Denver Strike: Teachers Protest Low Pay and “Corporate Reform” Innovations that Didn’t Work
The Denver Classroom Teachers Association went on strike yesterday against the Denver Public Schools over low pay and what has become a failed experiment in merit pay bonuses. Schoolteachers want the district to scrap its ProComp incentive pay system, which was put in place in 2006 when teachers agreed to the plan—a fixture of then-Superintendent Michael Bennet’s corporate school reformer agenda. Bennet now a U.S. Senator, served as Denver’s school-reformer superintendent from 2005 until 2009. He was the mayor’s chief of staff and formerly an investment banker who lacked any experience in education.
Denver’s teachers’ strike is the latest in a yearlong wave of walkouts by teachers—a state-by-state cry for help from a profession of hard-working, dedicated public servants disgusted with despicable working conditions, lack of desperately needed services for their students, and insultingly low pay. This time, however, an added issue is a twelve-year experiment with corporate reformer innovation in the form of a bonus pay system supposedly to incentivize teachers to work harder and smarter. Today teachers claim the innovation didn’t work, because too much money went into bonuses at the expense of base pay.
For the NY Times, Julie Turkewitz and Dana Goldstein explain why Denver’s teachers are striking: “Pay-for-performance models like Denver’s offer teachers bonuses for raising student achievement and for taking on tougher assignments, such as in schools with many students from low-income families.” Denver teachers, write Turkewitz and Goldstein, “say this model-once hailed as a way to motivate teachers—has delivered erratic bonuses while their base salaries stagnate amid rising living costs… The foundational principle of Pro-Comp—evaluating teachers according to how well their students perform—was later enshrined in Colorado law and then in Race to the Top…. But such evaluation models typically required more testing of students in order to gather evidence of teacher impact…. Since 2016, federal and state laws have shifted districts away from using student performance to judge teachers. In many ways, ProComp is now seen as a relic of an earlier era of school reform.”
The Denver Post‘s Elizabeth Hernandez reports that the school district’s negotiators agreed to CONTINUE READING: Denver Strike: Teachers Protest Low Pay and “Corporate Reform” Innovations that Didn’t Work | janresseger
