received a low VAM score based on a very arbitrary measure of their effectiveness. See video below for further explanation.

 

Actual Goal: Encourage even further attrition of senior teachers who may have higher salaries and some degree of job security.

Performance Rating: Highly Effective

If a teacher who is very happy with their school position gets involuntarily transferred to a worse school or a school a great distance from their home, they are more likely to quit the profession altogether or retire early.

Strand 4: Performance Pay

Stated Goal:  Change how Florida teachers are paid, shifting from a traditional “step-and-lane” pay scale that rewards experience and advanced degrees to a performance-based scale with bonuses based on the new evaluation system. Hard-to-staff subjects like math and science pay more. Teachers hired before July 1, 2011 could remain under the old contract system, or they could switch to a performance-based pay system with renewable annual contracts.

Performance Rating: Unsatisfactory

Florida continues to underfund education and this year most districts have already stated that there will be no new money for raises due to a 47 cent increase in general operational funds. According to SB 736, Florida highly effective teachers were supposed to receive salary adjustments higher than the largest step increase. This would have meant $6,000 salary adjustments for many highly effective annual contract teachers. Instead, South Florida districts bargained away the grandfathered step schedules, ignoring state law, and the largest salary adjustment to date for highly effective annual contract teachers has been approximately $1,500 and it has decreased every year since. With districts crying poor and the state refusing to fund merit pay, Florida has implemented a performance pay system without the pay. Instead of paying all highly effective teachers a permanent large salary increase, the state has instead decided to reward only 5% of teachers with a $6,000 Best and Brightest bonus based on teachers’ SAT scores.

 

Actual Goal:  Reduce Florida teacher salaries to lower future pension payouts and make sure Florida charter schools could attract teachers without reducing their profit margins.

Performance Rating: Highly Effective

The only forms of performance pay funded by the state since the law was implemented back in 2011 have been in the form of one time bonuses which will not count for pension calculations or permanently increase a teacher’s salary leading to much lower pension obligations as the Florida teacher will be relegated to a career salary maxing out in the low fifties instead of the low seventies. With the elimination of a step schedule, there is no projected or guaranteed growth in a Florida teacher’s salary.

Florida politicians must be extremely proud of their complete decimation of the teaching profession under the guise of raising student achievement and teacher recruitment through performance pay. In 2017 Florida was rated as having the lowest salaries in the nation when adjusted for cost of living. Mission accomplished.

 

 

Why Teachers Hate Class Wallet

I should preface this blog post by saying not ALL teachers hate Class Wallet. Miami Dade County’s implementation of the Class Wallet platform, however, will pretty much ensure that all Miami Dade County teachers hate Class Wallet by next fall. In case teachers missed the weekly briefing in your district email, (I’m guessing that would be about 90% of teachers), they may not be aware that ALL teacher supply purchases using state funds from the classroom supply assistance program next year must be made ONLY through the vendors listed on the Class Wallet platform. Consider forwarding this post to your clueless coworkers who may go out over the summer and spend $280 on classroom supplies thinking they will be reimbursed in September. They won’t!

So why is it a problem to force Miami Dade teachers to only use Class Wallet vendors? The main issues are threefold:

1. Class Wallet vendors products are much more expensive than teachers could purchase at other places and allows private businesses to profit off of the little money we are given for supplies at the taxpayers’ and teachers’ expense.
2. Class Wallet offers extremely limited items for purchase. If you want anything besides basic office supplies which most teachers already have available to them, you’ll be hard pressed to find $280 worth of products you want. Meanwhile, you will have to use your own money to purchase what you actually need for your classroom.
3. Teachers will not be able to purchase any supplies until after the start of the school year! HUGE problem! Traditionally, teachers have not been reimbursed for their purchases until September 20th because the county wants new hires to have access to the supply funds. This would not be a problem IF we could still upload receipts and do our back to school shopping in August in order to get our classrooms ready. But without the ability to do any supply shopping until September, everything you need for the first month of school is going to come out of your own wallet.

