A biology teacher with an alternate certification opines on the philosophy and practicality of SB 35

A friend of mine teaches high school biology. He graduated in Biology and went into science before going back to school to get his teacher certification. We have not known each other long, but I greatly respect his intellect and insight. We sometimes get in trouble with our wives for getting home 45 minutes late after discussing education, politics, and life while standing in a parking lot. We were discussing this extra pay for math and science teachers (SB 35 as rolled into SB 2, the omnibus education bill) and I asked him if he would be willing to write his opinion on a few questions for me to post. He graciously agreed.

My friend, unfortunately, is “just” a biology teacher and doesn’t qualify for the extra $5,000 dollars like the "superior" math and chemistry teachers. His experience of having worked in the field and in the private sector previous to becoming a teacher are very relevant to the debate however. He is his own person and we definitely do not always agree on politics and educational governance. For background, this email exchange took place in September before I had more carefully researched SB 35 and written my last post. So the discussion focused on the ideas rather than the politics behind the bill.

I was personally very interested in his opinions of the disadvantages and advantages of Biology Teaching majors and Biology majors entering teaching through alternate means. His explanation of the advantages and strengths are possible arguments for pursuing increased certification of private sector science employees, though I personally attribute some of what he explains to his own positive personality. He is critical of both his teaching pedagogy specific classes and university science pedagogy. He also doesn’t know a “single science teacher” who has left the industry over $3000-$5000 dollars.

My email:

The extra schooling was hard on your family time and money wise. Did you have to pay grad school rates upon returning for your teaching classes?

2 debates I'd like your take on:

Biology Ed. vs. Biology degrees: Do you feel your biology major better prepared you to teach high schoolers than if you had majored in biology teaching? (I think teaching college would be different.) What is your perception of other biology teachers with either sort of degree?

Required return to school w/ pedagogy classes like you did vs. alternative licensure that would fast track a biologist such as yourself to certification: Do you view the classes you took in order to get your teaching certificate as crucial, helpful, borderline, useless hoops, etc? Was the pedagogy and classroom management stuff helpful? In your view, how much of "teaching" knowledge and how much of content knowledge in your discipline are best?

Does your school struggle to find science teachers? Do you think science teachers deserve extra money compared to other teachers? And regardless of your thoughts on the last question, do you think the extra 3 to $5,000 bucks possible for some chemistry and physics teachers will help more straight science majors make the jump to teaching?

Any other comments you have on licensing, classes, and qualifications for science teachers.

Thanks,
UT

His reply:

I will address all of your questions in order.

First, regarding my salary as a laboratory technician. I made about the same or slightly more money as a lab tech than I do now as a teacher (depending on the month, as my salary fluctuates from month to month, sometimes as much as $800, which makes budgeting a bit difficult). The future salary potential, however, was vastly higher than what it is as a teacher. There's no question about that. The thing I find significant about the comparison between the two jobs is that I was making the same amount of money as the lowest-paid, most entry-level, peon employee in the private sector as I am now as a "professional" employed by the state. I mean, nobody doing my job at the genetics company was doing it as a career. It was just something that people like me did to make money while in transition to bigger and better things (e.g. grad school). Nobody took it seriously. It required virtually no brains. And, we actually weren't working for most of the time we were getting paid. A 12 hour shift would include about 4-5 hours of actual work, with the rest of the time waiting for the machines to run the samples. So it burns me up that I am now working myself into the ground at a professional "career" for essentially the same salary that I was making at a bonehead job that any kid could do. If this were just a matter of money, I'd be back at the genetics company in a heartbeat.

Second, yes I did have to pay graduate tuition as a post-bac student. Going back to school, taking 19 credits, while working full time was brutal. During the last half of each week, when I was working my 12 hour night shifts at the genetics company on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, while also going to school full time during the day, I literally got one hour of sleep between work and school (6 am to 7 am) and then one hour of sleep again between school and work (3:30 pm to 4:30 pm). I literally consider it a miracle that I did not fall asleep and crash on I-15 at some point during that semester.

