Baltimore City school district leaders are proposing a brand new pay scale system for teachers for next fall to align with the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future standards.
But the Baltimore Teachers Union says the current system, which has existed since 2011, fits the criteria – and can be more easily reformed.
Zach Taylor, the union’s director of research and negotiations, said the district never developed a formal proposal – or presented it to union members – after pitching ideas for a new career ladder in July.
“[The presentation] wasn't written in contract language, which is what actually matters,” Taylor said in an interview with WYPR. “Anybody who's been through negotiations knows that what matters is what does this proposal mean? Where are the details? How does this work? How do people have stability in this pay system?”
In a joint committee meeting Wednesday, the city’s school board voted to let the current pay scale system expire – a move that Taylor says hasn’t happened since its inception.
“What they've chosen to do is very disorganized; it's chaotic; they haven't done so many things that would need to come first,” he said.
Alison Perkins-Cohen, the district’s chief of staff, said that scrapping the old system allows leaders to develop a new one that focuses on teacher leadership opportunities and faster pay – to better align with the Blueprint’s goals.
But Taylor says the current system qualifies under those terms. And the district has yet to reach an agreement with union leaders about this year’s salary raises.
“They want to go ahead and talk about a radically new system when they haven't even done some basic things this year,” he said. “So it makes us feel disrespected, it makes us feel like we're not a priority.”
Perkins-Cohen said the district proposed a framework for the new payment system this summer “to make sure that there was space to have engagement and discussion around that proposal.”
“We'd like to work with our union partners to flush that out more and get their input,” she said. “This is a negotiated process; this is not something we're going to do on our own.”
Concerns and complexities of the current system
Under the city’s current career ladder, teachers earn “achievement units” by participating in professional development or projects outside of the classroom. A culmination of these units leads to salary increases.
The current system needs reform, Taylor said. But by scrapping it completely, the district returns to a traditional career ladder model at the end of this school year – which rewards teachers only based on the amount of years they’ve served, and the degrees they hold.
And how that transition will actually work is unclear, Taylor said. “No one figured that out a decade ago when they wrote this initial contract language,” he said.
Teachers are worried that a new system will require them to receive National Board Certification, a lengthy and time-consuming process, in order to receive raises – or even maintain their current salary.
But Perkins-Cohen says National Board Certification will be only one of multiple career-building pathways that the city offers, as mandated by the Blueprint. No teacher’s salary will decrease because of a new system, she added.
“Our current process is really complex,” Perkins-Cohen said. “We want our teachers to get real-time increases that tie to the work that they're doing on behalf of their school communities and their students. And the current contract is complicated enough that that makes it difficult.”
Taylor says the district has promised faster payments in the past, and hasn’t delivered.
“The district has no credibility when they say that,” he said. “They are always late when it comes to our pay raises. We get pay raises months after they have been earned.”
Taylor also says teachers also don’t want to be treated as “gig workers,” earning raises as stipends for out-of-classroom activities.
“They think teachers should have side hustles, that teachers should be constantly applying for this leadership opportunity, or this after school program,” he said. “But that's not what teachers want. Teachers want to focus on their classrooms. Teachers want to focus on their students.”
What’s next?
Taylor says district leaders should be focusing on this year’s salary issues, instead of prioritizing a brand new system for next year.
“We're still bargaining our pay for our current school year,” he said. “We don't have raises, and our first-year teachers are getting paid $5,000 less than Baltimore County's teachers. And our veteran teachers are, in many cases, tens of thousands of dollars behind.”
The union filed an impasse earlier this fall after failing to reach an agreement with district leaders on this year’s salary amounts. Taylor says they are waiting for a mediator to be appointed to complete the process.
Perkins-Cohen said both conversations can – and should – happen at the same time.
“It wouldn't be prudent for us to have one conversation about one set of compensation without looking at the picture that the legal framework gives us about how this will move going forward,” she said.
Both parties agree that more communication is needed before a pay structure for next school year is finalized.
Taylor says the union needs a formal proposal with the district’s ideas – and “meaningful conversation where teachers are heard and listened to, rather than gauged through working with consultants.”
“Our current system already has us jumping through lots of hoops,” Taylor added. “We don't want to be replacing that current system with an even more complex system. And that's what we know about this new system that has been detailed to the press. It just sounds much more complex.”
