Big raises for teachers

And an operating referendum to pay for it?

I. An anecdote

Some people have a thing where their first love leaves this indelible impression on their romantic psyche, and forever after they see traces of it in every subsequent relationship they have, no matter how different or incompatible or doomed it might have been.¹

Well, I have a similar thing with Robert Caro’s book The Power Broker, an 1,100-page story about urban planner and megalomaniac Robert Moses who, over the course of several-decades in the mid-20th century, accrued and wielded enormous power through various unelected positions in city and state government to crush his enemies, benefit his friends, and build parks, bridges, and highways that radically re-shaped the physical and social landscape of New York. No matter the political situation I’m observing or reading about, it’s always written over this palimpsest of Robert Moses being ruthless and clever and exploiting human psychology to get things done that I can’t not help but see.

Here’s Caro describing Moses’ vision for what would eventually become Jones Beach State Park on Long Island:

One bathhouse would be over there, he said, and the other over there. But then they would be almost a mile apart, the men with him pointed out. Yes, he said, and they should understand at once that he wasn't talking about ordinary bathhouses. These were going to contain ten thousand lockers apiece. In addition to bathrooms and shower rooms, they were going to contain wading pools, diving pools and swimming pools, and the swimming pools were going to be large enough to accommodate hundreds of bathers at a time…The bathhouses were going to contain solaria. They were going to contain restaurants in every price range. Although they were at a bathing beach, they were going to be constructed not of wood but of stone and brick, and the stone and brick were going to be of the finest quality.

[…]

Yanking an envelope from his pocket, Moses began to sketch on its back: Two X's to represent the bathhouses, lines to show how they would be connected on the beach side by a wide boardwalk, on the bay side by an "Ocean Parkway." Midway between the two X's, where the causeway from the mainland would join the parkway, he drew a large circle between two squares. The causeway would end in a circle, he said. People who didn't want to use the bathhouses could drive around it and into the squares, parking lots each large enough to hold ten thousand cars.

Legislators in charge of the senate and assembly finance committees thought he was insane:

Hutchinson and Hewitt were “guys from the backwoods,” recalls one who knew them. “When you said ‘water tower’ to them, that meant a tank on four skinny poles. A bathhouse was a little wooden thing you put up for fifty or a hundred bucks so the boys couldn't watch the girls undressing. And here Moses comes along and tells them he wants to spend a million dollars on one.”

They flatly refused to give him anything like it. Only after [Governor of New York Al] Smith had pleaded with them for hours did they consent to appropriate a total of $150,000—for the water tower and both bathhouses.

Moses’ architects expected him to tell them to scale down their plans.

“You just go right on the way you were doing,” Moses told them. “You forget all about what the appropriation is. I'm never going to put up just a tank on poles. […] We'll put all the money into the foundation for one bathhouse and then, when it gives out, we'll just go back and tell them they'll have to give us more or leave the foundation just sitting there with no building on top of it.”

Hutchinson and Hewitt threatened to impeach him but realized they couldn’t.

Moses had applied his lessons well. When his antagonists began to think about the situation, they realized they were trapped. What, exactly, for all their power, could they do? Charge that he had misled them—thereby admitting that they hadn't investigated the project thoroughly enough in advance? Deny him further funds—thereby insuring that the $150,000 already spent would be utterly wasted?

Robert Moses got his beach.

Big projects pretty routinely take longer than expected and go over budget. It’s so common that it’s become a reflexive joke whenever anyone talks about public infrastructure. Like, Oh, the California High Speed Rail was supposed to cost $33 billion and open in 2020 but now it will cost $128 billion and open in 20-never? Haha. What did you expect?

Social scientists, in their propensity for sterile, academic jargon, call it the planning fallacy. The often charming but sometimes disastrous optimism and constrained vision of humans that makes us underestimate the time, cost, and risks of future actions while overestimating their benefits.

It’s close cousins with the sunk cost fallacy—throwing good money after bad even though past spending shouldn’t matter when calculating the expected future payoff of continuing or quitting. But we do it anyway, the scientists intone, because we’re irrational and don’t like math.

