as they phase out large schools (which they are still doing, and which we should be doing more to hinder), experienced teachers are forced to look for placement, and these teachers have tended to stay with the schools they have worked in for a long time. Their difficulty finding placement is a real concern, and that’s today, under Open Market, without their salaries being billed to the schools.

I understand that there are far fewer senior teachers than in the past, but some of those who are left will be looking for new placement, not out of choice, and this funding proposal encourages principals to discriminate against them, as if there weren’t already a problem.

Jonathan

We all know that none of this is going to make a real statistical difference. It’s change for change sake and we need to patiently ride out the remainder of the Bloomberg term and focus our efforts on developing a true pro-public education candidate that has a chance at winning election. The rest is nonsense.

I apologized to him for that error, and I want to correct that here. In the Times article he had added a disclosure saying he was an advisor to Klein, and I made an incorrect assumption based on that.

In particular, they propose that schools will be charged the actual cost of their teachers.

Read that carefully. Schools will be given financial incentive to shun experienced teachers.

Under those circumstances, I feel no incentive to discuss the merits and demerits of WSF. We have more important business.

Jonathan

The fact that you dismiss it because SF’s WSF implementation uses averaged teacher salaries is interesting. Is you main objection to WSF in NY because of the use of true salaries?

Do you really believe that true cost accounting penalizes schools with experienced teachers? That woould seem to indicate you think experienced teachers are overpayed. The fact is that a principal would be a fool to stack his payroll with rookie teachers. He/she would fail. So he/she would be careful to blend experience and youth and — in all likelihood — end up with pretty average salaries.

Here is SF the use of averaged salaries is an arrangement negotiated with the union. It preserves the main value of WSF — increased site autonomy and enhaced site-based decision making — without intersecting with the thorny issues of pay scales and hiring rules. And it works, even if you choose to ignore the ample evidence.

One more fact to chew on: if SF were to use actual salaries, the schools that would be most negatively impacted would be the thriving, successful schools that serve the less disadvantaged students. The experienced teachers tend to gravitate to the schools that are doing well. These schools simply could not afford to keep their staff intact if they had to pay the true costs. We are searching for ways to alleviate this inequity here. I don’t really think moving WSF to true-cost salary budgeting is the answer. But that hardly invalidates our experience with WSF.

“City Comptroller William Thompson Jr. devoured Schools Chancellor Joel Klein at breakfast yesterday.

“With the chancellor sitting just a few feet away, the fiscal watchdog ripped the Department of Education as ‘a high-risk investment’ before dozens of public-school principals at a breakfast forum on fiscal accountability in education.

“In a no-holds-barred evisceration of the department’s business practices, Thompson portrayed the agency as one in the midst of a corporate back-room, free-for-all spending spree with none of the accountability to the public that it demands of its schools.

“He accused the department of exploiting ‘a gray area’ in state procurement law that allows it to strike no-bid contracts with impunity, and suggested the latest effort to restructure the school system will not yield significant gains.

“‘The people of New York City have a right to expect better fiscal management from those who run our educational system,’ Thompson, considered a 2009 mayoral candidate, said at Fordham University’s Graduate School of Education.

“Klein shrugged off the verbal assault as ‘all old news.’

“He also defended the restructuring, which is meant to give principals more authority over their budgets and curriculum, as a means toward pumping more money into classrooms.”

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If the Chancellor has his way, his “restructuring” will, ultimately, have the effect of transforming the DOE into subsidiaries of Edison, McGraw-Hill, and Princeton Review.

Where do we sign up to get an advance copy of that IPO?