Now, regarding the 2 debates you wanted my take on.

First, biology ed vs biology. This is a hard comparison to make. Biology ed majors at byu have to complete 30 credit hours more for their major than biology majors do (90 and 60, respectively). However, there are 2 important things to note about this. First, many of the "extra" classes the biology ed majors take are science education classes, so that obviously helps with the teaching aspect of science, but doesn't necessarily make them more versed in the content; second, while biology ed majors are required to take a broader range of science classes (e.g. geology, which biology majors don't have to take), thus giving them a wider breadth of knowledge, they don't take as many straight biology classes as biology majors do. I can see the logic behind this – their broader background makes them more able to teach a broad science curriculum (which is very important in a high school science class, where it's impossible to understand biology without at least a rudimentary understanding of physics, chemistry, geology, statistics, and math), while, simultaneously, they don't delve as deep into the biology classes because their students will never be learning biology at that deep of a level in high school, so, it's not necessary for the biology ed majors to take those upper level biology classes in college. At least that is what I think the thinking is behind the two different curricula for the two majors at byu.

So, what are the differences, in my opinion, between how well prepared I am to teach high school biology, versus a biology ed major? I think I have some advantages over biology ed people, and I think they have some advantages over me. I think they have an advantage in that all of their university instruction in the field of biology was internalized by them through the lens of "I am going to be teaching this to 15 year olds some day." Whereas, in my case, my learning took place through the lens of "I need to learn as much about this as possible, so I can become one of the elite few who knows more about biology than anyone else, so I can do world-class biological research." The difference between the two mindsets may seem trivial, but to me it is significant. I am still struggling to change my paradigm from a university-model lecture-based approach (I gave many lectures as a TA at BYU) to an interactive, inquiry-based exploratory approach. I don't think my biology-ed friends ever really struggled with this. I think the way science is taught at universities (the actual content classes, not the science education classes) actually makes the knowledge as inaccessible as possible ("hey, if you didn't get my lecture, then maybe you should change majors"), and I think I, at least initially, adopted that approach to teaching.

On the other hand, I believe that I have 2 advantages over the biology-ed folks. The first is, I think that I am more passionate about biology than they are. I think that this is a natural by-product of the different routes that we took to teaching. They tend to see themselves as teachers first, and as a person interested in biology second. I, on the other hand was a biologist first, and then became interested in teaching. This difference gives the biology ed people better pedagogy, at least at first, but it gives me a passion that I have never seen matched by any of them. That passion is contagious. I can often tell when my students have gotten interested in something because they can see the level of my interest. Furthermore, my passion leads me to try things that my colleagues do not, and, quite frankly, to put more effort into certain activities than they are willing to invest. Sometimes it becomes a liability - I occasionally have to remind myself that I am not there to indulge my own interests, but to teach my students. However, on some level I think the two merge (my interests and their learning, that is).

The other advantage that I have over the biology ed people is depth of knowledge, as I mentioned above, as well as actual experience as a working biologist. Depth of knowledge doesn't always matter in teaching, because, as I mentioned above, much of what I know is at too high a level to be relevant to what my students are learning. However, I have often been surprised at how many times I have had to draw on the limits of my biological knowledge about a particular subject in order to address a student's question. I have often been surprised at how shallow some of my colleagues' knowledge is about certain biological subjects. It has also helped that I have done extensive research and published, as well as had numerous field work experiences. Obviously, not all biology majors do those sorts of things. However, they are much more likely to than are the biology ed people, because they (biology ed people) are spending all their extra time working on pedagogy and taking extra classes. My field and research experiences taught me some of the most important things that I know about biology, and those are things that just cannot be duplicated in college classes. I think this is where the strongest argument can be made for the benefit of alternate licensure – the real-life experiences that people who come from either the private sector or other government employment have can resonate with students in a way that traditional teachers just can't. You should see my students' eyes pop when I start telling them about my experiences doing fieldwork in the Amazon, or when they see some of my pictures from Madagascar. I know biology in a different way than biology ed teachers do because I've experienced it as a biologist (not just at the genetics company, but also through working for professors at BYU as well as for the state DWR), and had to write grant applications and manuscripts, present at conferences, and publish my work. Biology ed people just can't duplicate that experience by taking another class. I mean, when I start the year by teaching the nature of science and the scientific method, I can take things to a whole new level because I have actually used the scientific method to conduct studies, rather than just reading other people's studies out of a book. Now, none of this replaces pedagogy, which people like me inevitably struggle with. But, it does give me a dimension to my teaching that biology ed people lack.

