Owensboro Times reported on Thursday, June 13, that the amount of teacher applications were down for the 2019-2020 school year in both Daviess County and Owensboro Public Schools districts. Both districts also reported not seeing as many recent college graduates entering into the teaching profession or exiting college and returning to Owensboro to pursue their teaching career.
Last week, in his monthly report to the Kentucky Board of Education, Commissioner of Education Wayne Lewis, Jr., Ph.D., addressed the financial challenges facing the public education system, specifically the need for incentives to attract highly-qualified teachers.
“The most important aspect of what we do in public education centers on what happens in classrooms,” Lewis said. “While support services for students are critically important, especially for many disadvantaged students, teaching and learning is the core business of schools. There is no more important element to providing high-quality learning experiences for students than ensuring all students have a high quality and effective teacher. I wish I could tell you that every Kentucky student has access to an effective teacher, but we all know that is simply not true.”
Lewis voiced concern for taking new teachers fresh out of college and placing them into difficult to handle classroom situations with little to no support.
“Undoubtedly, limited resources in key areas and in some regions of the state are hindering our ability to provide the type of experiences our children deserve,” Lewis said. “Although the state and federal government provide funding to school districts in most instances, decisions about the allocation of resources within a district, including across schools, are primarily made at the local district level. Simply increasing funding for public schools will not address these fundamental inequities in some school districts.”
Lewis and various members of the board called for assistance beyond increasing the $4.1 billion currently being spent on educational funding, asking for some type of structural reform.
“We are advocating for greater accountability,” Lewis said. “But we have to do a better job of creating a system where there is accountability, not just at the top — where there is accountability throughout the system.”
A suggested portion of that accountability and reform model could include performance-based pay for teachers.
OPS Superintendent Dr. Nick Brake, agreed that both teacher pay and incentive were important, but suggested other methods be considered beyond accountability for test scores.
“Definitely, we need to do everything we can in our state and at a national level to impact teacher pay in a positive way,” Brake said. “We are in a position where we have significant shortages in a lot of areas and pay is a part of that. I don’t necessarily think tying pay to test scores is the answer for that. In fact, part of the reason for the decline in teachers is because of the high stakes testing.”
Brake suggested tying incentives to a career ladder model through professional development, where teachers have an opportunity to take on leadership roles.
“In other parts of the world, they use a ladder model and develop master teachers,” Brake said. “I think we need to look at the structure of the profession a little bit — look at it systemically.”
DCPS Superintendent Matt Robbins agreed that teacher incentives were important, the call to teaching went far beyond finances.
“While financial incentives are a key incentive, there are many other incentives to be a great teacher that just as important,” Robbins said. “Beyond finances, I do not believe anyone wants to purely hire a professional (doctor, nurse, attorney, architect, engineer, etc.) based purely on compensation — and great teachers would not be exempt from that list. People are generally good at what they do because they love what they do and this happens to meet their own personal needs for their own household. In DCPS, we make intentional efforts to reward great teaching through various means such as recognition, teacher-leader opportunities and many other methods.”
When discussing what financial incentives and structural reform might look like for DCPS, Robbins questioned what methods might be used to measure teacher effectiveness.
“Several questions come to mind about how one might objectively measure and thus reward great teachers financially,” Robbins said. “I do not believe test scores are an objective means to do so because of the variability in student population and how this variable alone impacts student achievement — test scores.”
Robbins suggested student growth as a more fair way to measure academic performance, including reaching gap groups whose performance may lag behind their peers.
“Great teaching is much more profound than a single metric and a system of financial rewards — it must be objective and measurable, rather than subjective.”
