There is an Arizona referendum initiative in the works that wants to spend well over 60% of school funding in the classroom, up from 58% being spent now.
Over the past couple of Arizona legislative sessions and at the Arizona Town hall on PreK-12 education in June of 2004 an idea has been floated to increase teacher pay by 20%. This raise would be gradual over a number of years, and be in addition to the normal inflation, performance, experience and advancement based increases.
On December 6th the Associate Press reported that the Governor’s Committee for Teacher Quality and Support suggested a raise for starting teachers to $35,000. This increase would be 20% above the current average of $28,000 starting salary.
Most would agree that it would be good to pay teachers more. But this issue is only a piece of a larger system challenge. Arizona is growing 3% a year and the teacher cadre must increase by 15,000 just to support growth. With a high percentage of teachers leaving in first five years of their careers and others in mid career the traditional supply of quality, experienced teachers are not available to meet the demand. Math, Science and English Language Learner teacher are particularly difficult positions to fill. Arizona is resorting to certification courses for not teacher graduates for specific content areas.
In the November 2nd Education Week commentary Saul Cooperman, former New Jersey (one of top 5 ranked K-12 states) state commissioner of education, presented what he called, “One Heretical Route to Quality.” -- “Increase Class Size and Pay Teachers More.”
His argument: The research on class size is decidedly mixed. Significant reductions in class size, say from 30 to 20 would cost about $1 billion (for Arizona school population.) The 50% increase in classrooms and support would be another huge cost. He quotes the Institute of Educational Sciences, “The most robust finding in the current research literature is the effect of teacher verbal and cognitive ability on student achievement.” High pay would attract higher quality teachers, and academic performance would rise in spite of class size increase.
When we developed the eSATS design we realized that we had to pay at least 20% more for eLearning savvy teachers. That would be the only way to attract, retain and motivate teachers to transform their classrooms use effective eLearning methods. In our model we increased the number of students by 2 to 3 students per class, about a 10 percent increase. These cost savings just about paid for the teacher’s 20% raise over a ten year time period. Other savings like one year early graduation, less text books and construction avoidance also kicked in, allowing the entire eSATS implementation to go to “zero” extra cost by year ten. Heretic to Hero --- Why not?
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