‘Incentive grants’ miss special ed teacher shortage
January 12, 2007
Dear Substance,
The following was sent via e-mail to the Chicago Tribune more than two months ago. You may use it as you see fit. Your readers can remind ourselves how much we need to continue discussing these things, even if the discussion doesn’t take place in the downtown media.
Re: Your article: City teachers to get merit bonus
Sent via e-mail
November 3, 2006
Tracy Dell’Angela: Chicago Tribune Education Reporter
Dear Ms. Dell’Angela,
As you may be aware according the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), its largest area of teacher shortages has been for special education teachers. If you go to CPS’s website and look at the Board Reports for the October 25, 2006 meeting you will find report 06-1025-RS2. In this report the CPS indicates that its greatest area of shortage is for special education teachers, in April 2006 there were 212 unfilled positions. The next closest area of shortage was for math teachers whose shortage was only 45 percent as drastic as the shortage existing for special education teachers. From what you wrote in your November 3 article the 10 schools that the CPS is initially selecting for involvement in the “merit bonus” program will more than likely have vacant special education positions because they already are ones with “with high teacher turnover.” This means that day-to-day substitutes would be filling those special education positions.
The Chicago Sun Times article on the same topic which also appeared today (November 3) informed readers that the Teacher Incentive Fund grant proposal developed by the CPS included a plan to hire a “master teacher” for each school who would get an extra $15,000 a year and an unknown number of “mentor teachers” who would each receive an extra $7,000 per year.
Since these schools may lack special education teachers it would be wise for the CPS to hire special education teachers to fill these roles. This is because the merit payments of up to “$9,000 for superior work and student gains” per teacher are less than sign on bonuses being paid by school districts in our state for special education teachers who will work in far less challenging circumstances.
Access Living has been raising this issue of special education teacher shortages with the Board, most recently at the September 27, 2006 meeting where I pointed out that at that time “about 23 percent of all CPS vacancies are in special education even though only about 13.6 percent of CPS students are identified with disabilities.”
We would urge you to closely follow the implementation of Chicago’s Teacher Incentive Fund grant to see if these low performing schools that receive this grant obtain and retain special education teachers. We would also urge you to inquire about the extent that the measured academic improvement of students on which the incentive payments are to based will include academic test scores of students with disabilities.
Lastly we wanted to comment on an aspect of the Department of Education Teacher Incentive Fund grant that neither your article nor the one appearing in the Chicago Sun-Times addressed. That aspect is the on-going funding obligations that CPS has entered into by accepting money from the Teacher Incentive Fund. The Federal Register, Vol. 71, No. 83, at page 25581 states:
“Cost-Sharing: The grantee must ensure that, in each applicable budget year, an increasing share of funds from sources other than this grant will be used to pay for earned differential compensation costs as they are phased in during the performance period. In the final year of the performance period, the grantee must ensure that at least 75 percent of the differentiated compensation costs are not paid from this grant...”
Your article indicates that the grant to CPS is $27.5 million lasting up to 2010. Your article also indicates that “each school would receive an estimated $500,000 to $750,000 a year depending on the size of its staff.” Since there will be 40 schools involved in this program the CPS will have pick up about $18.7 millions of dollars of costs for these incentive payments in 2010. Moreover, if one reads the details of the grant in the Federal Register it clearly indicates that in the CPS proposal the school district was required to obligate funding the incentive program beyond the time period of the grant. At that point the costs for incentive programs at these 40 schools would be about $25 million a year. Given the fiscal problems that the CPS has indicated it has experienced, some so extreme that hundreds of special education teachers and aides had their positions eliminated in June, I wonder how it was possible that this issue was not examined in your report.
We have to wonder if the CPS even provided reporters with the grant requirements as set forward in the Federal Register or if these requirements were even looked at by one reporter in Chicago.
Yours truly,
Rodney Estvan
RDEST@aol.com
Access Living Chicago
