Edwize takes another swipe at WSF
The New York teachers union blog Edwise is taking another swipe at the Weighted Student Formula concept. They mount their criticism in response to a debate on the merits of WSF hosted by the Center for American Progress. The debate featured non other than Arlene Ackerman, as well as Rod Paige and John Podesta.
This is thesecondthrid (I missed this one) time Edwise has weighed in as WSF skeptics. The first time they swung their brickbat at WSF they claimed WSF was an attempt to undermine collective bargaining. This time they take the contradictory position that SF's WSF is toothless and insignificant because it uses averaged teacher salaries and thus does not deliver true equity. In Weighted Student Funding—100% questionable they write:
This is the
And in San Francisco it seems that the single largest district expense, teacher salaries, are still being allotted to schools using an averaging formula. A key tenet of weighted student funding is that poor schools have more real dollars to "buy" highly-qualified teachers. Podesta and Paige both emphasized the potential for greater equity as their reasons for supporting it.While I share their concerns about the dubious political bedfellows that have jumped on the WSF bandwagon, I truly believe that WSF is a powerful reform that needs to be nurtured and developed further. Site based decision making and autonomy are very powerful, worthwhile goals. Legislators need to support it by freeing more money from the strings of restricted funding programs. The union needs to get on board, as UESF has, by empowering site councils and local control. It need not be viewed as a threat to union protections if, as in San Francisco, it is implemented with union participation.
Labels: SFUSD Politics
4 Comments:
I support the WSF concept, but agree that it has no teeth when teacher salary averaging is factored in.
Teacher salary averaging is what needs to be addressed, not WSF.
Through better incentives to attract more experienced teachers to underperforming schools and a teacher assignment system that spreads around lower paid 'new' teachers and higher paid 'senior' teachers this can be addressed. Realistically, this will need to happen with additional revenues flagged for this purpose to improve - and provide equal access - to quality teachers for ALL schools.
Anonymous said...
I support the WSF concept, but agree that it has no teeth when teacher salary averaging is factored in.
Teacher salary averaging is what needs to be addressed, not WSF.
Through better incentives to attract more experienced teachers to underperforming schools and a teacher assignment system that spreads around lower paid 'new' teachers and higher paid 'senior' teachers this can be addressed. Realistically, this will need to happen with additional revenues flagged for this purpose to improve - and provide equal access - to quality teachers for ALL schools.
While I am no fan of Edwiz (populated by non-classroom teachers), I agree with them that the WSF can and will be used to send money to Charter schools and morph into a voucher program for private and religious schools. To ignore the potential abuse of the WSF program is to look at education with blinders on.
The WSF is a great idea that would allow needy schools to attract quality teachers by offering them more money. However, so is Communisum, whose ideals were a people's democracy where everybody would be equal. See how that turned out. Where WSF have been used it is always adjusted and the results show no overall improvement.
The best way to prove their point would be to implement it in a mid-sized town with no union and government restrictions. let it run a decade and show the resuts to peer review. Then, and only then should anybody take the WSF seriously.
Why look for some "mid sized town"? Why not use SF as the experiment? There will be union and government intrusions any place you might go, so SF seems as good a place for it to prove itself. Hell, I think it already has proven itself, in spite of the shortcomings in the execution (limited portion of the funds, averaged salaries, etc.)
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