Access to High Quality Education in Pittsburgh: Case Study I

A Case Study Exploration of Career Ladder Programs in Pittsburgh Public Schools

Project Profile

This project attempted to pay effective Pittsburgh Public School teachers additional pay to take on leadership roles in high-needs schools.

Project Sector:

Policy and Leadership

Area of Initial Design Focus

Social Innovation

Level(s) of Spatial Scale

City of Pittsburgh (targeting specific schools within the city)

Temporal Scale

The project was funded and scoped for five years, with the intent that it would continue beyond the first five years. Participants knew that the program was intended to become a permanent opportunity within the school district but the nature of the roles was subject to change.

Transition Design Potential

This project has the potential to become a transition design solution through re-conception of the trajectory of the teaching profession in Pittsburgh.

Project Overview

Beginning in 2010, Pittsburgh Public Schools began the Career Ladder program which offered qualified teachers the opportunity to take on a promotional role that allowed them to stay in the classroom while taking on leadership responsibilities and earning increased pay. Three roles were staffed long-term that aligned in different ways to the broad district goal of ensuring that all students were taught by an effective teacher every day.

These three roles were the Learning Environment Specialist, focused on improving school culture, the Promise-Readiness Corps, for high school teachers and counselors to support a cohort of 9th and 10th grade students by collaborating, advising and looping to ensure they’re college-ready by 11th grade, and the Instructional Teacher Leader 2 (because a first iteration already existed), math and literacy teachers who taught half-time and coached a cohort of their peers half-time to improve their classroom practices. In the first year the programs launched over 300 teachers applied, and 120 were accepted. Over the first 5 years of these programs, about 10% of the teaching workforce served in one of these roles each year. Roles had term limits of two years, and each year a teacher’s performance in the role, as well as the effectiveness of the program, were evaluated.

The program was designed to encourage great teachers to move to higher needs schools and serve the highest-need students and broaden their impact by elevating their great instructional practices as a model for other teachers. National funding and policy shifts made it possible for the district to build a system for evaluating teacher performance using multiple measures (comprised of observation, student growth, and student feedback) that was then used to determine which teachers qualified for these roles. Teachers in these roles were paid up to $11,300 more dollars each year for the increased leadership responsibilities they took on. A federal Teacher Incentive Fund grant provided the financing for these roles, their program management, and training costs for the first three years of their implementation in schools. The program (and the specific roles) were written into the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) that governs the labor practices between the school district and the teacher’s union, allowing for rules and regulations that made mobility of teachers between schools to be superseded and maneuvered around. The collective bargaining agreement also outlined that teachers in the Career Ladder program would work a longer year to allow training to take place. The program’s inclusion in the CBA signaled that both the district and the union were united in their belief that these roles were positive for teachers and intended to become a new career pathway long-term.

Vision & Lifestyle

This program was intended to impact the long-term careers of district teachers, offer opportunities that would make the district stand out to new applicants, and have a measurable impact on student outcomes. However, the evaluation requirements related to the grant required that an impact to be seen in four years — a very short timeline to train teachers in new leadership roles, and see a change in student outcomes. The CBA is renewed every five years as well, so the timeline for these positions to be permanent was also subject to change on that timeline (though once something is in the CBA, it’s likely to remain). Financially, the district would need to absorb the cost of paying for these roles over time because grant funding was only for five years. The project was framed as long-term, but in reality was envisioned on a very short and unsustainable timeline. A logic model that required back-casting was created, but it was quickly abandoned as leadership of the roles transitioned over time. Those implementing the program wanted the timeline to show impact to be at least six years to allow the new roles to become stable fixtures in schools. It was conceived as one strategy of many intended to re-imagine the career trajectory of a teacher — intended to pay effective teachers differently, not just pay more for time spent in the teaching position. This program happened in conjunction with a new evaluation and overall compensation system that was also part of the CBA.

