Making Maryland the Best State for Public School Educators

The Kirwan Commission wants Maryland to be a leader in recruiting and retaining excellent educators

If you’ve been following MSEA Newsfeed, you know we’re focused like a laser on the Kirwan Commission — a 25-member panel of state leaders, education experts, and public education advocates working on a plan to address Maryland’s $2.9 billion funding shortage with innovative strategies to improve our schools. It’s a once-in-a-generation chance to close resource and opportunity gaps in our state education system.

After starting its work more than two years ago, the Commission has released a set of preliminary policy recommendations. They now plan to build a new school funding formula — based on the cost of those ideas — for the Maryland General Assembly to take action on in 2019.

But in the meantime, we’re engaging educators and our community partners to make sure the Commission gets the policy recommendations right. So MSEA is writing a series of briefs designed to help you get up to speed and give you a chance to voice your thoughts.

Last week, we covered the Commission’s recommendations to expand access to public pre-K programs:

Here’s How the Kirwan Commission Wants to Expand Early Childhood Education

This week, we’re focusing on their preliminary plan to make Maryland’s educator workforce the best in the nation and a leader in the world.

Rebuilding the Teaching Profession Pipeline

The Kirwan Commission has focused heavily on addressing declining enrollment in teacher preparation programs in Maryland and across the country. According to the Learning Policy Institute, enrollment in U.S. teacher-preparation programs dropped from 691,000 in 2009 to 451,000 in 2014, a 35 percent decline. Maryland has seen similar negative trends: University of Maryland data shows that our state saw a 19% decline in enrollment in undergraduate and graduate programs from 2010–2014:

University of Maryland College of Education graph of P-12 Longitudinal Data System Dashboards

With fewer applicants for teacher education programs, universities in Maryland are less selective with who they accept. According to Kirwan Commission draft documents:

“While the University of Maryland, College Park Campus (UMCP) and Towson University both require a 3.0 minimum GPA for candidates, the academic record of the high school students going into teacher education at UMCP are among the lowest of those going into any professional preparation program, and, alarmingly, only a handful of students among the thousands entering these two universities every year elect to prepare themselves to be teachers.”

Meanwhile, data shows that our education preparation programs are failing to adequately train many students. The University of Maryland has found that the state’s 24 school districts hire just 30–40% of recent graduates from teacher preparation programs. Instead, 68% of their new hires are from out-of-state — coming from preparation programs that the state has no ability to improve or hold accountable.

The Tipping Point: Solving the Staffing and Salary Crisis in Maryland Schools

In an effort to drive up demand for entering Maryland’s teaching profession and ensure more recent graduates are hired in Maryland schools, the Kirwan Commission has made the following preliminary recommendations:

1. Offer high-performing graduating seniors at Maryland high schools a free college education — including tuition, fees, and room and board — if they major in education and commit to teach for a certain number of years (to be determined in the final report or in future legislation) in a Maryland public school. Priority would be given to applicants who commit to teach in high-needs schools. The scholarship would also be made available for career changers who need to go back to school to get teacher certification and college students who change their major to education.
2. Mandate that universities improve the standards for entering education preparation programs and increase rigor for what is expected for graduation.
3. Provide college students majoring in education ample opportunities for clinical experience in classrooms to confirm their interest in and aptitude for teaching early in their college careers.
4. Use program approval power to more rigorously assess the quality of college preparation programs by examining the success of teachers early in their careers. The Commission recommends that success of programs not be based on Praxis entrance exams and other test-based indicators.
5. Raise teacher compensation and improve the conditions under which teachers work.

Supporting and Compensating Excellent Teachers

In the fall, we wrote in MSEA Newsfeed about the promising ideas coming out of the Kirwan Commission on elevating teacher pay to match comparable highly-skilled professions, like CPAs and architects:

Kirwan Commission Takes Major Step Forward on Teacher Pay

Here’s a refresher. The Commission has made the following preliminary proposal:

1. In the first five years of implementation, the Kirwan plan would raise Maryland’s average teacher salary to match that of Massachusetts and New Jersey — which we estimate would reach $92,000 by 2024, a 34% increase from the $68,000 the average teacher in Maryland makes now.
2. Following that increase, Maryland would implement career ladders that provide exemplar teachers the opportunity to take on leadership roles — like mentor, instructional coach, or curriculum specialist — for significantly increased salary. For example, the top of the teacher side of the ladder would pay the same salary as the top of the administrative ladder (see Y-shaped model below). During this move, the state would ask districts to increase teacher pay to match comparable highly-educated and skilled professions in their region. The Commission estimates that teachers across the state are currently at about 40% of the salaries of these comparison career options.
3. Each district would have its own locally-negotiated educator leadership structure, with some broad commonalities determined in a statewide framework. Criteria for advancement would not be based on standardized test scores, and release time would be given to teacher leaders so they have the time to accomplish their tasks — while still staying in the classroom part-time.

The Commission has made a number of other recommendations to improve teacher working conditions, especially for new educators:

More Planning and Collaboration Time

Maryland teachers spend between 70–80% of their day teaching. It’s closer to 40% in better performing countries where collaboration, observation, and other professional development is valued as essential skill-building. With more time to plan, learn, and work in coordination with colleagues, teachers can improve the craft and make more progress with struggling students. The Commission’s staff and consultants are busy figuring out the costs for this recommendation. The deliberations of the Commission and legislature over the next year will determine what the decrease will be.

Better Mentoring for New Teachers

While the state has regulations in place that require a mentor for all new teachers, its implementation has been quite poor.

New Teacher Support in Maryland: Rhetoric vs. Reality

One key example: 85% of mentors say they are not given a reduced workload to spend time with new teachers in their caseload. The Commission wants to fix that issue by requiring release time for mentor teachers so they can focus on helping their mentees.

Improving School Leadership Quality

While principals play a central role in a school’s effectiveness, Maryland requires little demonstration of success as a teacher — let alone success in mentoring and supporting the instruction of other colleagues in their school building — to become a school leader. According to the Learning Policy Institute, the lack of adequate support from school leadership is one of the key factors in Maryland’s second-worst school working conditions ranking.

In surveys, just 41% of Maryland teachers strongly agree that their school administration’s behavior toward the staff is supportive and encouraging.

To address this problem, the Commission has recommended that educators meet several standards before reaching administration:

1. Principals should have “demonstrated the skills and knowledge needed to be highly competent instructional leaders.” As you can see in the Y-shaped career ladder model above, educators would be required to demonstrate excellent content and instruction skills and success in mentoring less experienced colleagues before reaching school leadership.
2. In order to ensure school leadership matches the diversity and needs of our student population, the recommendations require that principals must have “significant experience and success at schools that represent the demographic and economic diversity of the school districts in which they have worked.”

What Do You Think?

Agree with the Commission’s plan? Think they could make some improvements? Comment on the Facebook post you clicked to get to this story.