http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=wr3vmAD799U&feature=view_all&list=PLB326D63C0D0AE851&index=4 Title Care at Work - Rafiq Kalam Id-Din Care.

e.com Transcription Its still morning, so Im going to begin with saying good morning. You know this talk Im about to give is going to sound very, very technical, but Im actually going to end talking about love. And I know that sounds like its really, really separate because were going to talk about money and were going to talk about organizational theory and things of that nature, but were actually going to end talking with love and I think that will make sense as we kind of proceed through. So, you should understand a couple of things. When we talk about talent, people who play instruments are talented. I saw LeBron and my boy Wade - they did great last night, you know, people call them talented, they are absolutely. But were talking about something really specific when were talking about teaching talent. Teaching talent, I really believe, is really similar to any other kind of human capital. Human capital essentially, and its really interesting to kind of follow Kathy in her talk about how work itself has been evolving. Essentially, at its core, human capital around this idea of non-routine tasks and accomplishing non-routine tasks on a daily basis. Theres this professor in Canada (well forgive him that hes from Canada) named Royston Greenwood. He is someone you probably wont ever hear of again, except that I have read his organizational theory books and his research. He has done this really interesting and amazing research about professional service firms, really contrasting and comparing them to corporations. Interestingly enough, whether you are a lawyer, doctor, whether you are a banker, a consultant, the thing that brings all of these particular professions together is that they are focused on recruiting a certain level of talent who can perform well non-routine tasks all the time, all the time, and put them in really complex and difficult environments in which to provide solutions to these non-routine problems. And notice, I havent yet talked about lesson planning, about lunch and recess, which are all extremely important. But what you have to understand about teaching, just like these other professions and areas, what they produce is simply their knowledge. They are the ultimate knowledge worker. Every single child is unique; every child is different. You have a classroom full of anywhere from 22 and in some schools up to 30 or so human beings who are developing at their own rate, who have their own learning styles, who have their own backgrounds and experiences that they bring to bear every second of every day. There is absolutely nothing routine at all about that; not a thing. And teaching them not just discrete tasks and skills. Of course everyone is going to learn their multiplication tables, but we also have to inculcate a love and thirst for learning so that they can bring to bear the knowledge and skills they acquire with the world they are going to interact with. That is truly the nature of the work of schools we are preparing young human beings to

participate in the world we hope, in a really effective, efficient, prosperous way. And we see the results when that doesnt happen right? We have an extreme, extremely robust prison industrial complex where we actually spend and invest much more money than we do in education. When youre in prison you pay no taxes, you dont have a job that contributes. If anything, it detracts significantly from society. But if you have a college education, you have a graduate degree, you are potentially an inventor, an ambassador, a lawyer, a doctor, a banker, or a teacher. So it is clear that this is, I think, the most urgent economic issue for this country, and if we dont start to kind of focus on how do we make this the most efficient and effective industry possible, we will remain exactly where we are. An so I just wanted to kind of, as we kind of talk about these things, kind of really connect those two dots and that is why this matters and this is why talking about talent in this context is so important. So just to talk a little bit about of what is particularly special about professionals and about the way in which they approach their work. Professor Greenwood talks about there are really two factors. One is autonomy, because professionals work product is really produced by what they think, it is a creative process. So the ability to have the autonomy to approach particular problems and problem sets specifically, it is important for them to have the freedom and autonomy to bring to bear what ever they think is necessary to order to solve that particular problem. The other piece that Professor Greenwood points out and contrasting from corporations, is he talks a lot about the high cost of supervising non-routine behavior. It is extraordinary. And I think schools are a perfect example of exactly how extraordinary that cost is. Most schools spend all of their money and therefore place all of the power in the institution in the hands of administrators whose sole job, only job, is to make sure that the workers, the teachers, the professionals are doing their job. Thats their job, thats it. They have the power to define what the ends look like, how theyre going to be held accountable, etc. But in each one of the other industries consulting, banking, doctors, lawyers especially, that power lies with the practicing professional. And this is the interesting thing about the professional service firm itself is that it is run and managed by the people that continue to practice their craft on a daily basis. Lawyers run law firms, bankers run investment banks, consulters run consulting firms, but in schools, teachers do not run those enterprises. So, Professor Greenwood kind of takes out of that, he actually doesnt mention schools at all. He simply talks about contrasting corporations. His work was mostly focused around arguing that technology companies, because of the nature of their work, should be organized more like law firms and investment banks. He actually doesnt talk about schools at all, hes never met me, Ive never sent him an email he probably thinks Im abusing his work. But I actually thought it was really, really applicable. And he talked about a couple of factors that are extremely important to knowledge workers in these contexts. So power is one of them, the ability to kind of make your decision about how youre going to use your brain on a daily basis. The other is the prestige, the prestige that comes from having the control and the power over your own work, your own work

