Teachers’ contract may end performance pay

City schools, union to vote today on arbitrator’s report

The last contract for teachers in the Pittsburgh Public Schools linked pay for newcomers to how well they performed in the classroom. But that key provision is likely to disappear in the next collective bargaining agreement that the district and its teachers’ union could approve as early as this week.

The school board and members of the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers will vote Wednesday on whether to accept a nonbinding report from an independent arbitrator who examined each side’s proposal. If either rejects it, they can vote again up to 10 days later, then go back to negotiations. If accepted, it becomes the contract.

Five-year pacts for union members ran out June 30, 2015, and they have been working under the terms of contract extensions that ran out the same day this year. The union represents 2,400 teachers ,565 para professionals and 20 technical clerical employees.

The two sides have staked out differences on a new contract and made their arguments to Lewis Am is, a media tor who has heard more than 400 teacher arbitration cases, on Oct.19. The union’s summary of his report, furnished to its members and obtained by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, provided a glimpse of the issues dividing the school district, sometimes discussed in sharp language.

By the union’s account, Mr. Amis rejected or remained silent on a few key aspects of its proposal. But everyone generally appeared to agree to phase out the performance-based pay concept for teachers hired after July 1, 2010. The new pay scale essentially changed the time needed to attain tenure from three years to four years and pegged compensation directly to how well they perform in the

classroom.

Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, performance-based pay currently affects roughly a third of the current teaching staff. But the union had long been wary of the proposal — it denounced its measurements of teacher performance as “unfair, unscientific, and subjective” — and the Gates grant expired in 2016.

“As an example, teachers in higher poverty schools are less likely to achieve a rating leading to higher compensation,” the union said in a pressrelease last week.

School board members were told not to talk with reporters before the Wednesday vote. But Ira Weiss, district solicitor, said the impetus for ending the concept predated the administration of superintendent Anthony Hamlet.

“It is far from clear that pay for performance achieved what it was designed to achieve,” he said.

Performance-based pay was central to the rationale behind the Gates-funded Empowering Effective Teachers initiative, noted James Fogarty, executive director of education watchdog group A+ Schools. He said phasing it out entirely “is a missed opportunity at the bargaining table to rethink and reimagine and improve a system that was put in place to reward professionals that were doing well with kids.”

The reason the issue came up with the arbitrator now is because the union and the district must agree on how to pay those teachers in the new contract.

The district wanted to replace the performance-pay structure with a 15-step scale for teachers, and the union wanted 12 steps with more money on the earlier steps. Mr. Amis decided on 15 steps but gave teachers on the traditional scale a 2 percent increase across the board, over the the 1.5 percent the district pitched. More detailed salary information wasn’t available.

Nina Esposito-Visgitis, president of the teachers’ union, said she couldn’t publicly discuss the confidential report, which will become public if either side votes it down.

The union told members that Mr. Amis also rejected its proposal for a five-year contract, siding with the district’s pitch for a three-year term. In advocating for the longer agreement, the union described a feeling of being “constantly in the state of negotiations process ... [which] breeds anxiety, distraction, instability and financial strain.”

The contract approved in 2010 marked the first time the city school system had ever agreed to a five-year pact.

Mr. Amis suggested raises of 2 percent to earlychildhood teachers and 10 percent for athletic coaches, different from the union’s requests, which weren’t detailed in the summary to members.

Union leaders also were upset that Mr. Amis granted scheduling power to school principals, rather than letting teachers set their own schedules. The union said that provision would result in “increasingly poor morale” for members.

But the arbitrator agreed that teachers should be able to transfer schools yearly, instead of every three years, as the district proposed.

Notably, Mr. Amis didn’t address the union’s desire to reduce class sizes, which the union has called among its most important issues. The contract they vote on Wednesday will maintain the previous agreement’s language.