������Ƶ

The latest teacher contract was a good start. Time to start thinking about the next one.

A few hours after voting commenced last week, a verdict had been reached. Teachers overwhelmingly supported the new contract that, among other things, will increase starting salaries for new teachers and guarantee pay increases for all teachers every year for the next four years, no strings attached. It will take effect starting July 1.

Although there was  against the contract for not going far enough, the broad sentiment from the time it was announced was one of excitement.

It’s easy to understand why. Who would turn down a 14.5% raise over four years, especially when the last contract’s biggest accomplishment was avoiding pay cuts. 

This was a much-needed win for teachers, but also for the Hawaii State Teachers Association and its president Osa Tui Jr., who took over in 2021 a month after the previous contract was ratified. This was the first major hurdle under his tenure, and he cleared it with relative ease. 

But it’s important to maintain perspective. The new contract is a step in the right direction, but it’s also just that — a step.

In a previous column, I discussed how more money goes a long way to address the teacher shortage but will have less of an impact on turnover, which is driven by burnout. Increasing pay is absolutely necessary, but it’s also not enough to fix the long-festering issues that affect our education system — issues that, notably, do not often spawn from within our education system, but are nonetheless thrust upon it.

All work is a negotiation between money, labor and time. The contract for the next four years addresses one of those components, so here are a few ideas to bounce around for the next contract.

More Prep Time

When I was teaching in South Korea, I had three hours of prep every day for four hours of teaching. I used that time to provide feedback on student work, organize special events like lectures and field trips, create curriculum and collaborate with other teachers. 

I ran multi-campus debates and speech contests, mock trials and Model United Nations sessions. I worked with other teachers to create coursework that was printed in textbooks. 

None of this is the result of any particular competence I have. It’s merely the consequence of having lots of built-in time and space to plan cool things. 

Now, I have a little over three hours of prep every week, and meetings regularly devour entire prep periods. There’s been a lot of focus lately on providing teachers professional development opportunities, but whatever is learned from those trainings is either diluted or dissolved in the flow of the workday. Teachers need more time to not only sharpen their craft, but to optimally apply it.

The way to provide additional prep time is to hire more elective teachers, which also benefits students. Can’t go wrong with a win-win.

Longer Recess And Lunch Periods

Unstructured time is crucial for growth and development. Kids need breaks from learning to process what they’ve learned, but also to develop social skills through conversation and play. 

Recess is proven to reduce stress, which boosts students’ ability to focus and manage impulses. It also has been shown to improve  and . At a time when social emotional needs are heightened, giving kids more time to be kids seems like a no-brainer.

Currently, students get 15 minutes of recess and 30 minutes of lunch. I say we double it, or at the very least throw an extra 15 minutes on top of both. Extending the school day another 30-45 minutes would be worth what we’d get in return.

Get Rid Of The Educator Effectiveness System

Last year, I scrutinized the Educator Effectiveness System and asked what should have been a simple question to answer: what evidence do we have that this system works? In March, a group of researchers published an answer: . 

Despite a significant amount of time and energy (aka money) poured into teacher evaluations, the researchers concluded that “teacher evaluation reforms had no detectable effect on student achievement or attainment.”

They found “little evidence that the effect of teacher evaluation reforms varied depending on the design rigor of the new evaluation systems states implemented, or that teacher evaluation improved outcomes for the academically vulnerable groups it was intended to benefit.”

If we are truly driven by evidence-based practices, then we need to listen to the evidence and stop wasting everybody’s time and money.

Change How We Count Years Of Service

For my first two years of teaching I was an emergency hire, which means I was not licensed, but I was allowed to teach because I was in the process of getting licensed. Emergency hires are typically only offered positions after all licensed candidates have turned them down.

My date of hire in the Department of Education is listed as August 1, 2012. This probably means nothing to you, just as it meant nothing to me. I simply applied, got interviewed, and accepted the first job I was offered.

This matters, however, because apparently the school year started July 24, 2012. Since I did not work that one week in July — a week where students were not on campus at my school — the DOE recorded my service as having missed a month. At the end of the year, I was credited as having worked nine out of 10 months. 

I learned all of this earlier this year when I did not qualify for compression pay because I missed the cutoff date for years of service — by a month. Meaning, that one week 10 years ago effectively eliminated an entire year in terms of receiving compression pay. One week=one month=one year, a time-bending branch of mathematics unique to the Hawaii DOE. 

Although this situation is specific to me, other teachers missed out for similarly silly reasons: they got hired a month into the school year after a teacher abruptly quit; they had to use a few weeks of unpaid vacation days at the end of the year to take care of a sick family member. This is a needlessly rigid way to honor years of service, a metric that affects not just pay but also things like sabbatical eligibility. 

We can measure service by months instead of years, so that nine months is not paid the same as six months or two months or zero months. We can add pay increases on a rolling basis, so that missing months of service only delays pay increases by the equivalent number of months. Or we can allow other teaching service — like the six-plus months of summer school I’ve taught in the DOE over the years — to compensate for whatever service is missing. Or, we can do all of those. 

The new contract has given us momentum that we can use to make substantive improvements to one of the most fundamentally important jobs in society.

I don’t present these ideas as the most pressing issues in education, just ones with straightforward solutions. The more we can fix the small- and medium-sized problems, the easier it will be to fix the big ones. See you in 2027.

Civil Beat’s education reporting is supported by a grant from Chamberlin Family Philanthropy.