Now, on to your question about the classes I had to take during my licensure. The science ed classes were helpful. The general ed classes (multicultural ed, adolescent ed, teaching with technology, students with disabilities ed, etc) were a huge waste of time. In each case what I got out of the experience could have been summed up in a single paragraph. Anything that I learned that was useful I got from my science ed classes, and even then, I don't remember much and don't think much of it actually translated into me teaching differently because I took the classes. I very much feel like, when I was taking my education classes, I was in one sphere of existence, and when I actually began teaching all of that went out the window as I entered another sphere of existence, with virtually no carryover from one state of being to the next. Unfortunately, I think that any progress I may have made in my teaching has been from trial and error, with virtually none of it informed by my teacher education. Sad, huh? As far as the balance between teaching knowledge versus content knowledge is concerned, I was going to say that I think they should be about even, and then I read over what I just wrote two sentences above. If I really believe what I wrote up there then I guess I should conclude that content knowledge is more important, shouldn't I? I mean, if there's going to be virtually no carryover of pedagogy from teacher ed classes to the actual teaching experience, then what's the point of a heavy emphasis on pedagogy? Maybe we should just teach pre-service teachers as much content as possible and let them learn the rest on their own if that's how it's going to happen anyway. That is, of course, assuming that it can only happen the same way that it happened to me, which is, of course, a bad assumption. Although I do think that for most people it does happen more or less the same way it happened to me.

I don't think that my school struggles to find science teachers, although I am aware that many schools in the area do. I think that that is because, at my school, the teachers who have been around forever and aren't going anywhere are the ones who teach the subjects that are difficult to fill (physics and chemistry). Biology teachers are much more common, because, let's be honest, biology is a lot more fun to teach than either chemistry or physics – even chemistry and physics teachers will tell you that. Every other school that I interviewed at wanted me to teach all chemistry classes (I am endorsed in chemistry, but it's not my forte, and certainly was not what I wanted to spend my career teaching).

I don't know that it's possible to make a very strong argument that science teachers deserve more money than their counterparts in the liberal arts, unless you're going to appeal to supply and demand economics. The problem is that supply and demand economics theory doesn't really work here, because the extra salary incentive doesn't seem to be working. I don't know of a single science teacher who left industry because of the salary incentive. I honestly think it's pretty silly to think that that would ever work on a large enough scale to justify the program. Even if the money were tempting (and, let's be honest, 3-5 K is not going to be that tempting to someone who's already making more than the average teacher), no one from industry is going to be willing to jump through the licensure hoops, let alone put up with the crap from the kids, parents, and administrators unless they had a passion for teaching, in which case they would probably have gone into education in the first place and would not be an industry-employed professional anyway. I, of course, am an exception to this. However, at the time that I was working in industry, I was still searching for "what I wanted to be when I grew up." I wasn't exactly in the target demographic for the merit pay program. So, what we end up with is science teachers who were already going to be science teachers anyway getting paid more to do what they are already doing. So, it does seem a bit pointless doesn't it, not to mention sparking some major resentment among English and history teachers (although, let's be honest, if I qualified for merit pay, I would be all for it – in fact maybe this response is just a reflection of my own resentment for being left out of the deal).

