Catawba County Schools salaries posted

If you've been following this blog, you know the Observer posts the salaries for school district employees in Mecklenburg and surrounding counties each year. One of the final ones we've received this year, for the school district in Catawba County, is now available for search.

Why post school district salaries by name? I think Ann said it well back in May when the first databases of the year went up: It helps the public find out if something is going wrong in public spending.

Take a look and see what stands out.

Mission Impossible: Keep up with General Assembly

Last summer I kicked myself for paying too little attention to the legislative session.  Like many others, I struggled to figure out changes to tenure,  teacher pay,  charter school rules and other developments in public education after lawmakers had gone home and everything was a done deal.

This year I vowed to make sure readers knew about education proposals in time to react.  But I'm no longer sure that's possible.

I set out with good intentions,  dutifully trying to keep up with the education bills being introduced.

In June I spent a week in Raleigh covering the General Assembly.  Mostly I learned that not being there isn't as big a disadvantage as I'd thought.  The legislative web site has a lot of great information,  including audio links to key discussions.  After scurrying around to grab a seat in the chambers,  I discovered that the more experienced political reporters often stayed in the press room following the discussions on audio.

So it's great that we can do that from Charlotte.  But I've concluded that the volume and complexity of this system makes it nearly impossible to keep up,  even in this ostensibly short and simple off-year session.

A search for education bills in the 2013-14 session gets 532 results.  I'm pretty sure that only those in the lighter typeface are active in 2014,  but that's still a long list.

Sometimes the content changes dramatically as it moves through the system.  House Bill 1224,  for instance,  began life in May as  "an act to modify the job maintenance and capital development fund provisions."  But when it went to the Senate Finance Committee last week it morphed into a bill that could kill the Mecklenburg County commissioners' plan to hold a referendum on a sales-tax hike to boost Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools salaries.

I've paid especially close attention to Senate Bill 793,  which has been through five versions, 11 proposed amendments and 39 actions since it was introduced in May.  It's the one that,  depending on the day,  either ensures that charter schools will follow the same personnel disclosure and privacy laws as other public schools,  removes all references to said topic or blocks disclosure of charter school employees' names.  (Meanwhile,  the Observer finally completed the database of Charlotte-area salaries last week,  when Lincoln Charter provided its information.)

Because I was dogging that bill,  Rep. Charles Jeter, R-Mecklenburg,  realized that his protect-the-names amendment has consequences far beyond his intentions.  He says he asked the conference committee to delete the amendment he got the House to pass.  Best I can tell,  there's been no action since that committee was created July 1.  What will emerge is anyone's guess.  Meanwhile,  a search for charter school bills turns up 47 other options to keep track of.

In my efforts to serve as a better watchdog,  I've ended up feeling like a mutt trying to chase a forest full of squirrels.  Even with the state's press corps doing their best,  I can't help wondering what  surprises may emerge after the last gavel bangs.  (Public Schools First NC is doing the best job I've seen of tracking education proposals.  Last week's summary filled nine pages.)

I voiced my frustration to Tom Tate,  the CMS board's senior member,  when we were talking about something else.

"I don't know how anyone is keeping up with it at this point,"  Tate sympathized.  "Even the legislators themselves."

Sugar Creek Charter salaries posted

We've updated the charter school salary database to include employees of Sugar Creek Charter School, leaving Lincoln Charter School as the only school that hasn't provided names  (Chief Administrator Dave Machado has said his school is working on that list).

The Observer requested salary information from 22 Charlotte-area charter schools in March,  sparking a prolonged debate over disclosure that continues to work its way through the General Assembly.

Sugar Creek students at school choice rally with Gov. McCrory

I don't think the Sugar Creek names are  "stop the press"  news.  The school had already provided details for its top administrators,  withholding names of lower-ranking employees.

But I do think full disclosure is important.  As Rep. Charles Jeter learned when he introduced an amendment designed to block the Observer and other media from publishing salary lists for charter schools  --  the same kind of lists that have been published for employees of school districts and other public bodies for years  --  when you start trying to pull some information from public scrutiny you can create more problems than you solve.

If a broader discussion of salary discussion loops around in the coming year,  as Jeter has suggested,  I hope the people who want to limit public access to personnel data will be challenged to provide specific,  first-hand information on the harm that disclosure causes.  We heard dire predictions when we first posted Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools salaries in 2008.  I'm well aware that many individuals don't like seeing their salaries posted,  but I have gotten no reports that it disrupted public education.

Likewise,  some charter school officials and advocates said disclosure of merit-based salaries would lead to such turmoil on the faculty that students would suffer.  But since we posted the salaries in May,  along with articles analyzing teacher pay and administrator salaries in charters and CMS,  no one has contacted me or Observer editors to say their school fell apart.  Some charter directors have told me the articles helped dispel public myths about extravagant pay at their schools.

