Testimony Before the Master Plan Committee on Professional Personnel Development 

February 12, 2002

By VirginiaAnn Shadwick, Representing the California Teachers Association

M. Chair and Members of the Committee:

I am VirginiaAnn Shadwick, a member of the Board of Directors of the California Teachers Association and a Librarian at San Francisco State University.

On behalf of our more than 300,000 members, I would like to thank you for this opportunity to address the Professional Personnel Development work group’s draft report. I would also like to thank you and the committee members for their hard work and for the attention the legislature is paying to these important issues.

Let me at the outset clearly state that CTA is firmly committed to ensuring that every student at every level of public education in California – from kindergarten through the university – is taught by a highly qualified educator. Furthermore, we believe it is crucial to have sufficient numbers of highly qualified librarians, nurses, counselors and other certificated personnel whose dedicated efforts are helping our students throughout the state.

Given the committee’s long agenda, I’ll try to keep my remarks short. Please consider them an addendum to the minority report that was submitted by Leslie Littman, a social studies teacher from Hart High School, a member of the work group, and chair of CTA’s Credentials and Professional Development Committee.

I would like to focus attention on two major issues.

First, what must be done to attract and keep the fully qualified teachers California needs at all levels K-university; and, second, what changes we are urging be made to the draft recommendations.

Let me emphasize that every recent study on the teaching shortage in California – including the work group report -- has made the same point. First and foremost, to get the more than 300,000 highly qualified teachers and higher education faculty this state needs over the next decade, California must make the compensation packages for these jobs more attractive. We simply cannot secure the teachers we need without bringing the salary and benefits more in line with those of comparable positions with comparable responsibilities.

The only real alternative is to reduce the standards for teachers, and that is a foolish alternative. CTA firmly opposes reductions in standards for teachers. We support taking the only step that will achieve the objective, and that is substantially raising salaries for fully qualified teachers and faculty.

We believe this issue is so important that it should become the report’s first and foremost recommendation. We would urge that the report include the following language: "The California Legislature believes every Pre-kindergarten through grade 12 public school and every community college district and the California State University system must have salary schedules/structures and fringe benefit programs that will attract and retain scholarly intelligent, creative, and dedicated personnel. The legislature is committed to making salary and benefit increases a priority in the State of California."

No other remedy….no matter how it is packaged or sugar coated…will help the shortage.

Note that, technically speaking, California does not have a shortage of fully qualified or credentialed teachers. The data analyzed by the SRI International has determined that California has plenty of fully credentialed teachers – just that many of them have left the profession for other types of employment with better pay and working conditions. Higher salaries and more attention to working conditions would go a long way to keep them from leaving.

At the higher education level, the California Postsecondary Education Commission has just concluded that faculty salaries at the state university have fallen 10.6% behind pay at comparable universities.

Several recommendations in the report do propose salary increases for some elements of the academic community. If the increases in recommendations 9.4, 10.0, and 13.4 were enacted alone, for example, they would provide increases for administrators only. Such actions would be divisive and unfair, and not comprehensive enough to solve the problem. Even more important, they would skew the priorities of an institution away from instruction. You can’t attract teaching personnel across the board with salary increases targeted at just a few categories.

Second, although the working group has come up with a number of solid recommendations, some of the recommendations are not research-based. These recommendations will not solve the issues of teacher quality and retention.

Let me focus first on the items the report addresses that primarily affect grades K-12.

The current recommendations, specifically Recommendation 1.0, calls for the Governor’s Office of the Secretary of Education to coordinate virtually all K-12 professional development activities. We believe that procedure would undermine the functions of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, a constitutional officer elected by the people. CTA does not believe that this recommendation will improve the quality of professional development. This will also not contribute to an understanding of the character and condition of the organization within which teachers and faculty do their work and pursue professional development. For these reasons, we oppose this recommendation.

Current recommendations 2.0 and 3.0 would create new bureaucracies to gather data and coordinate and monitor local programs. CTA believes this would simply misuse limited state resources. These resources would be better earmarked for classroom instruction and support, including substantive training at the district and at school-site locations.

Option 8.1.2 would create still another teaching credential, a continuation of a troubling trend that has led to a proliferation of paper. The California Commission on Teacher Credentialing has reviewed similar proposals to create that additional credential. The legislature has rejected it out of hand each and every time. CTA urges deletion of this recommendation.

We have equally important concerns relative to the recommendations about higher education. Many of the provisions of the current higher education master plan were not addressed by recommendations from any of the workgroups. We believe these provisions should be retained and protected.

Recommendation 7.1 refers to links between the community colleges and higher education teacher education that CTA believes are important to forge. We believe that the recommendation should be expanded to make clear that teachers need strong grounding in English language and math skills, and that the community colleges are a crucial and alternate location for tackling this task…before candidates enter teacher education programs at the university.

Recommendation 8.0 needs to be expanded to ensure that all instructors have the time and opportunity to collaborate with their colleagues.

Recommendation 11.0 would establish still another new "center" at a time of diminished state resources. We would argue instead the new doctoral collaboration between UC and CSU could include a focus on teaching and learning generally. Further, funds should instead be earmarked for higher priority instructional uses including those in 11.0.

Recommendation 12.0 calls for still another commission to evaluate the impact of using part-time and temporary faculty. This issue has already been studied extensively. CTA believes it’s time to take action by increasing the number of full-time permanent instructional positions and by allowing our current, dedicated, fully qualified part-time instructors first consideration for the new positions. It’s also important to provide parity in pay and benefits for part-time instructors, as well as pay for advising and performing committee work.

Recommendation 14.1 focuses on efforts to fully implement the doctorate in education degree at the CSU in collaboration with UC. We urge that CTA and faculty organizations be made partners helping to ensure that these higher education institutions meet the needs of K-14 professionals in implementing these degree programs. Further, any new programs must be fully funded with additional fiscal resources. We should not further dilute the already limited CSU instructional resources.

These, then, are our major messages: boost instructional pay and benefits to address teacher and faculty shortages, focus funds on classroom instruction and educator professional development, and eliminate unnecessary stumbling blocks and centers, as well as studies that will tell us what we already know.

I’ll be more than happy to answer any questions you’d like to pose. Thank you.