Holy Crap, Batgirl -- You're Published!

We've been having quite the stink here as our school board wants to institute a merit pay system. We are currently in binding arbitration between the teachers' union and the town, and the entire state will be watching as no one else has merit pay in the state. Thus, the decision here will either slam the door shut on this for a while or it will fling it wide.
After going to the school board meeting last week, and hearing everyone else speak on the subject, I read our local state representative's (spoon-fed, rah-rah, this-is-great from the board) opinion supporting merit pay in the local weekly paper, the Greenwich Citizen. I got pissed and wrote the following:

Dear Mr. Harrison, (editor of the Citizen)

I would like to respond to Dolly Powers' article supporting merit pay in Greenwich.

I am a Greenwich homeowner, taxpayer, voter, parent of a first grader and a 3-year-old, and also a teacher. I am starting my thirteenth year working for Greenwich Public Schools (nine non-consecutive years at EMS, four at CMS). Having looked at the board's evaluation plan design and merit pay ideas, I think they are fundamentally flawed.
Let me tell you about my first year teaching. I was hired by Ben Davenport to teach sixth grade language arts and social studies at Eastern Middle School. I walked in with all of the materials I had collected and created in my college classes, hoping that there would be enough there to at least get me started in my new classroom. That concern evaporated almost immediately, as I was taken into the collective fold of the sixth grade team and the EMS faculty as a whole. Joanne Zammit, Jeanne Fachner, Jini Martens, Stacey Goodnow, and many others handed me lessons, resources, and even whole unit folders, saying, "What do you need? Let's see what you can use!" Their doors were always open for any question, whether it was classroom management ideas, curriculum, staff development, paperwork, scheduling, or the myriad other issues that arise daily at school. I have always felt indebted to them for all of the assistance they freely gave me that first year... and for the fact that they have never stopped being willing to help me or any other teacher. I found that environment as well when I moved to Central Middle School in 2002 to become a media specialist, particularly with Judy Peterson, Justine Domuracki, Kevin Krois, and Jo Frame. Even as a seasoned teacher, moving into a new curriculum meant that I needed support from my colleagues and an open, collaborative environment in order to give my students the best experience possible. I have made a conscious effort to be a teacher who is willing to offer to help other teachers as much as I possibly can, because of those formative experiences in my teaching career.
My students through the years did not learn and succeed at school because of me alone. They succeeded because of the efforts of the entire team of teachers that they had at school. That's not just the academic teachers, but also the art teachers who asked them to think critically and creatively, the music and gym teachers who constantly encouraged them, the media specialists who gave them interesting books and taught them computer skills, the Consumer Science (Home Economics) teachers who had them use math and reading skills for directions, recipes and other activities, and all of the other staff who provided them with a well-rounded middle school experience. We have always worked together for the students' benefit.
This is what concerns me about merit pay. I have seen the evaluation plan the board is pushing, and it comes across as a selfish, overly complicated and divisive device. There is no place in the evaluation for noting effective collaboration and cooperation -- it is all about financial incentives for singular personal achievement measured by administrator evaluations and student test scores. The days of new teachers being welcomed and helped the way I was are desperately numbered with this plan. Placing financial incentives in front of teachers for their best lesson plans and ideas means that those lessons and ideas won't be shared with other teachers. That hurts two groups most: our new teachers who need support and nurturing to develop real-world skills and an arsenal of options for all situations in the classroom, and most importantly, this hurts the students of the Greenwich Public Schools. My first-grader has a new teacher at Riverside. I want her to have the support of the Riverside faculty and the other teachers in the district so that she can find the best ways to nurture and challenge him and his classmates. I want all of his future teachers to have that as well -- because I want the absolute best for him. Without collaboration and a system that encourages sharing, this kind of support will wither away as teachers discover that in order to succeed financially they must deny their colleagues access to their ideas and materials. It amazes me that the board thinks that developing this sort of cutthroat atmosphere in our schools is way to attract and retain teachers, and help student scores go up.
Although Dolly Powers wrote about how merit pay has been successful elsewhere, I wonder how that success has been measured in her eyes. Did she also find and read about the districts where merit pay failed (and there are a multitude of those) or did she just take the positive spin from Bill Kelly and the board? I found the most interesting fact in her article to be the amount the federal government has given out to states where there are districts with merit pay ($80 million). I've been wondering what the board's underlying agenda was, and I can't help but think getting a piece of the federal pie would be quite the incentive to them. I've noticed that there are an awful lot more highly paid (non-curriculum-related) administrators down at the Havemeyer building now than there were ten years ago, and yet Dr. Sternberg and the board were lambasted at the most recent board meeting about their refusal to hire more teachers for overcrowded elementary classrooms, where our children need them most.
What do I want? As a taxpayer, I want the board to be judicious and careful stewards of the resources allocated to them by the town. As a teacher, I want to be constructively criticized, fairly evaluated and equitably paid for the work I do at my school with my students, and the work I do for the district. At this point, that's already happening, so I don't see a problem keeping the current system. I want my colleagues to believe that it is in everyone's best interest (students and faculty alike) to share ideas, materials and resources, and I want them to feel encouraged to share, cooperate as teams, and collaborate to create the best learning experiences possible for our students. Our opening day speaker, Ken Kay, made it very clear that those are exactly the skills that our students must have in order to succeed in the 21st century. How will we teach those if we cannot actually set the examples and demonstrate how to do that successfully ourselves? The board is setting teachers up to fail, and that makes me angry as a parent. When the board acts in that manner, they ultimately hurt the students whose interests the board should be acting to protect. And that includes my kids -- my biological ones and the ones who show up in my classroom and the EMS media center every day.

He wrote back and let me know that he was going to publish it in today's paper. I was shocked to see that he didn't cut anything -- he published it as it was written and gave me **half a page** in the paper. And thus I am a published person. Not a novel or anything lengthy, but yet a piece I feel strongly about and one that I hope will cause people to think about how this issue will affect our schools. There are a few people on the board that I really really hope I pissed off by speaking my mind, but my real aim was to simply speak -- exercise my First Amendment rights to my opinion, and in doing so present another side of the issue.