Teacher bonuses and classroom prep: Inside Newsom’s $900 million plan for California schools

Luis Guerrero didn’t abandon a career in electrical engineering to become a McClatchy High School math teacher for the money.

Guerrero, 28, instead committed to the classroom believing his story as a South Sacramento, first-generation college graduate with immigrant parents would create a ripple effect through his own community and former high school.

“I have a lot of similarities with my students, from colloquialism, to the urban swagger, the ethnic background, the cultural experiences,” Guerrero said. “All those things manifest in the classroom for students to connect to a role model that they need.”

Guerrero’s path to the classroom is one California Gov. Gavin Newsom wants to make easier. He pledged $900 million in his 2020-2021 budget to recruit and retain high-quality teachers in struggling California schools where achievement gaps persist.

His plan includes money for professional development, competitive grants and $20,000 bonuses for educators who commit to high-needs schools.

The money — a sliver of the governor’s proposed $84 billion education budget — attempts to help stock districts with qualified educators and close achievement gaps for California’s most vulnerable students, Newsom said.

“We believe the biggest achievement boost,” Newsom said during a Jan. 10 budget press conference, “is fully prepared teachers.”

Recruiting new teachers

California’s 10,521 public schools in 1,037 districts serve nearly 6.2 million students.

But 75 to 80 percent of districts surveyed by the Learning Policy Institute in recent years reported recruitment struggles. There’s a particular need for science, math, engineering and technology — STEM — and special education teachers.

Newsom proposed nearly $200 million to target these “workforce shortages” and another $175 million for one-year, teacher residency and preparation programs for aspiring educators dedicated to “high-need” subjects and schools.

Linda Darling-Hammond, the Learning Policy Institute’s president, said the money could be used to help people change careers to become teachers.

These teachers could be military veterans or Silicon Valley professionals, she said, adding that young people right out of college also could apply. Newsom appointed Darling-Hammond to the State Board of Education and she is his top education adviser.

Newsom’s proposal also takes aim at cost barriers, and proposes suspending certain teacher accreditation fees. Every year, the state Commission on Teacher Credentialing collects about $800,000 in fees from applicants.

Darling-Hammond called the $900 million in Newsom’s budget a way to “build the pipeline” for new California teachers.

“Addressing the teacher shortage is critical to moving the achievement of students forward and closing the achievement gap for students who are experiencing this very intense influx of people without preparation,” Darling-Hammond said. “It’s a healthy down payment on filling those needs.”

$20,000 bonuses

Half of California students passed English tests in the 2018-2019 school year. Less than 40 percent met or exceeded math standards.

High-poverty schools are particularly desperate for quality teachers. Low-income districts are more likely to hire unprepared teachers with “substandard credentials” and tend to rely on long-term substitutes, according to the Learning Policy Institute.

The shortage has inspired an influx of “intern” educators, a credential that affords teachers time to finish preparation coursework while already in the classroom. About 4,000 of the 16,518 new teaching credentials issued in 2017-2018 were on an intern basis.

Black students are concentrated in 23 high-poverty schools districts with fewer veteran teachers, according to Newsom’s budget. They’re also not experiencing narrowed achievement gaps.

More than a third of the money in Newsom’s proposal — $350 million — was earmarked for training grants, specifically for specialized subjects like mental health intervention, English learning, STEM and special education.

Newly credentialed teachers who work at least four years in high-needs schools and subject areas could also apply for $100 million worth of $20,000 stipends, ideally to pay down student loans that increasingly make it difficult to live and work in a more expensive California.

“What I appreciate about the budget is it reminds the public that teaching is a profession and in order to become better in the profession, you have to spend time learning the craft of teaching,” said Travis J. Bristol, an assistant professor of education at the University of California, Berkeley.

Building a diverse workforce

As a student at Sacramento State, Guerrero, the McClatchy teacher, said he was the only Latino male in his engineering and science classes by his junior year. He simultaneously noticed the same lack of diversity among the high school calculus students he tutored.

“As I went deeper into higher education, deeper into my field, the less I saw people who look like me,” Guerrero said. “I was connecting that at the same time to statistics I was reading, that the highest disparities in math and science are with students of color.”

Whites make up 60 percent of California’s 306,000 public school teachers, but only 23 percent of the student body, according to state data. Meanwhile, 55 percent of students are Latino. Ten percent of students are Asian and about 5 percent are black.

Teachers who reflect their student bodies inspire stronger test scores, better attendance and lower suspension rates, at least in the short term, according to a 2017 study by the IZA Institute of Labor Economics.

Newsom said his teacher training proposal would help build a diverse workforce: “Not only having stable, prepared, professional teachers, but also a teacher that looks like you,” he said.

Guerrero, who’s also a freelance audio engineer and works for the Sacramento Kings audio department, estimates that 50 to 60 percent of his 150 freshman math students are Latino, and predominantly low-income.

He’s in a unique position to offer a “counternarrative,” he explains, one in which you can be “comfortable in your own skin, and also be academic.” That philosophy correlates to his lesson plans.

“It’s developing critical lessons around certain issues like poverty, classism and racism,” he said. “And really being able to use my content, math, to discuss real world issues I think students appreciate, as opposed to counting how many taxi drives you can do in a day.”

Bristol, the Berkeley professor, agreed teachers of color are paramount to California’s continued quest toward academic gains for black and brown students.

“My caution,” Bristol added, “is we don’t want to create policies where black and Latinx teachers are only working with black and Latinx students. We want white children in Davis, the Berkeley hills, white children across the state to have access and learn from a person of color, as they prepare to be global citizens.”