Denver Teacher Strike Ends With Deal Of Raising Pay By Up To 11 Percent

DENVER, CO - FEBRUARY 12: 4th grade teacher Gerardo Cedillo, middle, with fist in the air, and other teachers from Florida Pitt-Waller Ece-8 School hold up a protest banner and chant as they take part in a rally in C... DENVER, CO - FEBRUARY 12: 4th grade teacher Gerardo Cedillo, middle, with fist in the air, and other teachers from Florida Pitt-Waller Ece-8 School hold up a protest banner and chant as they take part in a rally in Civic Center on February 12, 2019 in Denver, Colorado. Denver Public Schools teachers showed up by the thousands for a rally with speeches at Denver's Civic Center Park then they marched to encircle the entire Denver Public Library where negotiations are currently being held. This is day two of the Denver Teacher's strike as DPS administrators meet with teacher's union negotiators to try to work out a deal for the teachers. (Photo by Helen H. Richardson/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images) MORE LESS
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DENVER (AP) — Denver school administrators and the city’s striking teachers reached a tentative deal Thursday to end a three-day educator walkout with a contract agreement that gives teachers raises of 7 to 11 percent, built-in cost-of-living increases and opportunities for future salary hikes.

The key sticking point of variable bonuses for teachers working in tougher environments will be studied to determine if they help retain teachers in schools, the teachers’ union said.

The deal was reached after negotiations that went through the night and it was announced shortly before schools opened Thursday morning. Superintendent Susana Cordova and teacher union president Henry Roman hugging after signing it. Teachers were encouraged to return to their classrooms if they felt ready, even though the deal awaits ratification by the full union membership.

More than half the district’s teachers went on strike Monday after negotiations over pay broke down.

Democrat Gov. Jared Polis, whose administration declined to use its power to block the strike, praised the deal though he said he wished it had been reached before a walkout.

“Denver’s kids are the biggest winners in today’s agreement,” he said.

The teachers had demanded that the school system should rely less on bonuses for educators in high-poverty and high-priority schools.

The district gives bonuses to teachers who work in schools with students from low-income families, in schools that are designated high priority or in positions that are considered hard to staff, such as special education or speech language pathology. It sees the bonuses as key to boosting the academic performance of poor and minority students.

Teachers on the bargaining team said bonuses alone will not keep their colleagues at high-poverty and other priority schools, pointing to district data that showed a variety of teacher retention rates at those locations.

Teachers have said the reliance on bonuses leads to high turnover, which they say hurts students, and that spending money on smaller class sizes and adding support staff, like counselors, is the best way to help disadvantaged students.

Cordova said she wants to have similar conversations about Denver’s schools with teachers “all the time.”

“Truthfully, there is so much that we agree on,” she said.

The district said some of the extra money being put into teacher pay will come from cutting about 150 jobs in the district’s central office and eliminating performance bonuses for staffers in the office.

The walkout came about a year after West Virginia teachers launched the national “Red4Ed” movement with a nine-day strike in which they won 5 percent pay raises. Most recently, Los Angeles teachers held a six-day strike last month.

In Denver, there are 71,000 students in district-run schools. Another 21,000 are enrolled in charter schools that were unaffected by the strike.

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Notable Replies

  1. Who would have thought that Trump would revitalize Unions…

  2. Lest anyone get too excited about Colorado Senator Michael Bennet after his emotional speech on the Senate floor last month, please know that he was the superintendent of Denver Public Schools when the Pro Comp compensation system was brought into DPS. This Pro Comp compensation system is one of the central teacher union concerns that sparked their strike.

  3. Avatar for drtv drtv says:

    From Six Dangerous Myths About Pay (Pfeffer, 1998):

    Despite the evident popularity of this practice, the problems with individual merit pay are numerous and well documented. It has been shown to undermine teamwork, encourage employees to focus on the short term, and lead people to link compensation to political skills and ingratiating personalities rather than to performance.

    and

    Surveys conducted by various consulting companies that specialize in management and compensation also reveal the problems and dissatisfaction with individual merit pay. For instance, a study by the consulting firm William M. Mercer reported 73% that major changes to their performance-management plans in the preceding two years, as they experimented with different ways to tie pay to individual performance. But 47% reported that their employees found the systems neither fair nor sensible, and 51% of the employees said that the performance management system provided little value to the company. No wonder Mercer concluded that most individual merit or performance-based pay plans share two attributes: they absorb vast amounts of management time and resources, and they make everybody unhappy.

    It’s a bad idea in business. So why apply it to education?

    Six Dangerous Myths About Pay

  4. Avatar for paulw paulw says:

    It’s too obviously gamed.

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