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Justyna Granicka, a specialist maths teacher from South Africa, had her ‘Expression of Interest’ in NZ residency declined because her teaching pay is $0.39c per hour below Immigration NZ’s required threshold. Photo: Annabel Wilson
Justyna Granicka, a specialist maths teacher from South Africa, had her ‘Expression of Interest’ in NZ residency declined because her teaching pay is $0.39c per hour below Immigration NZ’s required threshold. Photo: Annabel Wilson

PoliticsJune 4, 2019

Welcome to NZ teaching, where you don’t get paid enough to be granted residency

Justyna Granicka, a specialist maths teacher from South Africa, had her ‘Expression of Interest’ in NZ residency declined because her teaching pay is $0.39c per hour below Immigration NZ’s required threshold. Photo: Annabel Wilson
Justyna Granicka, a specialist maths teacher from South Africa, had her ‘Expression of Interest’ in NZ residency declined because her teaching pay is $0.39c per hour below Immigration NZ’s required threshold. Photo: Annabel Wilson

Why do we strike? Because the profession is in crisis. Because Immigration NZ declined my teacher mate’s residency application owing to the fact her pay is 39 cents an hour too little, writes Christchurch teacher Annabel Wilson.

I turned my school email to auto-reply at midnight on May 29 because I quite often get emails in the middle of the night. It’s not unusual for a student to send me work for feedback in the small hours. That’s because for teachers, there’s no such thing as after hours. When I message my family or friends to say I’m leaving work at the end of the day, I always have a sad giggle to myself because while I can say I’m leaving work, I can never say I’m finished work.

The role is not a job, it’s a vocation, and it’s incredibly rewarding. And because of that it comes home with you. In piles of marking. In emails from students, colleagues and parents, about assessment, pastoral care issues, co-curricular activities, sport, school events, Ministry requirements and professional development. In the planning for the next day, week, year. In the thoughts and conversations you have about those students you teach, about the best way to meet their diverse needs.

There was a lot of talk at the strike last week. Among the 50,000 protesters who chose not to teach and instead take the ‘last resort’ of striking, there was a strong sense of a shared message – the teaching profession is in crisis. The past 10 years have seen a 38% decrease in the number of new secondary teachers graduating. Student numbers are rising: there will be 10% more secondary school students by 2025. Teachers are getting older – with 21% of teachers over 60 in 2005, and no plan in place for what will happen when the Baby Boomers retire.

The demands upon teachers continue to evolve and increase, and a payrise is only a small part of the solution. We need more time, money and resources in order to ensure all our rangatahi are provided with the education they deserve. The PPTA’s vision, to ‘bring out the best’ applies to both teachers and learners. Teachers require support so their job is sustainable, and they don’t get burnt out. When we value teachers, we value education, and paying them enough would be a start. With fair pay and adequate resourcing, we will be able to empower our young people to reach their true potential.

A colleague stood beside me on the picket line last week. Along with her partner, she’s packed up her life in South Africa to take on a specialist maths teaching job here. She’s committed herself wholeheartedly to her work and the wider life of the school and is already a much valued part of the fabric of our College. Since joining our community this year, she’s led our staff in morning karakia, joined the Social Club and put up her hand to be the ‘grief person’ who writes cards to colleagues in times of loss.

On strike in Christchurch. Photo: Annabel Wilson

In the last four months, as well as meeting the daily requirements within the classroom, she’s been there at Pasifika evening, Polyfest, our overnight marae visit. She tells me that Immigration NZ has just declined her expression of interest in residency, because her pay is 0.39 cents per hour below the required threshold. When a highly skilled teacher is turned down from living here because they don’t earn enough, there’s something wrong. So we marched, sang and chanted “We Want Change” because we do.

Just after midnight on May 30, my email flicked back to normal. Messages, marking and tasks flooded in. A lot of this communication is enriching and exciting – because every day is different and every day we know we are making a difference. Some of the messages are from the PPTA, with updates about the rolling strikes to come.

We won’t teach Year 9s today. Next Tuesday, Year 10s will be ‘rostering home’, followed by Year 11s the Tuesday after that, and Year 12s on Tuesday 2 July in accordance with the PPTA’s strike notice. The nature of this action will be a continuous withdrawal of all labour related to those students for the duration of the strike day, which means no teaching and learning, no feedback, no marking, no report writing or planning for that cohort on that day. Rolling regional strikes are also proceeding for the week of 17- 21 June.

We’ll continue until our voices are heard by the government. Teaching is a verb and we will keep doing what we do and we don’t do it for the money. I hope something happens soon so my colleague gets to stay in the country, and continue to get kids fired up about Maths. It’s situations like hers that just do not make sense, situations that illustrate the frustrations of people working at the chalkface. The profession is at a turning point, and I hope that change is coming.

Keep going!
Image: Getty Images
Image: Getty Images

PoliticsJune 1, 2019

David Seymour: In defence of performance pay for teachers

Image: Getty Images
Image: Getty Images

The state should massively increase its investment in teachers, but take off the blinkers and recognise the best teachers should earn more – it works in the rest of the economy, argues the ACT leader

A recent Spinoff article starts by quoting me as wanting to set $1 million aside as a fund to better remunerate teachers. Now, I don’t want to be pernickety, but: the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars, as ACT actually campaigned on in the 2017 election, is a lot.

There are about 50,000 teachers in New Zealand on a full-time-equivalent basis. If you divide $1 million by 50,000, the answer is $20. The author might have thought, “I know David Seymour’s an idiot, but he’s also a former under-secretary to the minister of education. Surely his big idea can’t be to reform education on $20 per teacher?”

