Summary: I introduce two teachers and their situations as a means of giving human flesh to an issue of distributive justice. In this situation neither is in the wrong. There is, however, injustice. Towards the end of the piece I believe that you will agree that if Peter Cushing's notion of Fair Shares makes sense; the merit portion should apply to these teachers. This entry sets up a future weblog entry which will be a more detailed presentation of the Fair Shares approach as it would apply to teacher compensation.
Let me introduce Madeleine and Sally, two highly professional high school teachers.
Madeleine Cartle*
Mrs. Madeleine Cartle is a history teacher. She teaches 5 sections of history each week for 180 school days, 36 weeks a year. Usually she teaches 3 sections of American History and two sections of European History. While we'll focus on American History, here, her procedures for teaching European history are similar.
Mrs. Cartle puts in 60 hour weeks for these 36 weeks. She arrives at school at school at 7:30 for early advising, has homeroom from 8:15-8:30, teaches 3 sections of history before an 11:30-12:00 lunch break (which lasts til 12), has a prep period til 1, and then teaches two more classes from 1 to 3. She has homeroom again until 3:30, coaches either basketball or track until 5. Between grading homework and tests (which she does for at least two hours a night for all but Friday nights) she adds the final 12.5 hours to her workweek. In addition to the counted hours, she also phones parents and receives phone calls from parents and students.
In each class Mrs. Cartle follows a similar pattern. She conducts lectures and discussions of chapters in the American History textbook, following its organizational plan for lessons as she organizes and delivers classes over the course of the 36 weeks of the school year. During that year she assigns each student at least two homework assignments per week, which she grades, she gives about five pop quizzes, four midterm exams, a final and two short (3 pages) papers, all of which she also reads and grades.
Last year she had one hundred and thirty students on her roster. Those students received the following final grades in Spring semester: 10 F's,15 D's ,50 C's, 40 Bs and 20 A's. She has been sworn at 30 times, threatened with physical attack twice. She has three commending letters in her file this year from parents who are convinced of her major positive effect on the lives of their children, and two letters from another two students who believe that she did the same. She is considered strict and traditional by her students who in the same breath say she is compassionate and caring.
After eight years of experience Mrs. Cartle is paid $32000 per year, partially as compensation for her continuing educational efforts. She receives a benefit package as well... which would amount to another 25% on top of gross pay. [She has been paid 228000 (285000 including benefits) over the 8 years of her employment...for 18720 hours including summer classes or 17280 hours not including them. Her pay per hour has averaged 12.18 (15.23 with benefits) per hour with summer school hours included or 13.19(16.49 with benefits) not including them.]
When Mrs. Cartle isn't teaching school she is often going to school. She generally takes two courses a summer and saves the rest of the summer(another 8 weeks) for chores, the family vacation and usually the painting of one house ... which she and her husband, who is also a teacher do to make ends meet. She and her husband, Rick, try to split household chores and childraising equally.
Sally McLaine
This is Sally McLaine. She teaches across town in another High School. She has exactly the same years of experience and comparable postgraduate training. Both earn 32000 dollars per year. Sally, too, has invested time in her classroom, actually more time. Some of it is the same--reading papers takes the same amount of time. But also Sally has invested and continues to invest more time structuring the use of resources and of time in her classroom. She has worked to develop the structure and processes of her classroom, without help, to the point where students may have varied starting points in the curriculum, different forms of testing and different learning styles (eg. Bill acquires information on the civil war via tapes and Andrew acquires the same information via a textbook. )This is not a matter of differences between two teacher's prefered classroom structure; it turns out that it is a matter of less learning in Madeleine's class and more in Sally's.
Grading patterns are different. Mrs McLaine has given fewer D's and F's. Wait, before you say she's soft on incompetence or buying student's affection, read further. On a national, standardized test of history her students demonstrate significantly higher mastery of American History-related concepts. Could we explain this difference based on differences in make up of groups that each teach? No, the differences in the mix blue collar & white, rich and poor, Wasp African American,Hispanic and Asian, etc., are statistically insignificant. Finally, could we say the differences might be due to the difference in the characters of the teachers themselves, the support of their families during childhood, while they were going to college or during their present lives ? Again, the answer is no. Neither superficial nor deep evaluation efforts have surfaced any psychological differences which could explain the differences in outcome.
Sally's Classroom with Learning Centers
The difference is in the their professional behavior and the "engineering" of their classrooms. It is also in their "vision" and in how they have employed their outside-of-class time over the years of their presence in the profession. And yes, Sally had a slight difference in her training.She was exposed to a unit on the accommodation of individual differences in one class. At that time she used the unit concepts to outline the structure and processes of her ideal history classroom.
[Now that we see that different practices are responsible for a distinct difference in the degree of achievement of the teacher's students]
There are some moral/ ethical issues involved here. For example, you should be having concerns about distributive justice (see right hand column of table for initial discussion of teacher pay).
Pay: should a teacher be recognized, promoted etc. based on experience, courses taken, college of graduation or on student learning which results from classroom instruction? I say the latter (based on the merit section of the Fair Shares definition of distributive justice.If you agree that the distribution of 'goods' amongst teachers should be most influenced by the latter (student learning resulting from teaching) then Sally should be receiving more pay... yet doesn't. And, we can speculate that this kind of [is it deliberate?] obtuseness is not unique to pay differences between Sally and Madeleine.
Support and training: If it's true that practices influence student achievement , as this essay argues, then why haven't both women received preservice and inservice training supporting such practices during the numerous preservice and inservice training classes each has taken. How is it that the education of neither materially influenced the practices that actually had the pay-off.
Re Disabilities: Sally's class is more amenable to inclusion than is Madeleine's... because it allows considerable variation in objectives, pacing, testing, styling, etc., and of lesson delivery itself, for each student. As a result, for example, Sally is better prepared for the included student with learning disabilities , better structured and organized to alter instruction ( for example, to alter the reading level and text for any given concept), better prepared to individually tailor instruction for this, or any, student. This preparedness probably influences Sally's willingness to include students with disabilities (i.e., she's more likely to be willing) but may at the same time cause her to have more of these more-difficult-to-teach students assigned to her, thus pushing even her organization and temperament to a point of high stress. How is this just treatment and support for professional staff? [Remember, the pay is exactly the same.]
*Pictures are of professional photographic models. Names are fictitious.