More omnibus fun: SB 35 -- High quality smoke and mirrors brought to you by Howard Stephenson and Greg Hughes

I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am. Howard Stephenson still surprises me with his relentless drive to attack public education so that his secret big business clients (Click on About Us and read the history and the 5th bullet under Association Purpose and Objectives) who bankroll the Utah Taxpayers Association can pay fewer taxes, regardless of the effectiveness or truth of the measure. I knew there were problematic aspects with SB 35, but I hadn’t realized exactly how much this bill had deceptively morphed into something much different than originally proposed, even when I briefly wrote about the timeline of its votes. I also listened to Greg Hughes interview Senator Hillyard last Saturday on Red Meat Radio (Senator Stephenson is the driving force and most frequent host of the show) and forcefully claim that the legislature is already ethical and transparent, and it’s just the unethical media who misportray the truth. Talk is cheap my legislative overlords, and stuff like I’m about to document is why people don’t trust you. I belatedly caught one more instance of ideological, secret agenda pushing here 8 months after the fact...how many more go unseen among the wheels within wheeled amendments at the legislature?

SB 35 was another bill logrolled into the omnibus education bill, SB 2. Unlike the million dollar laptop program, this bill had seemingly passed the Senate. Its path was a tortured one however and the bill that passed the Senate was NOT the same one that got illicitly passed in the omnibus.

First, the original SB 35 passed a vote in the Senate Education Committee on Jan. 22nd and then the first of two required floor votes in the Senate on the 30th. The bill was relatively short. If you read the Highlighted Provisions summary and the actual bill language, it directed the State School Board to annually survey the schools for difficult-to-fill science and math positions, create a “criticality index” to rank which positions were the most difficult to fill, and give $5,000 more dollars to a math or science teacher who accepted one of those positions. This rankled some teachers, but I thought it was a relatively good idea. If you need to pay teachers more at schools where fewer people want to work, that may be necessary in order to help kids. I had an acquaintance who moved to Dugway for a year to teach. I bumped into him the next summer and he was ecstatic about leaving. I personally think it’s noble, but there’s no way I would take my family to a rural school in the state.

A second thing that bothered teachers only emerged gradually: it wasn’t all math and science teachers who would qualify, only those teaching selected advanced classes, excluding other sciences such as Biology and implicitly the vast majority of jr. high math and science teachers.

70 (2) The money appropriated in Subsection (1) shall be used to provide a $5,000 salary
71 supplement for a full-time-equivalent position as a teacher of:
72 (a) mathematics level 3;
73 (b) mathematics level 4;
74 (c) chemistry;
75 (d) physics; or
76 (e) integrated science.

I’m not specifically clued in on the hiring difficulties of districts, but I was still mostly OK with this if it would help get some teachers to less desired areas. It was a relatively straight forward “market incentive” geared towards filling areas of need. There was nothing about teacher qualifications since the bill specifically addressed “teachers,” and all teachers already need a teaching certificate which requires a bachelor’s degree.

Senator Stephenson then amended his own bill on Feb. 5th, just before it passed the 2nd floor vote in the Senate. The new amended text now required that in order to get the $5,000 bonus, teachers that filled these positions of critical need had to have a bachelor’s degree or equivalent through later class work in the content area specifically, not the teaching specific degree that the vast majority of teachers get. So a Physics Teaching major who went to work on the Indian reservation school wouldn’t get the bonus because she didn’t get her bachelors in plain old Physics, and then pay the much more expensive post-graduate rates to earn the teaching certification. She would instead be punished for earning the certification as part of her undergraduate degree and moving quickly into the teaching area of greatest need. This angered a lot of teachers. Many debated if a Math major who later certified as a teacher was necessarily better than a teacher who entered teaching directly via a Math Teaching degree. And philosophically, this seemed to go against the supposed main thrust of the bill which was to find good certified teachers for hard-to-fill positions. It reduced the potential pool of qualified applicants by over 90% as very few secondary teachers have taken this route to certification. The change wasn’t consistent with the stated objective of the bill.