I hope any discussion will be precise about terms, too.  During debate over Jeter's amendment,  which the House approved,  he referred to the need to prevent disclosure of merit pay.  As I've noted before,  merit pay,  which is used in some charter and traditional public schools,  should make sense,  even if there's room to debate the results.  Market pay can be random. As one of my professors used to say,  the market is amoral.  The teacher in the next classroom may earn significantly more for a number of reasons that have nothing to do with fairness or ability.  That may be disturbing for teachers to discover,  but I suspect the real discomfort falls on the administrators who have to explain it.

Pay flexibility and public scrutiny

Forget, for a moment, the legal questions about public disclosure of charter salaries.  Richard Vinroot and Eddie Goodall,  local leaders in North Carolina's charter school movement,  have raised the argument that pay flexibility makes it essential to protect teacher salaries from disclosure  --  to their colleagues.

"Common sense suggests that we value the delicate balance by which charter operators and employees, who together, negotiate just the appropriate wage to satisfy each other,"  Goodall,  head of the N.C. Public Charter School Association,  wrote recently.  "Charters don’t mind if the public knows what everybody makes!  They only care about the third grade teacher, Tim, learning what Sally, the other third grade teacher, is making. The whole issue is about poisoning the chemistry of the charter team, adding an ingredient that might alter the flavor of the whole dish."

Vinroot contends that performance-based pay,  unlike that of teachers on a traditional salary schedule,  would cause disruption in two charter schools he works with if colleagues knew each other's pay.

Bertrand: Performance pay does create pressure ...

It's true that on the state pay scale,  you can figure out what your colleagues make if you know how many years they've worked and what kind of credentials they hold.  That locked-in schedule evolved from a time when pay discrepancies were often based on gender and race.  Some experts call it a good solution to yesterday's problems.

Charters are hardly alone in seeking better options.  The quest for a smarter teacher pay system is a national obsession,  with North Carolina and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in the thick of it.  One of the few points of near-universal agreement is this:  Done right,  performance pay doesn't just boost teachers' paychecks,  it improves the quality of teaching.

That means teachers who earn richer rewards should be doing so for reasons that people who cut the paychecks can explain.  Maybe it's because of test scores or classroom management or leadership skills.  Maybe it's because they're qualified to teach high-level math or science and it's hard to fill those jobs.  You can argue whether the standards are the right ones,  but they shouldn't be a mystery.

Those of us outside the classroom can argue theory all day long.  Reality can be a different matter.  So I asked Kristin Cubbage and Romain Bertrand,  two teachers who have been publicly identified as getting hefty raises based on their skills,  to discuss the question of working with colleagues after that disclosure.

Cubbage: Salary report didn't cause strife

Cubbage and Bertrand are part of the CMS/Project LIFT  "opportunity culture"  experiment.  Since more than 700 teachers applied for 19 jobs with greater responsibility and higher pay,  it's reasonable to suspect that some of their colleagues wanted the jobs they got.

Cubbage,  a first-grade teacher at Ashley Park PreK-8 School,  is blunt:  If it were up to her,  individual salaries, bonuses and incentive payments wouldn't be disclosed.  And when she agreed to be featured in an Observer article as one of the people receiving higher pay,  "I was a little nervous because money is a touchy subject within education."

"However, I did not feel any 'strife' at my school. In fact no one mentioned the salary portion of the article at all,"  she wrote. "I have only heard comments such as: 'I would not want your job because of all of your different responsibilities each day.'  ... If the teachers at my school are aware of the extra pay, they are also aware of what my role entails and the responsibility that what comes with it."

Bertrand,  a Ranson Middle School math teacher,  said the pressure doesn't come from the knowledge that he's making more money but from the need to prove he's earning it.  He's now responsible for six other teachers and more than 800 math students.  Not only will he be judged on year-end test scores,  but he feels a need to prove himself to his colleagues daily.

"They need to see how this position brings added value to the team: what is this person doing to make us all better?"  Bertrand wrote.  "They need to understand what they need to do to get a shot at such an opportunity in the future.  How does this ladder work?  What are the skills required to move up the ladder and be given a chance to hold such a role?  What is the equitable process in place to give everyone a chance to get there?"

Under the traditional system,  a teacher like Bertrand would have had to leave the classroom to earn a good raise.  Now he remains  "in the trenches,"  where his colleagues can judge whether his work makes a difference for kids.

When this year's CMS salaries are posted,  the additional pay for Bertrand,  Cubbage and the other opportunity culture teachers will be on display. I'll wager those schools will have bigger salary differences than charter schools do.

As the effort expands,  we'll see how other schools select and reward their high performers.  Private donations are paying for the consultants who help schools define the duties for those teachers,  and public jobs are being rearranged to cover the higher salaries.  Eventually,  the work of these individual teachers will determine whether this was just another idea that sounded good in theory or a real breakthrough in reforming the profession.

That's a lot of pressure.  But these folks are stepping up to show they can handle it.