Theories of Change

The theory of change that informed the design of the Career Ladder program was a set of assumptions and projections about how student outcomes could be positively impacted by influencing teacher practices. In 2008, there was agreement across stakeholder groups in PPS that outcomes for students, particularly those of color, were not acceptable, and traditional means for trying to address the issue was not working. At the same time, national research emerged that made it clear that the teacher was the most important school-based factor in impacting student outcomes. At the federal level, policies shifted to incentivize districts with funding who could propose unique solutions to the achievement gap problem. To get started, teachers, principals, union representatives, and district representatives came together to outline the current scope of the problem and determine a solution — one part of the solution was to introduce promotional roles for teachers and figure out how to design those roles to be attractive to teachers and

The explicit hypothesis was that, if provided with the right type of incentive, effective teachers would be willing to move to lower performing schools to teach, and improve outcomes for those students. This hypothesis was based on research that showed teachers at the number one school-based influence on a child’s educational experience, and came in conjunction with the aforementioned new ways of measuring the effectiveness of teachers to ensure those who were offered these opportunities were qualified.

Mindset and Posture

The mindset and posture of the program was conceived within a mechanistic worldview. The design relied on changing existing practices incrementally over time and took a collaborative posture in which the adults within the system and the different decision makers were all sharing voices and opinions to shape the program. The voice of parents and the community was absent in the discussion of how the district could best problem solve to address the achievement gap for students. The dominant structure of the system was present and the current construction of what educational delivery and educational outcomes should look like was also present.

New Ways of Designing

The project emerged out of “good intentions.” Ultimately the project was intended to disrupt the current educational paradigm, where teachers, regardless of their skill-level, are paid based on length-of-tenure. It established a new way to compensate teachers, encourage leadership, and attract teachers to the district and high-need schools. The program attempts to solve for pattern by holistically considering the financial health of good teachers and their career trajectories that, until these opportunities arose, all followed the same path. In terms of value, the teachers should benefit as much as the students by receiving additional ongoing training. What it does not do is provide methods to ensure that the program’s potential impact on students will be fully realized over time, ensuring students are actually accessing a high-quality education. The program itself makes assumptions about the impact of paying “good teachers” higher salaries. It does not challenge the curriculum or how high quality education should be delivered; it does not challenge the traditional measures of “impact” — standardized test scores. The project was further complicated by assuming that positive impact could be measured in only five years.

Connection to Wicked Problems

The Career Ladder program connects to policy change, economic incentives, and the inequalities that exist in access to high-quality education based on a student’s physical location. Education is currently a localized experience that is impacted by the topography that determines neighborhood boundaries and varies based on socioeconomic status. The solution we propose will solve for the access problem by making the educational experience more place-based, while using technology to improve access to good teachers.

Needs and Satisfiers

Access to high quality education requires students and teachers needs and satisfiers to be met in order to “show up” to teach or be educated. While the project encourages good teachers to move to high need schools through economic incentives, it does not address students’ needs and satisfiers. Social problems such as income inequality, food insecurity, transportation issues, and family issues are not addressed. Therefore this sort of project can be regarded as an ameliorative intervention–one that seeks to solve symptoms of the problem and not the root of it.

Understanding the Scope of the Project

Using the Winterhouse Symposium Matrix, we can place the Career Ladder Programs in Pittsburgh Public Schools at a systems innovation level. It is working with the existing infrastructure of the Pittsburgh Public Schools but seeks to create a system-wide intervention that could change significantly the distribution of teachers in the city’s school system. Given that the program was conceived in collaboration with several stakeholders within the Pittsburgh Public School System but since it excluded participation from parents and students, it failed to reach a cross-sector scale.

In order for this project to create a more lasting systemic-level change it would have to intervene in the existing infrastructure of the Public School system and would have to have a broader scope of shareholders involved in the ideation and implementation of it, while considering a more extended timeframe (not one that is determined by the project’s 5 year funding).