Those are two explanations. But the story above gets at other reasons these things happen. The first is that if people knew the true costs of something, they might never start it in the first place. You have to leverage their tendency for optimism and their aversion to rigorous cost-benefit analysis and paint a nice picture of the future to get them moving.

The other is that people care what others think of them, and they’d prefer to look competent, diligent, and consistent in their decisions and judgment rather than the converse. This isn’t necessarily just vanity or—among politicians—a cynical desire to get re-elected. People depend on others to help them accomplish things in the world. That kind of cooperation is harder if people think you’re inattentive or a rubber stamp or that you constantly flip-flop between supporting and opposing something.

And a closely related explanation is just that humans like the status quo. They get used to things, really quickly. They might haughtily look down their nose at the very idea of taking a Carnival Cruise, but if you give them free tickets they will probably go. If you try to take the tickets away from them, they will be a little upset. People have adjusted their lives and made their own plans in expectation.

The same applies in organizations that add staff or expend resources on big new initiatives. It looks and feels bad to reverse course and no one wants to do it, because the organization has already begun to incorporate and make plans assuming the existence of those extra people and resources.

II. Raises for teachers

This coming Monday, on May 22, the school board plans to vote on a new teacher compensation schedule. The new schedule was originally presented at last week’s school board meeting by Chief of Talent Sarah Zelazoski. She proposed two components:

→ Raise teacher salaries by 12% across the board. This would make district teacher salaries more competitive within the region, exceed the rate of inflation, and hopefully stanch the exodus of teachers from the district and from the profession nationwide (although presumably other districts are trying to do the same thing, so who knows how competitive the salaries will be once all the other districts adjust as well).

From the proposal:

Starting teacher salaries in other CESA 1 school districts average $45,000 with the highest near $50,000. This recommendation increases the starting teacher salary for the 2023-24 school year to $48,408 - which would move WSD to the top 10% of starting salaries in the region. At the top end of the schedule, the average highest regional salary reported for 2022-23 was $89,674. The recommendation brings WSD’s highest salary to $101,356. Based on 2022-23 rates, this would be the highest maximum salary among regional districts.

→ Provide smaller annual bonuses for special certifications. This would be an extra $800 annually for teachers who also have licensure as Montessori teachers, physical therapists, occupational therapist, and speech/language therapists.

The total cost of the plan will be $1.9 million dollars per year. This is on top of another $800,000 or so in previously approved pay increases (see table below). They would like the school board to approve it now even though they’re not sure how to pay for it yet.

And there might be good reasons for doing that. Teachers supposedly feel underpaid and are abandoning the district right now, but a state budget with more money to pay them hasn’t been approved yet and the earliest the school district could put an operating referendum before voters to fund the pay raise with local property taxes is 2024.

And the district does have a cash reserve of approximately $25 million dollars that it can dip into. While a note on Chief Financial Officer Keith Brightman’s budget presentation warned that, “Use of the district’s cash position is not a sustainable long-term fiscal strategy,” paying for two years of pay raises is eminently doable.

But I also think that one advantage of spending a lot of money now and figuring out how to pay it later is that sometimes the people who have to figure out how to pay it tomorrow are different from the ones that get to spend it today. Also, it’s easier to raise wages than lower them, it’s easier to hire people than it is to fire them, it’s easier to grow than to shrink, and it’s easier to get people to pay for something once you’ve already kind of gone ahead and done the thing you want them to pay for.

Mr. Brightman laid out two scenarios. Scenario One was something like, Suppose the state gave us everything we asked for? This includes an additional $750 per pupil next year and another $650 per pupil the following year, plus more funding for special education, mental health, and Medicaid reimbursement. Scenario Two was, We’ve been hearing some rumors from state legislators. No idea if they’re true. But what if they were? and includes a similar increase in special education aid, a smaller bump ($350) in per-pupil aid in the first year, and no additional mental health and Medicaid reimbursement funding.

