Rochester Gives Teachers a Big Raise, Bigger Role

Everybody talks about the public schools, but in Rochester people are trying to do something about them.

The initial effort, a lion-lies-down-with-the-lambs teacher contract, has made Rochester one of the nation’s most closely watched laboratories for school reforms.

The amicable pact, which went into effect this fall, jacks up salaries by 40% over three years and holds out the promise of jobs paying nearly $70,000 for “lead” teachers--”the Clint Eastwoods,” as Rochester Teachers Assn. President Adam Urbanski calls them--who will get the toughest assignments.

Teachers Aid Administrators

Teachers in each school will sit with the principal and other administrators on planning committees that will shape curriculum, establish performance goals and decide who gets hired.

In exchange for more power, the contract also seeks to hold Rochester’s 2,400 teachers more accountable.

The path-breaking, expensive compact is the product of an unusual rapport between Urbanski and school Supt. Peter McWalters, who risked his central office career walking a picket line with Rochester teachers in 1980.

“It’s founded heavily on the mutual trust of two 41-year-old men going through their mid-life crisis together,” quipped teacher Barbara Agor, who was lured back to the city schools from the University of Rochester faculty by the fat pay increase.

The Rochester contract borrows heavily from ideas espoused in “A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century,” a Carnegie Corp. task force report that urged dramatic improvements in the lot and livelihood of teachers.

The report in May, 1986, produced a National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, but that board is still years away from certifying outstanding teachers.

Instead of waiting, McWalters and Urbanski decided to try to jump-start the movement here on the shores of Lake Ontario.

Their sales pitch is not that it will do wonderful things for teachers, but that it will pay dividends for Rochester’s 33,000 students, 70% of them black or Latino.

The real aim, said McWalters, is “to break the cycle of urban poverty.”

‘Really Scary Stuff’

Rochester’s schools are no blackboard jungle. Its achievement test scores have risen steadily in the last decade. In 1986, 62% of the black children in elementary school were at or above national averages in math and 50% in reading.

But far from crowing over those numbers, McWalters rattles off other statistics that he calls “the demographics of failure”: Minorities make up only a third of those enrolled in tough Regents courses; 40% to 50% of the seventh- and eighth-graders in the non-Regents courses get Fs; the dropout rate is 30%.

“This is really scary stuff to me,” said the superintendent, a Peace Corps alumnus. “If we’re not going to educate these poor kids, we can stop all this revolution and stop wasting everybody’s money.”

Urbanski vows that if the Rochester experiment fails, “I will not be part of it. I will not collect a paycheck having retired and not announced it.

“If you don’t get much better results because of your great investment in teachers, then we don’t deserve this,” said the union president, a Polish emigre with a Ph.D. in history.

Urbanski foresees a day when engineering graduates will turn their backs on industry to teach math and medical school graduates will put aside their stethoscopes and “seek teaching positions in biology and sciences in our schools.”

Board OKd Plan, 5-2

The all-Democrat school board on Aug. 20 voted 5-2 to endorse the three-year contract, retroactive to July 1, despite some members’ misgivings about where the money will come from. The teachers association ratified it on Sept. 9.

Catherine Spoto, the board vice president, believes the day may come when the child of a Kodak manager and the child of a poor inner-city parent will enjoy the same chance of success in school.

Pillars of the business community, including Eastman Kodak Co. President Kay R. Whitmore, have pledged support for Rochester’s school improvement efforts, and the city schools already get a major slice of sales tax receipts from the surrounding Monroe County suburbs.

But some insiders question whether the city will be able to deliver on its promises. Mayor Thomas P. Ryan Jr. is seeking an independent investigation of the district’s finances.

School Board President Archie Curry voted against the contract, saying, “In all good conscience, I cannot start . . . down the road of deficit spending.”

Money Is No Guarantee

Frank Willis cast the other no vote. “The money doesn’t guarantee us that we’re going to get better teachers,” he said.

McWalters contends that elimination of seniority “step” increases and the infusion of state Excellence in Teaching funds makes this pact no more expensive than a standard settlement with 7% annual increases.

All Rochester teachers got $4,500 raises this fall and will get 11% more in each of the next two years.

Starting salaries shot up from $18,983 to $23,483 this year and will reach $28,933 in 1989-90.

Veteran teachers making $32,651 under the old contract jumped to $37,151 and will earn $45,773 in 1989-90. The top salary on the schedule then will be $57,581, plus whatever extra a lead teacher earns. A 20% differential would put the top teacher at $69,097.

McWalters now calls that figure “theoretically possible but very unlikely.”

Teachers Elated, Worried

As for the teachers themselves, their mood fluctuates between elation and acute anxiety. Rochester was already in the midst of dividing its comprehensive secondary schools into separate middle and senior highs.

