Good morning Mr. Chairman and committee members. My name is Frances Steenbergen. I am president of the Kentucky Education Association and a high school family and consumer sciences teacher from Barren County. I am honored this morning to speak to you on behalf of KEA’s hard-working 38,000 members who live and work in every corner of the Commonwealth. As you know, KEA’s preference is to speak in favor of bills that we believe will move our students, our schools and our profession forward. Unfortunately, today we feel compelled to speak against proposals that we believe will do more harm than good. We take no satisfaction from speaking in opposition to other education advocates and friends like the Prichard Committee or KSBA.
KEA urges defeat of Senate bills 1 and 2. Our members who teach math and science at all levels from pre-school through high school know better than anyone that we need to work together to improve all students’ learning in these important areas. They know what it will take to do that – better equipment and supplies, more support for struggling students, smaller classes, better professional development for teachers, especially those of us who are not math or science specialists, and more encouragement from families for students to succeed in rigorous courses. Unfortunately, little in Senate Bill 1or Senate Bill 2 would provide these teachers with what they need to help students learn more.
These bills are demoralizing to teachers. They would reward a very few teachers based on their students’ scores on the Advanced Placement exams in calculus, physics and chemistry or based on their own Praxis exam scores. One AP teacher who might get the bonus in SB 1 told us that she would not feel right taking the money that was the result of her students’ previous teachers’ hard work, their support from their families, and their innate ability.
A chemistry teacher told us that the harm that his bonus would do to the team work in his school would not be worth the extra $6,000 he might receive. We do think that it’s interesting to note that Southwest Airlines and other companies that value teamwork do not use any kind of merit pay with their employees, instead encouraging all employees to work together to provide the best for their customers.
No matter how good we are, teachers know that our success – or failure – with any given student results from many factors, not our efforts alone. P-12 classroom teachers and school employees work as a team.
Frankly, the assumption that seems to underlie merit pay schemes like those in these bills is that we have not been trying as hard as we could. Somehow dangling a few hundred dollars in front of us will, by itself, magically prompt us to do a better job, find more students capable of doing AP work, and be able to cause students to achieve a specified score on a test.
SB 1, unfortunately, is even worse than many other merit pay plans because it would award some money to a very small number of select high school faculty who teach a select group of high-performing high school students, based on a test that is not correlated to the Kentucky core content, which is of course the curriculum that Kentucky teachers teach.
SB 2 is no better. If the real aim were to attract and retain more teachers of math, physics and chemistry, it would create a program that more teachers could benefit from. Most current teachers of these subjects would not qualify for this extra pay. Many fully-certified incoming teachers would not qualify because of the Praxis exam scores required or the requirement for math teachers to end-of-course exams. For example, very few new middle school teachers would have a schedule of Algebra I for the majority of the day so they would not qualify.
The vast majority of teachers of the STEM disciplines will never see a dime from these funds, much less teachers of other subjects. Teachers who teach the most challenging students and those in the most challenging schools would never see a dime. Those English teachers who strive to teach students to write by grading hundreds of compositions every week would never see a dime. And yes, those pre-school and kindergarten teachers who give students such a great beginning would never see a dime.
Among the teachers who would not benefit from these bills are:
and tens of thousands of teachers just like them who would not see a dime. These include many constituents from each of your districts. They are each and everyone just as needed and just as deserving as those few math and science teachers of who would be rewarded under SB 1 or SB 2.
Some legislators and editorial writers have told us that these bills should not be interpreted to demean kindergarten teachers or history teachers or special education teachers or biology teachers. What those teachers tell us is that they do feel demeaned, devalued and discounted. In too many schools teaching is devoid of external recognition or rewards. To give such visible recognition to the accomplishments of a select few teachers and students is not helpful.
We know from experience that the best schools are those where all teachers, classified staff, and administrators consider all students their responsibility. Our experience is supported by research commissioned by the Prichard Committee, which indicated that one big difference between high performing schools and low performing schools comes most dramatically from the school culture. Senate Bill 1 and Senate Bill 2 would diminish school teamwork, a critical part of successful school culture.
The sponsor of SB 1 said he hopes that it will double the number of students taking AP courses. We share his desire for more students to succeed in more challenging classes. There is, however, no research that shows that merit pay results in increased student learning, much less results in more students taking or being successful in AP classes. We don’t believe that the state should spend its scarce educational resources on unproven proposals, when there is no shortage of ways that have been proven to increase student learning in math and science.
KEA believes that the focus should be much broader, helping more students and more teachers, and more school employees. KEA would encourage you to create a summer two-week institute for math teachers in grades four through eight, especially for those who are not math specialists. Too many students begin to lose interest and focus in math between fourth and eighth grade. Equipping their teachers to better reach all students could dramatically improve many students’ performance in higher level math. And because many higher level science courses depend on fundamental math skills, we believe this intense, high-quality professional development would also result in better learning in all the STEM disciplines.
Or perhaps you should fund smaller class sizes, early intervention and remediation, or preschool and kindergarten programs where students will get a great start.
We would like to raise one more problem we have with SB 1 and SB 2. People who have spent little time in public school classrooms since they themselves were students seem to think that they know how to motivate us, what’s important to us, and what we need to do to increase student learning. We are insulted. We would never attempt to tell lawyers, the business community or college administrators how to do their job without first consulting with them. The research on differential compensation for teachers says that successful plans are created in collaboration with and with the agreement of teachers. Yet these bills were drawn up by others without input, collaboration, or planning by P-12 teachers. We were not consulted nor our opinions asked. So it should come as no surprise to anyone that we are wholeheartedly against this unproven, demoralizing waste of taxpayer’s money.
We urge defeat of SB 1 and SB 2. At the same time, we pledge the support of our organization and its members in working together to create collaborative ways to increase student learning. Thank you.