The bill passed the 2nd Senate floor vote, but I would be very interested in what debate took place and whether the legislators, with no time to study as the bill was passed soon after the amendment, fully realized the rather large shift in emphasis.

The amended SB 35 was then sent to the House and introduced on February 5th. It was sent to the House Education Committee on the 7th. This next sidenote worries me. I had thought that the bill records kept online were accurate and independent of politics. The official status log has no record of an Education Committee vote, but just shows the bill sitting in committee, not voted on, until the 27th. I took that information at face value when I was making my timelines and wondered why the bill got stuck.

I was recently fishing through old material and came across an update the UEA sent out on March 4th about the omnibus bill. It was talking about the defeated bills tacked on and specifically mentioned Senator Stephenson’s SB 35 as having been defeated in the House Education Committee on a tie vote. Hmmmm. Fishy. I checked back and the status still does not show that vote as having occurred. However, a new section has recently appeared on each bill’s information page titled Audio Recordings of Debates. (Did I miss an announcement of this at the Senate site?) This is great news! It absolutely was not there in early June when I previously wrote about this bill. This section contains a link to a House Education Committee debate on Feb. 27th, while the status still says no vote happened. Was it really debated and not voted on? Or is the UEA claim correct and there is something wrong with the record? And regardless, what discussions and negotiations happened in the 3 weeks from Feb, 7th until the bill was debated on Feb. 27th? An important factor was apparently the discovery by Greg Hughes that Margaret Bird, an employee of the State Board of Education, was going to exercise her constitutional right to run against him that Spring in a bid to win the Republican nomination to his House seat. I remember reading about Hughes angrily saying he couldn’t trust the state board back in February over this, but I didn’t save the articles. Bird and Carol Lear recently testified to the House Ethics Committee about the incident during an ethics hearing on charges against Rep. Hughes. Senator Stephenson apparently got in on the attacks as well.

I haven’t had time to listen to the debate yet, but I want to so I can gain some insight into the vote as well as the next transformation of SB 35. That same day, Feb. 27th, voted on or not I do not know, the bill was sent back to the House Rules Committee. That committee’s vice-chair happens to be Greg Hughes and it is chaired by voucher sponsor, Steve Urquhart. The bill was then substituted by Rep. Hughes on Feb. 29th and that is the end of the status of the original SB 35. Another strange inconsistency emerges at this point in the bill timelines. The original SB 35 status shows the bill being sent to rules on Feb. 27th and substituted on the 29th. The new 1st substitute inherited the voting history of the original bill, but now showed something different for those last days in February. There are two new entries, one on Feb. 27th and one on the 28th, both apparently sending the bill to the Legislative Fiscal Analyst (LFA) for fiscal analysis. Both timelines then agree that the substitute bill was put forth on the 29th. So what gives? Which bill was evaluated by the LFA, the original or the substitute, and why the discrepancy between the two status reports?

A substituted bill is in effect a new bill and must pass both houses in its new form to become a law. So SB 35, 1st Substitute now needed to pass both committee and floor votes in both chambers in order to become a law in the face of stiff opposition from teachers and legislative education supporters…except that Senator Stephenson was actively planning his SB 2 omnibus at this point and just decided to pass the bill the easy way—attach it to teacher raises and hold them hostage. He waited for the fiscal note, apparently for the correct version of the bill, from the LFA on March 3rd and immediately inserted the bill into the omnibus, SB 2, which was created that same day.

The new bill bore little resemblance to the original SB 35. The original bill called for 7 million Uniform School Fund dollars to the State Board of Education to be distributed through the districts as $5,000 bonuses to those teachers in critical need positions. The substitute was now over twice as long and featured an utterly bizarre set of new expenses.