Let me provide an illustrative example of the Class Wallet conundrum as implemented in Miami Dade County. Keep in mind that Miami Dade County is the only county in Florida forcing their teachers to only use Class Wallet vendors. Even other counties that use the Class Wallet platform continue to allow their teachers to upload receipts for reimbursements.

I do not use a lot of paper products or office supplies in my classroom. I have spent great time and effort to put my materials and assessments online.  This saves my school and district a lot of money on copies and scantrons. The only paper product I purchase using my teacher classroom assistance funds, are large poster size sticky notes for student presentations. If you’ve never purchased these large sticky note pads and have only seen them used in school site or district PDs you would think the stuff was so cheap it grew on trees. If you have purchased those large sticky note pads for your classroom, however, you realize those things are so expensive they must be made from gold trees! Because of the cost, I limit my lessons involving the large sticky notes to once a year. At the very beginning of the year! This year, because I won’t be able to purchase the sticky note pads until September, I just won’t do the lesson. Note to self: do your back to school shopping one year in advance so you will have the supplies you need the following August!

The thrifty teacher shopper in me will comparison shop in order to stretch my teacher supply money for maximum purchasing power. Most office supplies are available much cheaper on Amazon than Office Depot. I can purchase a four pack of the 25 x 30 post it pads on Amazon for under $80.

 

On the regular Office Depot site, a four pack of the 25 x 30 Post-it pads will cost me almost $120! I may as well take $40 out of my own pocket and flush it down the toilet right now! Make a video of it and say “Your Florida tax dollars at work.”

Keep in mind that the Class Wallet Office Depot site usually will add another 20-30% mark up from the regular Office Depot site. That is, if Office Depot is even a listed vendor anymore. This morning, when I went to do a little comparison shopping on Class Wallet, Office Depot was no longer even listed as a vendor even though it was there earlier in the week. This may have to do with my comments on social media about taking screen shots of the marked up prices on Class Wallet and tweeting them to School Board members.

I’m not a huge fan of Twitter, and I think most people’s pets have more followers on Twitter than myself, but I will use it every now and then. This week I used it in the Superintendent’s Twitter Town Hall and to my surprise I hadn’t been blocked (yet) and he even responded to my Tweet!  Thanks for your response Supe!

It’s worth noting that the only person to like this Tweet was the marketing director of Class Wallet. This photo posted by a disgruntled teacher who’s $110 worth of Class Wallet copy paper delivered in shambles doesn’t really look like “facilitation of delivery” to me.

 

This response makes it seem like the district really does not trust its teachers to actually spend their $280 on classroom supplies. They think we’re out their buying all sorts of bling with our $280 teacher supply assistance funds! I guess this response might make sense (can’t trust those corrupt and greedy Dade County teachers to purchase supplies for their classrooms) except that Best Buy is listed as a Class Wallet vendor. What exactly are we supposed to purchase at Best Buy that would not be classified as technology or “equipment”?

Speaking of which, it should be noted that there is nothing in the state statute that specifies that we can only buy consumables and are not allowed to purchase food. It only states we can’t buy equipment. You can read the state statute here

The classroom supply assistance funds are not subject to collective bargaining, so other than bringing teacher complaints to the district’s attention, I’m not sure there is much more UTD can do about this. Special shout out to UTD’s Mindy Grimes-Festge who took the time to tweet to the Supe about the district’s Class Wallet policy.

I realize that $280 worth of classroom supply assistance funds is a rather small issue in the grand scheme of things, but it’s just disgusting to think that private businesses and the district are profiting off of funds coming straight out of teachers’ wallets. Any unused funds will be returned to the district, which really adds up when you have 20,000 teachers! In a year when we are hearing that no funds are available for teacher raises, to further debilitate our income by unnecessarily restricting when and where we spend our classroom assistance funds is demoralizing. Until we can upload receipts on Class Wallet or Amazon is listed as a vendor, I will see this as a $280 pay cut.