“All over the system right now I have schools in tension,” McWalters said.

One is Franklin High School, which McWalters calls “a perfect example of schizophrenia after a contract like this.”

At Franklin, a sprawling brick factory with 1,600 students, old-line faculty union reps have been quarreling with decisions made by a new principal, Kay McClendon.

She says she is just carrying out plans made previously to humanize the environment at Franklin. Bells no longer ring between classes and students cannot leave the building for lunch.

Students Have Changed

Franklin was once a predominantly white school with stiff academics. Its alumni include Urbanski, whose family fled communist Poland when he was a boy.

“You have people here who’ve been here 20 years and longer,” McClendon said. “The clients have changed. The good students as they define them are not here any more. Society has changed. Now we have to position ourselves to meet the needs of the kids we now have. That’s difficult.”

At Clara Barton No. 2 School, located in a poor neighborhood, the faculty and principal work closely together and have solid test scores to show for it.

Special education teacher Barbara Hansen, the school’s union rep, said, “This contract is a very iffy thing for us in some ways. . . It’s not like we’ve been holding back, and now that you’ve given us this extra money we’re all of a sudden going to be better teachers. We’re being the best teachers that we can right now.”

Several teachers relaxing in the faculty lounge at East High School voiced misgivings.

Promises No Miracles

Social studies teacher Tom Van Allen, 42, said, “The money is nice, but to think that I can work any harder, to work miracles, is a fallacy.”

The contract will make each secondary teacher responsible for “home-based guidance” of 20 students. Each will serve as the homeroom teacher for the group, meeting with them at the start and close of the day, serving as the main contact with parents and running interference for the youngster with other teachers.

The contract creates four categories of teachers:

- Interns for the first year.

- Resident teachers for one to four years before final certification and tenure.

- Professional teachers whose salaries would rise only up to step 12 of the old 25-step contract.

- Lead teachers who will help write curriculum, serve as mentors and perform other duties. Under this program, which begins in July, a teacher could compete for a lead slot after 10 years’ service.

Urbanski thinks they will be paid 15% to 20% extra; McWalters said it may range from 2% to 20%, depending on their duties. No one knows yet how many there will be.

The contract stops giving teachers automatic raises for obtaining advanced degrees or piling up graduate school credits. It commits them to working an extra week by 1989-90 to attend workshops and plan school improvements, and curtails early class dismissals for faculty meetings.

Competition for Jobs

If the district lays teachers off, seniority will still determine transfers. But teachers seeking a voluntary transfer must compete for openings and sell themselves to the school-based planning team.

Dick Raymond, 51, a veteran math teacher at East, said lead teachers “are being asked to give up quite a bit in exchange for money. You reach a point in your life where money is good, but it’s not worth taking the chance that you’re going to be shipped off someplace else that you have no interest being at.”

But Raymond said his son may switch his college major from math and computers to education. Five years ago, a daughter who wanted to teach went into the computer industry instead at a salary $10,000 higher than schools were offering.

Urbanski upbraided a member of his American Federation of Teachers local who complained he could have made nearly as much under the old contract without worrying about accountability.

“So what?” Urbanski shot back. “Are you saying my job is to make sure that you come out ahead personally? Or are we here to protect something much more important than that? I’m asking you to take the lumps for those who will follow us.”

Some Feel Threatened

Some administrators feel threatened by the teacher contract.

East Junior-Senior High School Principal Ed Cavalier said, “There’s only so much money there in the pot.”

Last year, the 320-member Assn. of Administrators and Supervisors of Rochester went to court to try to block a Peer Assistance and Review Program in which teachers serve as mentors for new teachers and troubled veterans. A judge threw out their complaint.

Richard Stear, the association president and a department head at Edison vocational school, said, “Administrators, too, need to feel empowered.”

At Monroe Junior-Senior High School, Principal Bob Pedzic praises the notion of shared governance, but expresses misgivings about paying any teacher more than the $61,000 he earns.

Teacher empowerment “to me does not mean decisions are going to be made by committee and all I’m going to do is make sure that the buses come in on time and leave at the end of the day,” Pedzic said.

‘Enormous’ Bet

“The bet placed on the table in Rochester is enormous,” said Marc S. Tucker, who directed the Carnegie task force.

If it works in Rochester, Tucker said, big-city schools will have a model to follow. If it fails, “there’s a real question how long those $70,000 salaries are going to be there.”

Urbanski, whom some members tout as a possible successor to AFT President Albert Shanker, said resolutely, “I’m not afraid to fail. Winston Churchill’s definition of success, you know what that is? Going from failure to failure with undiminished enthusiasm.”