Higher teacher salaries and allowing for a work-life balance has enabled Third Future Schools to better recruit and retain teachers and help curb teacher burnout.
Third Future operates Ector College Prep Middle School in Odessa and Sam Houston Collegiate Preparatory Elementary in Midland.
On the average, Third Future Schools teacher salaries are $74,000 a year.
They have eliminated teacher tasks like grading papers and lesson planning and they have teacher apprentice positions. These are people who can step in if there is a vacancy to prevent any loss of learning.
Third Future CEO Mike Miles said in a news release that they believe the workforce is changing and that teachers will increasingly demand better work-life balance.
“If we want to be competitive as a profession, then we cannot expect teachers to work 10 to 12-hour days,” Miles said in a news release.
Lesson plans and visual presentations are created by curriculum experts and provided to the teacher. Support personnel – called Learning Coaches – take copies of assignments and activities to the copy center and return them to the classroom. Learning Coaches also grade papers, the release said.
Teachers only grade “demonstrations of learning” during class; they do not grade papers outside of class. Learning Coaches monitor students at lunch and during most of the day. Teachers have only one hour of duty each week, and Miles said he expects TFS to eliminate even that amount of duty next year.
Teachers leave at 4:15 p.m. each day and they are done with no lessons to plan, no papers to grade, no documents to copy and no parent phone calls to make.
Education is Miles’ third career. He said he was previously an Army officer and a diplomat.
Miles was superintendent of Dallas ISD and the superintendent of Harrison School District in Colorado Springs.
Third Future operates in Texas and Colorado.
“We think that this generation is looking for better work-life balance. I think COVID only accentuated it, but didn’t spark it and it’s not the cause of it. But I think the last two years, we’ve seen more and more people say staying at home was a great thing. I need that balance,” Miles said.
It takes so long to earn a professional wage and starting salaries in education tend to be low. People don’t necessarily want to wait around for those higher salaries.
“And then as you get more experience in the profession, yes, you get a better wage. We think that’s changing. We think teachers no longer want to wait to get that $550 every year for another year of experience,” Miles said.
“Depending on the position, the salary range changes. Even at zero years of experience, our starting salaries are so much higher than ECISD,” Miles said.
Third Future operates schools in Odessa, Midland, Austin and Colorado.
“That workforce notion that I have to work 15, 20 years to get a good salary. Well, you can see they don’t in Third Future Schools. They’re going to get a pretty good salary pretty much from the start,” Miles said.
The elementary teachers are paid a little less and the salaries vary according to city.
“We’re trying to professionalize the teaching role, which means that we are trying to make sure that teachers’ roles is very much defined as a great instructor and then eliminate everything else. So they don’t handle discipline. The lesson plans are made for them; lesson plans, and assignments, the PowerPoint the day of the demonstration of learning, the assignments, the activities, the answer keys,” Miles said.
“They don’t make copies. Teachers don’t make copies. They don’t grade papers outside of the classroom. They grade the demonstration of learning in class. After class, they don’t have any papers to grade. They still have duty one time a week and hopefully next year we’ll be able to get rid of that, but it does cost money because somebody has to do duty because we’re open at 6:30. If we weren’t open at 6:30, might be a little bit different. But since we’re open at 6:30 and we close at five we have to have some people watching,” Miles said.
He added that about 12 percent of a district’s teacher salary budget is usually for electives because every student gets an elective every day.
“That’s 1/6th of your costs easily. We engage community consultants for a lot of our electives and what we call Dyads. So not only does a kid get an elective every day, one hour a day. They also, twice a week, 90 minutes each time, get a Dyad course. Many of our elective teachers are community consultants because the two are kind of mixed together,” Miles said.
“In other words, if we have a dance consultant that could be an elective class, so … instead of hiring elected teacher to do dance, we hire a community consultant to do dance. The only difference is the community consultants are on a 1099. They’re not employees. They don’t get benefits. They get $30 an hour,” Miles said.
He added that they have expanded the reach of their most effective teachers. At Ector, there are five teachers who are teaching two classes at one time.
“That saves money, but it also raises the salary,” Miles said.
Third Future began using apprentice teachers last year and now every school in the network has them. Miles said there are eight at Ector.
“These are teachers we hire. They have degrees. Many of them have certifications. Most have one or two years of experience, but they don’t have any experience in our model. So we hire them to do this; learn the model, learn how to provide high-quality instruction. In the meantime, they’re supporting the teacher in the classroom. If that teacher is absent, they substitute for that teacher. The biggest thing is if a teacher leaves mid-year, let’s say we have a teacher leave next month. Then an apprentice teacher will slip right in. We won’t have any lag time. That teacher knows the model. The lessons have been created for him or her anyway and so we don’t lose any high-quality instruction. The goal is 185 days of high-quality instruction,” Miles added.
He said they have a goal of recruiting and retaining good teachers, but Miles said that’s just part of it.
“You have to have a system, a model, where you’re able to get high quality instruction, even if a teacher leaves. So let’s say a high-quality teacher goes on maternity leave. That happens everywhere, every year. Our model has teacher apprentices and learning coaches who already know the model, so they’re going to be stepping right in,” Miles said.
“We make sure that we hire high-quality folks. This helps us do that, though. Then we also have the learning coach position. This school has 18 learning coaches. Learning coaches support kids in the team center. They support teachers … with copies. Learning coaches monitor lunch and they monitor the hallway, but their main job is to help students in small groups in the team centers and we have 18 of them,” Miles added.
Learning coaches also can substitute for a day, for example, if needed.
“Again, high-quality instruction; learning coaches know our model. They know our kids. They work every day with us. The lesson plans are made for them, so they step right into the classroom,” Miles said.
They also use instructors from Third Future Teacher Corps. There are a handful at Ector.
“We paid them $75,000, plus a $10,000 bonus; $85,000 to come to Ector for one year. At the end of that year, if they’re proficient, they can go anywhere in the network where we have a vacancy,” Miles said.
The Permian Basin has always had a teacher shortage, even before COVID, so recruiting people from Colorado Springs or even Dallas, for example, is tougher.
“I don’t want to diss the community. People like what they like. This is home for a lot of people and they like their home. I’m not dissing their home. But me personally, I like Colorado Springs. I like the forest. I like the mountains. I like the rivers and I like the lakes. And none of that is here, so you’d have to incentivize me to come out here. Others you might not have to,” Miles said.
