$57,000 Salary Suggested for Best Teachers

Teachers should have more control over their profession--from setting hiring standards to deciding how subjects will be taught--and the best senior teachers should be paid up to $57,000 a year, a special state commission said Tuesday.

The 17-member panel, made up mostly of business and education leaders, said California will not be able to recruit and retain enough good instructors in the next decade unless teaching is made more attractive as a profession.

Though hardly a new problem, the state’s public schools are facing a shortage of teachers by 1990 because enrollments are rising while college students in general are avoiding education as a career.

85,000 New Jobs

The commission, set up by legislative leaders to sift through the many ideas on improving the schools, estimated the state will need 85,000 new teachers by 1990.

While most reports have focused on raising starting salaries to lure recent college graduates, the commission’s report stressed making teaching more rewarding as a long-term career.

“Only when we can offer potential teachers the opportunities for professional growth and success found in other professions will California’s schools be able to recruit the bright, creative individuals that all of us want to teach our children,” said Dorman Commons, chairman of the Commission on the Teaching Profession and former president of the Natomas Corp.

The commission proposed that the career ladder for elementary and secondary teaching more closely resemble the university track. In colleges and universities, new professors are evaluated regularly by their peers. They move up in stages and over a number of years before they can become full professors, receiving higher pay and more responsibility for training and evaluating newcomers.

Evaluation Process

By contrast, schoolteachers are seriously evaluated only when they seek tenure or if they have an obvious problem. “The current system of evaluating teachers for tenure doesn’t work,” the report said. Since principals are responsible for too many teachers and have too many other duties, “evaluations are not rigorous enough and tenure rights too often are granted to teachers who are not well qualified.”

Moreover, teachers with 25 years of experience usually have no more authority or responsibility than the teachers in their third year.

“No feature of the teaching occupation is more destructive . . . than the current reality that to move up, you must move out,” the report said.

As envisioned by the commission, a state standards board, composed mostly of teachers, would set “rigorous professional standards,” including subject matter tests for instructors seeking tenure. The current state test--the California Basic Educational Skills Test--measures only whether a teacher has mastered basic skills in reading and math.

At the same time, local panels of teachers would be responsible for observing teachers in class and judging their performance.

Making Tenure Tougher

“Tenure should be as difficult to achieve as it is to lose,” the report said.

The commission suggested a starting salary for teachers of $25,000 a year, up from a current norm of about $18,000. It also proposed sharply higher salaries for those teachers who move up the career ladder. With 20 years on the job and having passed the series of state and local hurdles, a teacher could earn $57,000 a year, the report said.

Many of the commission’s ideas, such as higher salaries and smaller classes, are costly, and neither the governor’s office nor legislative leaders had a quick reaction to the report. The Senate Education Committee will meet in Santa Monica on Thursday to hear a presentation on the report and react to its recommendations.

But teachers union officials were more than pleased with it.

“I’m excited. At last, a high-level commission has listened to teachers,” said Marilyn Russell Bittle, president of the California Teachers Assn. “Quite a bit of this looks like it came directly out of our policy handbook.”

She said teachers “have been advocating for years . . . the idea of having additional responsibility in exchange for additional compensation.”

Entrance Standards

Teachers are also in favor of “a clear set of state standards for entering the profession. We are often criticized for who is hired into the classroom, but we don’t have anything to do with that,” Bittle said.

State Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig said he also agreed with the general outline of the commission’s findings, but said the state’s political leaders must now pick through an array of laudable notions.

“They’ve raised the right issues: How do you better prepare teachers, how do you make classrooms better and how do you get accountability?” Honig said. “But the details are still missing. Now we need to get an agreement with the Legislature and the governor on what areas we can push for.”

If adopted in their entirety, the cost to the state of the salary proposals alone would be an extra $501 million a year, according to the report.

But the most expensive proposal was to “begin the process of reducing class sizes” in California. The state has the largest classes of any in the nation, and reducing the average from 30 to 25 would cost an extra $812 million, the report said.