First, it created a new “restricted” sub-account called the Teacher Salary Supplement Restricted Account, within the existing Uniform School Fund.

Second, it allocated $127,000 this year and an ongoing $190,000 every year hereafter from the General Fund to the Department of Human Resource Management to create an online application system to determine teacher eligibility for the bonuses, which then forwards the information to the Division of Finance, which then distributes that money to the districts, who then include the bonus in the teacher’s check. In other words, in order to do the same work the State Board of Education was prepared to do as just part of their duties, Hughes and Stephenson, the supposed “small-government” advocates, created a special account of education money specifically not accessible to the State Board of Education, and then inserted not one, but two additional bureaucracies as middlemen between the state and the teachers, all at an annual cost of $190,000. Stephenson regularly claims that public schools waste too much money in spite of class sizes consistently approaching 35 students, yet these two jokers can afford to spend $190,000 a year to redundantly sidestep the State Board of Education in order to teach some Board employee an important lesson about not running against incumbent Republicans because it hurts their feelings. And then Stephenson, co-chair of the committee that sets the board’s budget and the person who had just called Bird specifically to pressure her to drop out of the race, righteously claims that “he was careful not to pressure her.”

Third, the allocation for bonuses was also increased by $646,100, despite the fact that the bill’s provisions substantially reduced the pool of possible recipients. Finding 1400 spots to be defined as “critical shortages” in order to distribute the original $7 million was going to be a stretch anyway, depending on how you defined “critical.” Now in the substitute bill, I don’t believe for a second that Sen. Stephenson and Rep. Hughes thought they would find 1529 teachers holding one of that very limited range of degrees in order to distribute the $7,646,100 of annual bonus money available from the Uniform School Fund. I would be surprised if more than 5% of secondary science or math teachers held those degrees. It forces me to speculate that they are purposely withholding more Uniform School Fund money in that special “restricted” account than is strictly necessary to administer the bill in order to punish schools for opposing it.

Additionally, HB 35 1st Sub completely gutted the original purpose of the bill and revealed what appears to have been Stephenson’s intention all along, to delegitimize teachers as professionals and frame them as inferior to “real” mathematicians and scientists. The bill sneakily includes language about filling critical shortage in its Highlighted Provisions summary (Lines 20-22), despite there being absolutely no mention of that in the bill itself. I guess this would satisfy those legislators who only read the summary. The actual portions of the bill that are concerned with teacher salaries rather than four-bureaucracy-deep payment protocols decree that any teacher can now receive the $5,000, whether teaching in Parowan or the Wasatch Front, as long as he/she received a bachelor’s degree in a selected “hard” science and later became a teacher. “Critical shortages” are not addressed at all, and biology teachers and jr. high teachers are once again found less worthy than the high school teachers. The bill’s implicit purpose now apparently became to remake the teacher ranks by persuading scientists and mathematicians to become teachers by paying them $5,000 more than their colleagues. This was confirmed in the press conference introducing the omnibus on the afternoon of March 3rd when Senator Margaret Dayton rambled for a few minutes about how differentiated pay was going to make Utah "the feeder state for NASA.” (You can click through to the video and watch her speak if you wish.)

It seems to just be common sense that $5,000 won’t change much. I don’t believe there’s this huge pool of higher quality people than our current math and science teachers, just waiting to switch careers if only they could make an extra $5,000 a year.

More to the point of this post, Senator Stephenson and Representative Hughes surreptitiously changed the purpose of SB 35 to something completely different than originally voted for and what its own Highlighted Provisions purported it to be, added $190,000 of completely unnecessary duplication of services to grind a personal ax, and then dishonestly avoided debate by sticking it all into an enormous omnibus bill two days before the close of the session.

Dishonest. Unethical. Sneaky. Power hungry. Irrationally ideological. Take your pick. Trust is not won in an ethics hearing; it is won through transparent actions in the best interest of those citizens whom you represent.