City Beat
Education officials want better teacher salaries
School tax levy being considered
By Jim Aquino
Willow Glen High School students recently got some attention in California when Gov. Gray Davis visited their campus in February to congratulate them on their high scores in the state's standardized tests.
At the State of the Schools conference in San Jose on May 7, local educators, school board members and superintendents talked about the need for more students in Santa Clara County--and particularly the rest of the state--to excel in the same fashion as Willow Glen High students.
This issue, as well as many others facing public education in the valley, were raised by Santa Clara County Office of Education Superintendent Colleen Wilcox, who gave a State of the Schools address at the morning conference at the IBM offices in South San Jose. May 7 also happens to be National Teacher Appreciation Day.
"It is my hope that we make every day Teacher Appreciation Day," Wilcox said in her address.
Wilcox called for a countywide tax to boost teacher salaries and shrink class sizes, something never tried before.
During her address, Wilcox referred to a County Office of Education phone survey conducted in March to research people's opinions about local public education. The survey revealed that 97 percent of the county's teachers interviewed believe their salaries should be raised, and 91 percent of survey county residents agreed that increasing teachers' pay was warranted.
"People [at the conference] were as equally surprised as I was that there was such congruence in the attitudes of our residents and teachers in regard to public education, particularly with the need to increase teachers' salaries. That is not a finding that is typical throughout the country," Wilcox said in a phone interview.
Willow Glen High School Principal Pat Day didn't attend the conference but said that pay is a huge issue for educators, as well as those who want to pursue a career in teaching.
"We've got a lot of people who are applying for a teaching fellows program and always wanted to be teachers. I do a lot of interviewing for that in our district. When I ask them, 'Why didn't you get trained for teaching back in college?' The response is almost always, 'Money. Teaching doesn't pay enough,' " Day says.
Another major issue at the conference was a statewide shortage of teachers, particularly those with proper credentials for the classes they teach. A recent County Office of Education survey found that one-third of the teachers interviewed were planning to leave their profession within the next five years, mostly due to retirement. In her address, Wilcox said that the shortage creates a need for more than 2,000 teachers in the county each year.
As for younger teachers, expensive housing costs are causing them to move away from the valley to find work in more affordable areas.
"We lose good people because of the cost of living here. There's nothing more important than a quality teacher in the classroom," said San Jose Unified School District (SJUSD) Superintendent Linda Murray, who attended the conference.
In her address, Wilcox discussed her concerns about teachers who are not fully credentialed. According to her, the number of fully credentialed teachers in the county will decrease from 11,000 to about 7,000 by 2005.
"We will need approximately 13,500 teachers to maintain current levels. At that time, our current credentialed teachers will make up only about half of the teachers in the county," Wilcox said in her address. "The goal in California is to reduce primary and elementary grades to 20 students per class. To do so in Santa Clara County would require approximately an additional 400 teachers."
Wilcox says the search to replace those departing teachers with those with the proper credentials in the next four years is an enormous task.
"The stability that I think public education has been known for is certainly slipping away with so many of the baby-boomer teachers in line for retirement," Wilcox says.
According to Wilcox, the number of fully credentialed teachers affects students' grades. During her address, she cited findings that prove that districts with the greatest percentages of teachers who aren't fully credentialed tend to have lower scores in the state's Academic Performance Index (API), which measures schools' academic performance. API scores range from a low of 200 to a high of 1,000. Currently, the average school API score in Santa Clara County is 742, which outranks the state average of 678.
"Most of you who follow public education in Santa Clara County have heard me and others brag about the fact that on almost any important measure, the county outperforms the state," Wilcox said in her address. "However, California is not necessarily a standard to which we want to compare ourselves because California compares poorly with other states ... California's eighth-grade students lag behind the U.S. average on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in reading, science and mathematics."
Other issues Wilcox addressed were the fact that education is the highest priority for taxpayers; the need for Silicon Valley, one of the nation's wealthiest communities, to invest more of its wealth in local public education; and the lack of racial diversity among the valley's teachers. Wilcox mentioned that 75 percent of the county's teachers are white, 11 percent are Latino and 8 percent are Asian or Pacific Islander. Meanwhile, on the student side, for the first time in Santa Clara County history, Latino students outnumber whites--34 percent are Latino, 33 percent are white and 22 percent are Asian or Pacific Islander.
Wilcox told The Willow Glen Resident that minority teaching scholarships need to be created to recruit more people of color into the education field.
"We have to create a financial incentive to recruit those who want to live a life as a teacher and have them be able to live in this community and teach," Wilcox says.
Santa Clara County Board of Education President Leon Beauchman briefly talked about how the interest in joining the education field has waned among high-schoolers. When he attended high school, Beauchman said, he and his classmates were inspired to become teachers by both the '70s TV series Room 222 and special extracurricular programs that allowed students to learn more about the profession. Beauchman also recalled attending a segregated elementary school in Mississippi.
"Separate is never equal," said Beauchman, referring to the "separate but equal" doctrine that kept schools segregated in 17 states until 1954, as he called for educators to be more active in improving the state of education. "The sin wasn't that we went to those schools. The sin was that we accepted them."
The conference also included a speech by keynote speaker James Montoya, vice president of the College Board, and a panel discussion with Ann Lieberman of the Carnegie Foundation, Michael Hackworth, co-founder of the Texas-based digital entertainment electronics company Cirrus Logic, and Franklin-McKinley School District Superintendent Larry Aceves.
"I want [teachers] to be able to deal with the children. ... I want the children to be ready to learn," said Aceves during the discussion. "We have to break the cycle of low expectations."
Wilcox's announcement of the formation of a blue-ribbon task force to deal with improving the state of local schools was positively received at the conference. This committee will include former San Jose Mayor Susan Hammer and Carl Guardino, president and CEO of Silicon Valley Manufacturing Group.
"I think anything that can be done to look for solutions to these issues is wonderful," said Principal Pat Day.
Murray said she intends to have the SJUSD assist the blue-ribbon committee in their efforts.
"We're doing a lot ... to try to bring quality teachers to our valley," Murray said. "The next challenge is to keep them."
Willow Glen, California Since 1992
