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In nearly every respect, Seattle students are shortchanged on learning time, receiving fewer school days this year than state law requires and suffering high teacher absentee rates (an average of 16 days per teacher). Seattle elementary students have the shortest school day in the region and theirs is among the shortest in the nation. |
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After a number of significant recent pay raises, Seattle's teacher salaries are now largely competitive with other Puget Sound districts, but only if teachers agree to take a lot more advanced coursework than what is typically required of teachers. In fact Seattle spends 22 percent of its annual teacher payroll to incentivize teachers to take more courses, despite research that requiring teachers to do so does not necessarily improve student learning. |
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When teachers receive their annual pay raises, the biggest pay raises are reserved for the longest serving teachers, an inequitable system that works against retention of newer teachers and which is a practice not found in most other large districts in the nation. |
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Seattle does better than other districts across the nation in attracting teachers with stronger academic backgrounds but does not do enough to aggressively recruit teachers early enough in the year, especially in shortage areas. |
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In spite of a policy that gives principals final say over who can teach in their buildings, principals are often forced to take teachers they have not chosen or approved. |
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Seattle is not doing a thorough job evaluating teachers' performance, giving short shrift to teachers' impact on student learning and identifying 99.5 percent of the workforce as satisfactory in the most recent school year. |
March 2010: Inspired by NCTQ's report, Our Schools Coalition, a citywide coalition of 30-plus groups, forms to advocate for teacher-quality reforms in the new union contract. Among the changes the group seeks are: increased teacher collaboration time; linking student achievement to teacher evaluations; performance-based staffing decisions; and pay for performance.
October 2010: A year after NCTQ released a study on Seattle's human-capital policies, we take a close look at the district's new collective-bargaining agreement. Better teacher evaluations—check. More principal autonomy in selecting staff—check. But there is room for improvement.
August 2010: Amid contract negotiations, NCTQ provides a side-by-side analysis of proposals made by Seattle Public Schools and the Seattle Education Association, concluding that, on the whole, the district's recommendations would do more to improve teacher quality.
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