Source

Scenario One obviously looks better financially although there are still some deficits. But, also, it’s not clear how this all adds up. Summing the numbers in the columns does not give you the numbers at the bottom. I also don’t understand why the $1.9 million for increased teacher compensation (and every other cost) only occurs in 2023-24 but not 2024-25.

Nobody seemed confused by this except me, so I’ll assume I’m missing something and that the bottom line numbers are correct.

In either case, one way to think about this is its effect on your taxes. The adopted budget for 2022-2023 included a property tax levy by the school district of $59 million on $8.5 billion of property which comes out to a tax rate of $6.92 per $1,000. Adding $1.9 million per year would raise it to $7.14 per $1,000. For someone with a house worth $350,000, the total bill for the school district goes from $2,422 to $2,499. I suppose the increase would be even larger for an operating referendum meant to cover the larger deficits in Scenario Two.

Dr. Means thinks we need to strike while the iron is hot. “There's some school districts who have decided they're no longer going to wait on the legislature to determine what they're going to do in terms of resources they provide for the children,” he says, and even if we didn’t implement any of the proposed increases to teachers’ compensation “we would have a budget shortfall,” and he truly “believe[s] we're at a crossroads as a school system.”

Board Member Mike Meier, while initially skeptical that the community would approve an operating referendum, towards the end of the meeting reconsidered his views. He worried “that waiting too long causes a deterioration in the quality of our choices” and said:

I am worn out with trying to run this school district from behind. From short on money, from what the legislature might or might not do, from all kinds of other things, and I want to really know what the community thinks.

And I used to believe I sort of knew, but in the last two election cycles I'm thinking this is a Wauwatosa that's not so…frugal—no, that's the wrong word. This is a Wauwatosa that might want to invest more money in its education, but we don't know that for sure. But shame on us if we don't find out.

[…]

There is a big election coming up in November of 2024. [We should present] a well thought out, well planned long-range strategy, and ask the voters do you support this or not?

III. So why are teachers leaving?

Strangely unclear. Approximately every other meeting, a board member says, Gosh, I really hope we’re getting good information from our exit surveys on why all these good teachers are leaving the district.

But I never hear anything about these exit surveys. When Board Member Jessica Willis asked about them last Monday, Ms. Zelazoski said that she has “not opened up the data for this year yet,” that “Wauwatosa has used the same exit survey for the past number of years,” and that she’d like to make sure they’re “asking the right questions.”

Dr. Means said that students had become more difficult to deal with and described a “mass exodus from the profession since Covid.” It’s not clear if he was talking about a district, regional, or national shortage but several administrators in previous board meetings have described it as a national trend, and I’m not sure what evidence supports this claim. This August article from The Atlantic describes it this way:

In parts of the country, schools are struggling to hire staff. But they are mostly the same districts that have been struggling for years to fill the same positions, such as substitute and special-ed roles. In the big picture, the new and catastrophic national teacher shortage is neither newly catastrophic nor, in any meaningful sense, national. Under one interpretation of the murky data, the country might even have a teacher surplus on its hands, because so many parents have pulled their children out of public schools since the pandemic began.

Instead, it quoted one education policy expert who said:

“I’m not confident about the education data, but I think we’ll eventually discover that public-school enrollment declined in the 2022–2023 school year even as districts hired more teachers than they had before the pandemic,” Aldeman told me. “If the student ratio goes down, it’ll be very hard to call that situation a ‘teacher shortage.’”

Wauwatosa fits this description. Student enrollment declined by almost 300 (4.2%) students between 2019 and 2022² while the number staff has grown by the same amount (4.2%)³. While I think it’s reasonable to complain that the state’s per-pupil aid hasn’t kept up with the rate of inflation and there are staff positions that haven’t been filled and aren’t getting filled, it’s also true that we’re hiring more and more staff to teach fewer and fewer students and that this also contributes to funding and hiring shortages.

Several board members questioned whether raising compensation in the way they’ve proposed will actually do what they hope it will. Board Member Phillip Morris asked if they’d considered aligning incentives by tying teacher pay to the accomplishment of various strategic plan objectives:

[Mr. Morris]: Aside from tenure, are there any achievement or performance metrics or standards that are tied to those salary levels?