product and how you engage in that work. The other one is that there is a path in ascension within a particular profession that is controlled mostly, we all know about office politics, but mostly about the quality of your work. So, for example, if you are an extremely amazing lawyer or a doctor, you are not confined by the law firm in which you work or the practice in which you are apart of. You can always leave, and when you leave you take away the most important asset of why they hired you in the first place, which is your brain which is your knowledge. And so you have an opportunity to ascend in a way that can be independent of the structures that are there to provide you the job in the first place and that is very important. And the last thing is the pay matters. And theres no getting around this. We would all agree that teachers are underpaid. But what is the right price point? And I think thats part of what hasnt been apart of the conversation is how do we make ourselves really competitive? What is it? Do we need to pay teachers a million dollars? We certainly agree that it needs to be more than what it is, but pay is a significant part of it and I dont think theres any way for us to have this conversation about recruiting human capital in your industry without compensating them financially. So if you take all of those components together, this is what weve actually decided on ($150,000$300,000). And this is not for every single teacher. In our model, in our teaching firm model, people enter as teaching apprentices and they work with an associate in our firm. In our co-teaching model, that means during your two years as an apprentice you actually dont lead the classroom on your own. So for us, its very similar to the way junior associates at some law firms really operate until they get a little bit more experience. The people who lead the classrooms in our model are the associates and our partners and for each one of those levels theres a specific amount of bonus potential that they have. So we set our base to be really competitive with the rest of the teaching market, I know I have my charter school friends here, and our goal is to put our base where everyone elses compensation is. But in our performance base compensation model, create bonus potential for them. And so in our bonus potential for our junior associates is 40% of their base, for senior associates about 60% of their base, and for our partners 150% of their base of $125,000 a year. So what this means is that operated in this optimal way our junior associates can make up to $90,000, our senior associates $115,000, and as partners, $300,000 is the number. And part of what we think this will do is to have an impact on where people decide to enter the marketplace, to enter the industry. Up until now, your only option if you want to remain a teacher and practitioner in your craft, maybe you can become the head of your grade level, but you cant run the institution. But in the teaching firm model, where as a partner, and Ill be one of the teaching and managing partners of our firm, I will be teaching full time. I get to practice my craft and still make all of the decisions about the enterprise with my fellow partners. And we think this is the thing that will really change the marketplace when it comes to teaching. All of a sudden you can see you can ascend in your career and not give up the thing you love the most, which is working with students and working with them directly. And the way were able to accomplish this is if you look at most schools, most of the

