This morning the Senate Committee on Early Learning and K-12 Education held a public hearing on Senate Bill 6761. Senate Bill 6761 implements recommendations put forth by the Quality Education Council (QEC).
The QEC was established as a part of the Basic Education overhall legislation passed in 2009 (HB 2261). The QEC develops strategic recommendations for implementation of a new definition of Basic Education and the financing necessary to support it.
Though this may seem only to be a K-12 related policy council, the QEC and the implementing legislation (HB 2261) also established criteria for teacher evaluations and teacher compensations. Both of which are critical issues for Masters in Teaching and Masters in Education faculty and students.
The implementing legislation created a compensation work group that is tasked with developing an enhanced, collaboratively designed salary allocation model. The new model will align educator development and certification with compensation. A critical part of this conversation is the relationship between earning an advanced teaching degree and receiving an increase in salary for this achievement.
Evergreen worked hard during the 2009 session to bring legislative attention to the value-added when an educator earns an advanced degree in education. Evergreen was successful in refocusing the conversation on compensation and away from the initial assumption that education beyond a bachelors was not value-added in the classroom.
As a result of Evergreen’s work and the work of others a compensation work group was created to develop a compensation model in Washington for teachers. This replaced the initial proposal to not provide increases in compensation for teachers who earn an advanced degree.
That is the long way of saying, one of the recommendations of the QEC, as stated in SB 6761, is to convene the compensation work group in 2010 with a report due December 2010. This would move the convening of the work group and the recommendations of the group up a year.
Evergreen did not weigh in on this change to the implementing legislation. Instead Evergreen attended the public hearing to learn more about SB 6761 and to hear public testimony from other partners.
SB 6761 is expected to be moved out of committee early next week.