[Ms. Zelazoski]: Not with our current system. So the way the current system is set up is to go ahead and reward years of service, and it does not take into consideration other master's degrees, it's a one-lane system. I believe the prior system had more of a performance-based flavor to it in terms of rewarding teachers with outstanding performance, of special work, with higher increases than the average and frankly that was one of the things, in my understanding, that the WEA [Note: Wisconsin Education Association i.e., teacher’s union] and members of the association were not interested in.

He then asks whether, given some of the difficulties with student behavior in some schools, it makes sense to “really wrap salary performance to classroom performance [and] the achievement of the school all into this package.”

But Ms. Zelazoski felt “that would be a really different system than we have right now” and that “we have not talked about it as a board or within the WEA in terms of adding a performance component to what we're doing with salaries.” She also noted that they have been moving away from things like merit-based pay because WEA teachers wanted simpler, more predictable seniority-based pay raises.

However, I think there’s at least some evidence that flexible salary schemes can be really beneficial. Washington D.C. implemented pay for performance schemes several years ago that improved teacher retention and student test scores. More recently, Barbara Biasi at Yale studied the effects of Act 10 on teacher payment schemes (popular press article here) and found that, “the introduction of flexible pay raised salaries of high-quality teachers, increased teacher quality (due to the arrival of high-quality teachers from other districts and increased effort), and improved student achievement.”

So Ms. Hoag asked, “Will our broader teacher community have an opportunity to weigh in on this before we get to our vote?”

Mr. Means told her that’s not really how school districts work:

The WEA is the voice of the teachers […] The WEA have selected these teachers to be the voice of their colleagues when it comes to compensation and so we come to the table meeting with the WEA with the understanding that it's not about soliciting and surveying the 500 some odd teachers that we have in the district.

[…]

I think we would be undercutting their authority if we said, Well, what does everyone think? The way we've been trained in our our leadership roles, working with the WEA, our job is to listen to them and we trust that they are soliciting and getting the feedback from all of their membership.

But I couldn’t actually figure out what percentage of teachers in Wauwatosa are represented by the WEA. During the meeting, board Member Mike Meier said he didn’t know either.

However, statewide there are approximately 62,000 teachers and the 2020-2021 enrollment numbers for the National Education Association (of which the Wisconsin Education Association is an affiliate) is only 29,500. So a little less than 50% of teachers are actually represented by the union, and I would further assume that some percentage of those union teachers have divergent opinions on the best ways to attract and retain teachers.

Board members and administrators speak frequently about following the data, they hire people to analyze data, they implement new systems that make it easier to manage data, and they make detailed presentations full of data that, for instance, outline in granular detail which students are getting in what kinds of trouble and meticulously track them in order to provide individualized support and interventions.

Given that teacher retention seems like a similarly big problem with obviously large financial consequences, the reliance on outdated exit surveys, anecdotal reports, vague and possibly incorrect perceptions about national-level trends, and union reps who may represent the views of only a minority of teachers and certainly have their own interests to pursue seems puzzling.

Mr. Meier:

The WEA’s mission—much more than anyone else—is to maximize teacher salary. […] It has not been unusual for the WEA to advocate a salary position with confidence that of course the school board won't agree to it if it's a budgetary mistake. But that's not their job to worry about whether we're making a budgetary mistake. That's our job.

Overall, the board seemed hesitant and uncertain, as they probably should be. It’s a lot of money! And I didn’t get the sense that there was a lot of confidence that what they’re proposing would have the effects that they desire or that it would be the most efficient way to solve some of the problems they’re worried about.

In the end though, Dr. Means reminded them that, you know, you did kind of ask for this:

The bigger question I would ask you to think about is—this board approved in August a very audacious, bold strategic plan. So the question is do you want us to execute that?

1. This is not a personal confession.

2. You can look at different years of enrollment data for Wauwatosa here.

3. You can look at different years of staff FTE data for Wauwatosa here.