DC Teachers Contract: Probably Good for DC, Probably Meaningless Elsewhere
Having been an historian I’m inclined to take the long view. While I think the new DC teachers contract is a positive development, it’s being way oversold in the press (how soon they forget Cincinnati).
I wrote the following for the National Journal blog:
The DC public school system has been a train wreck for many years, but the district hasn’t lacked for attempts to remedy the situation. I remember the efforts of the DC Financial Control Board and its appointment of General Julius W. Becton to run the schools in 1996. The city has maximum class sizes of 25, boasts a thriving charter school network, instituted a short-lived private school voucher program, and still has mayoral control. It shouldn’t surprise anyone to see an experiment with performance-based teacher pay and retention in DC.
As Bill Turque of the Washington Post reported, the teacher contract that expired in 2007 contained a host of measures designed to improve collaboration, mentoring and school turnarounds. So while the new contract has received an extraordinary amount of media exposure, little context has been provided about what preceded it.
The press showered most of its attention on the proposed voluntary performance pay program for teachers, but the contract offers almost no specifics, other than the promise that teachers in the program will rank “among the
I wrote the following for the National Journal blog:
The DC public school system has been a train wreck for many years, but the district hasn’t lacked for attempts to remedy the situation. I remember the efforts of the DC Financial Control Board and its appointment of General Julius W. Becton to run the schools in 1996. The city has maximum class sizes of 25, boasts a thriving charter school network, instituted a short-lived private school voucher program, and still has mayoral control. It shouldn’t surprise anyone to see an experiment with performance-based teacher pay and retention in DC.
As Bill Turque of the Washington Post reported, the teacher contract that expired in 2007 contained a host of measures designed to improve collaboration, mentoring and school turnarounds. So while the new contract has received an extraordinary amount of media exposure, little context has been provided about what preceded it.
The press showered most of its attention on the proposed voluntary performance pay program for teachers, but the contract offers almost no specifics, other than the promise that teachers in the program will rank “among the