You probably think I’m being a bit priggish, but it really is worth showing what we’re dealing with when it comes to the standard of debate on this topic.

A billion dollars divided by 50,000 teachers is actually about $20,000 each. That amount would make a big difference to a teacher’s pay. It would mean that the average teacher salary would go from the low $60,000s to the low $80,000s. This would restore teacher pay to the same level, vis-à-vis the average salary in the rest of the economy, as it was 35 years ago.

Then, a teacher at the top of the scale earned about 180% of the average wage. Now, the same figure is 140%. If people had known this would happen, I suspect many would never have entered the profession. There are certainly enough leaving now. The extra $20,000 would roughly restore the ratio of teacher pay to the average salary to what it was 35 years ago.

It’s worth asking how we got here. Over the period in question, unionisation has plummeted across the economy. Teachers remain one of the most, if not the most, unionised profession. Could it be that their insistence on paying every teacher the same, and making it almost impossible to remove bad teachers, has been part of the problem?

You just have to ask yourself: can you think of a teacher who should be earning $100,000? I can, from my time as a student and in the electorate I represent. Now, can you think of a teacher who should never in a million years be paid that, who should really be fired right now? Sadly, I can think of them, too. What’s happened is we’ve met in the middle and paid every teacher between $47,000 and $78,000 on a rigid seniority scale.

Unless you’re unbelievably noble or don’t really like money, you’re not going to stick around being massively underpaid while time-servers breeze in and out around you. Kudos to all the noble teachers, but, house prices being what they are, it’s getting harder for the current generation of young teachers to ignore the money. As my own favourite teacher said to me years after I left his class and entered politics: “I don’t know why some of them show up except to get their pay cheque.” This system damages the profession and depresses its pay.

The author goes on to argue that introducing performance pay would add another layer of bureaucracy. Clearly the author does not know what the union collective agreements are like. Many of the frustrations I hear from teachers in the staffroom arise from the inflexible nature of contracts negotiated one-size-fits-all between the Crown and the unions in Wellington. I know of one small school with a single unionised teacher. They are not allowed to talk to the teacher about contractual terms, having to do so through the union representative who is outside the school.

We have a system that logically cannot satisfy all because of the terms and conditions set down in union contracts. Some want more money, some want planning days, some want smaller class sizes. These variations are only natural because teachers are (a) human and (b) at different stages of their lives and careers. The author of the piece somehow managed to argue that individual employment agreements for teachers would actually lead to more “one-size-fits-all”.

That seems to come from the idea the principals will abuse individual employment agreements, using their power to bully teachers into a monoculture. This is very worrying. If principals really are tyrants who can’t be given any more power lest they abuse it to stifle their staff’s creativity, then we have even bigger problems than I realised.

That leads on to the old chestnut: If teachers are paid differently, they won’t collaborate. Clearly the author is not aware of the rest of the economy. Accountants and architects, for instance, have individual employment agreements. They still manage to collaborate and produce results.

Another way to put it is in reverse. Imagine going down to law or engineering school and telling the students: “Righto – 96% of you are going to work for the Crown on one-size-fits-all contracts where you can’t get paid more for how well you perform, only for serving time. This will make you more collaborative.” Would that increase or decrease the calibre of school leavers who want to be lawyers and engineers?

Then another chestnut. Well, you can’t measure teacher performance! The assumption is that, for some reason, teachers will just be paid based on test scores. Why would any business do that? The suggestion is that a principal would know all about a teacher’s collegiality, difficult or easy to teach kids in their class, commitment to extra-curricular activities, potential other job offers… but of course they’d just ignore all that and pay them based on test scores.

On what planet would that be the case? In what other profession is pay done that way? There is simply none. Of course, individual employment agreements would take into account the many factors that make up an individual’s value to an organisation, that’s how it works in the rest of the economy.

Here’s the kicker. Whatever the state sector thinks of individual employment agreements, the independent schools are doing it. They use algorithms to analyse whether a kid’s test scores are better in a particular teacher’s class compared with the same kid’s performance in all their other classes. Then they use that as a guide when taking into account a whole lot of other factors and, bugger me, they employ teachers just like real professionals.

Amazingly, the author quotes teacher union boss Lynda Stuart as saying there is no research that supports the idea performance related pay improves outcomes for students. Of course she’d say that. But she’s wrong. In 2007 the Journal of Public Economics published a study which found “test scores are higher in schools that offer individual financial incentives for good performance”. Similarly, 2011 research in the Economics of Education Review looked at cross-country evidence on performance-related pay and found it was “significantly associated with math, science, and reading achievement across countries”.

The question is whether or not we want to continue with low-morale, underpaid teachers on one-size-fits-all union contracts that the rest of the economy dumped in the 80s and 90s. ACT’s policy at the last election was, and still is, that the government should set aside a billion dollars and give principals an extra $20,000 for each teacher they employ. If teachers want to leave the union collective, they can access this top up to their base salary.

We would see teachers who are leaders of the profession, who inspire their kids and upskill their colleagues on $100,000 or more. We’d see others sent a pretty clear message about their future in the profession. We’d see more top students wanting to enter the profession and more top teachers wanting to stay. We’d achieve what everyone says they want: teaching respected as a profession like accountants, architects, engineers and lawyers.

Crucially, we’d see a lot more political support for paying teachers more because people would know their taxes were going to the best. It is significant that even ACT supports this. It is one of the very few times we’ve supported increasing government expenditure in our 25-year history.

Unsurprisingly, union organisers want to keep negotiating collective agreements, a bit like how butchers want to keep selling meat. For the rest of us, and especially the current generation of students who might like the idea of becoming teachers, turning teaching into a profession with individual employment agreements like every other profession can’t come soon enough.

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