So what can teachers do? I’ll tell you what you shouldn’t do. DO NOT GO OUT AND SPEND YOUR OWN MONEY GETTING YOUR ROOMS READY FOR THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL! Let administration get angry enough over your sad looking walls to complain to the district. Let parents see your cold empty classrooms and long supply list on Back to School night and explain why your rooms look that way. Don’t be like these big hearted well meaning teachers who undermine their own cause and financial well being by spending thousands of dollars of their own money every year on their classrooms. Demand the system fully fund you and your classroom!

 

If they really don’t trust teachers to spend at least $280 on their own classrooms every year, just get rid of the program and put the money towards teacher salaries instead. I’d rather have the freedom to spend my own money where I want, on whatever I want, and whenever I want than to have the funds micromanaged to the point of uselessness.

 

If you are so irate about the district’s restriction of teacher supply funds, consider signing up to speak at the May 16th School Board meeting. You have until Monday afternoon to fax in the form. Hopefully, you will be in good company! Since this blog post is mostly geared towards Dade County teachers, I’m going to make one final plug to attend the rally for salaries at next week’s School Board meeting.

So far Florida teacher protests have been MIA, let the 305 lead the way!

 

 

What NOT to Give a Teacher this Teacher Appreciation Day!

At the risk of sounding ungrateful, I’d like to showcase some of the most bizarre gifts bestowed upon teachers in the name of “Teacher Appreciation” and offer a critique as to why these were perhaps not the most appropriate way to thank a teacher.

#1 Ramen Noodles

I realize school budgets have been slashed over the past decade in many states, but Ramen noodles should never be given by administration to teachers as a token of their appreciation.  Food items that scream “impoverished college student” and “you don’t have time to have a real lunch” only serve as a reminder that teachers have chosen a profession that ensures them a lifetime of cheap, hurried, and not particularly nutritious or delicious lunches.

#2 Kisses with Barnyard Animals

Let me preface this by saying, I love pigs. I think they’re cute and they taste good too, however, some teachers might find the thought of sucking face with swine on Teacher Appreciation Day a little offensive and unhygienic.

#3 Undergarments 

Apparently, underwear (and in the thong form) is a much more common gift to teachers than one would have thought. There is even an entire line of teacher themed thong underwear available on Amazon. They really do sell EVERYTHING on Amazon! Whether it be from an administrator, a parent, or a student, giving a teacher a thong is just plain wrong! You don’t want your teacher to end up as a meme like this on Instagram.

OR

There is actually an entire “saw my teacher’s thong” genre of memes if you do a google image search. These are the most PG rated ones I could find. Teachers, do yourselves a favor, and save the thongs for the weekends!

So what is a good way to thank a teacher this Teacher Appreciation Day? If your school has the means, many PTAs have started offering Spa Days for school staff.

Unless they married well, trips to the spa are few and far between for most teachers. Treating your teachers to a mani-pedi or midday massage is a great way to show your teacher appreciation. If your school doesn’t have the budget for such pampering, having the students write a thank you note to their favorite teacher and putting those notes in their mailbox on Teacher Appreciation Day will surely bring a smile to even the grumpiest of educators.  If you live in state that suffers from chronic underfunding of public education and low teacher salaries, wear Red for Ed during Teacher Appreciation Week May 7-11, take a selfie holding sign stating why you appreciate your child’s teacher and post to your preferred social media platform. Or, as one Miami teacher and public school parent pleaded in a recent Sun-Sentinel article,

“I ask that if you value teachers that you write letters, make phone calls, and/or write emails demanding that our public schools be funded adequately, that our teachers and school employees be compensated with a fair and adequate living wage and that our taxpayer dollars stop funding private for-profit charter schools. This would be the greatest gift you could give me or any public school teacher.”

And don’t forget the best teacher appreciation gift of all,  remember to vote for an education friendly candidate next November!

 

If you have a received a particularly interesting, funny, or fantastic token of Teacher Appreciation, feel free to tell us about it in the commenting section below.