high compensation is reserved for administrators. But since weve done away with that, we have one lead administrator and then a bunch of junior folks who support the lead administrator were able to recapture all of the money that would be otherwise spent on personnel cost for solely supervisory personnel and we get to distribute that among the core human capital, and those are the lead teachers our associates and our partners. Now why does this matter? Why is this relevant? Why is this about talent and teaching? Now, you have to understand, schools have been the same way, same structure administrative heads, teachers working for an administration for 375 years. Think about that. Three hundred and seventy-five years. What industry has not evolved in over three centuries, nearly four? Schools have remained locked and deployed in the same way, and we think its about time for things to change. We think the urgency around this has to do with this number here (25%), and this number here (10%). In the United States, the quality of our teaching talent comes from the bottom quartile of college graduates. In the top performing education systems in the world, it comes from the top 10%. Law firms, medical practices banks, consulting firms; their talent comes from the top 10%. And so for us, the ability to compete with them means that we have to, and it is possible, deploy an enterprise that looks very, very similar. Now, we have no interest, none, not at all about replicating everything about these professions. So what does our practice look like? And I promised you before I was going to come back to this word love. It is impossible to teach if you dont love what you do and you do not love children. It is impossible. Children are the best lie detector; they know when you dont like them, even when you dont like them a little bit. They sniff it out. And so, all of a sudden, we have created a practice, a way to engage in teaching that aligns the fact that you have to love to do your job. And if you love extremely well, if you love children, and we know, sometimes its hard its really, really difficult (kids can be annoying sometimes) but we love them through that and understand that a part of the way that children interface with the world is what we are trying to help them master right from the beginnings of their lives and that must be driven by the love that we have for them, it must be. And so, if the proposition is, come into our career, come into our profession, where you will get paid a significant amount of money to love children every day. I think that beats the firms, I think that beats the consulting practices, I think that beats the banks. You know for me, this is something that is rather urgent. Without my education, I would literally not be here. I would be a part of the prison system that I referred to earlier in my conversation. When I was younger we watched Eyes on the Prize, I dont know if any of you have seen it before it is an award winning PBS production. But during this one particular set about Jesse Owens, Jesse Owens in the 1936 Berlin Olympics he was challenging the notion of the superiority of the Arian race that the Germans were supposed to have on display. And he had already won 2 gold metals and he came to the long jump competition. The long jump competition I dont know if youre familiar with it you get essentially three tries and you get to move on to the finals and they take the whichever is the longest of your jumps. So, Jesse Owens starts running, jumps from the

line, he shatters the world record with his first jump, and they put up a flag that he faulted, and he is like what? I dont ever fault. So he does it the second time - another fault. Now he is clearly in jeopardy of not being able to progress to the final gold metal round. And he is a bit distraught, hes not really sure what hes going to do. And his opponent, basically says to him, listen just leave no doubt, leave no doubt. So Jesse Owens goes back to the bench, he picks up his towel, and he lays his towel about a foot behind the line, and he jumps from there. He goes on to shatter the record and win the gold metal. I remember hearing this story and thinking to myself, I feel a little behind the line. I grew up really poor, Im one of ten kids, and like real poverty, not like you know we couldnt have certain kinds of food poverty, I mean real poverty. I went to school and my clothes smelled like Kerosene because that was what we had for heat. I hate Ramen noodles no offense against the company but I had to eat it for three years, I hate it and if I could buy the company and put it out of business I would do it, but I cant. So that kind of poverty, poverty where I worked 3 or 4 jobs since I was 14 to contribute to the food that we had those damn Ramen noodles. So real poverty. And so, that to me, I was starting out not just a foot but miles and miles behind the people I went to school with. Even in junior high and high school, they werent thinking as they were sitting there, are we going to freeze tonight. Did Lorenzo get enough money to get Kerosene today from his job?. He doesnt get paid he works for groceries, but did they give him cash today so we can go down to the gas station to get some Kerosene for the heater. And then I need to focus on the algebra that Im trying to learn. And I am living proof, living proof, that just because you jump from the towel or behind, your success can still be amazing. Your contributions to your society, to your world, to your family, can be significant. So this fight for the best this fight for talent is it good for our economy? Absolutely. Good for our national interests? You know it. But it is also good for ourselves and for our souls. And when else do you get paid to save peoples lives? That is why we still got to fight for the doctors we arent going to beat them yet but were coming!

Keywords Care.com, Care at Work, the future of teaching, teacher salary, teaching administration, teacher bonus, talent