MARCH 17, 2011
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Scott Walker, the Republican governor of Wisconsin, recently took to the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal to tell the sad tale of Megan Sampson. Having just been named Outstanding First Year Teacher, Sampson was let go by her school district, whose union rules require that any layoffs proceed on the basis of seniority.
The solution, Walker argued, was his budget-repair bill, which “reforms this union-controlled hiring and firing process by allowing school districts to assign staff based on merit and performance.” Of course, it would also crush the union altogether, a detail Walker’s op-ed failed to mention.
Teachers’ unions have taken a well-deserved beating in the court of public opinion. Steven Brill’s influential 2009 New Yorker story about the battle for education reform, the 2010 documentary Waiting for Superman, and piles of less famous journalism and research have shown the deleterious effects of teacher tenure in public schools. The debate has rapidly moved past any reasonable question about the defendants’ guilt and into the sentencing phase. Walker proposes the death penalty, and Republicans hope others emulate him.
Is there any cause for objection? Actually, yes. As problematic as a world with overpowering unions may be—and, as I’ll get to momentarily, it’s pretty bad—a world without teachers’ unions at all would have problems of its own. The answer is to rehabilitate rather than destroy the teachers’ unions.
That the unions’ preferred policies have failed is clear enough. Teacher effectiveness is the single most important determinate of a child’s educational success, and the best educators can teach vastly more—about a full grade more—than the worst educators. What’s more, experience helps teachers only for the first few years, after which additional years in the classroom have no relationship to teacher quality. Given all this, the union-driven policy of paying teachers based on seniority, with near-insurmountable hurdles to firing even the worst teachers, is borderline insane.
Unions insist that no perfect method for evaluating teachers exists. That’s true. But surely some method of evaluating them—reform plans generally include students’ improvement in standardized tests as up to half the evaluation criteria, with subjective evaluations by principals and fellow teachers accounting for the rest-makes more sense than paying them according to a criteria that bears no relationship to quality.
Critics have long assumed that altering these insane policies would require smashing the unions. Certainly no other interest group can muster the unions’ organizational clout or depth of commitment to preserving the status quo. “The teacher’s unions are too strong a force, and important fundraising source,” wrote the Cato Institute’s Adam Schaeffer on National Review’s website, “for the Democratic establishment to betray.”
Yet the Democrats’ reluctance to betray the unions turns out to be about as strong as Newt Gingrich’s reluctance to betray his wives. Cities like Denver, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C., have implemented new ways of paying teachers on the basis of performance. The Obama administration, in perhaps its most undernoticed reform, used stimulus money to create a huge grant called “Race to the Top,” which rewards states that overhaul their schools. The policy has resulted in a vast, nationwide spurt of education reform.
This development has begun to unsettle even the unions themselves. Last month, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten offered to support a new plan to facilitate firing teachers deemed failures by their principals. It was the shrewd act of a group trying to ride a wave that threatens to wash it away altogether.
The reform momentum utterly belies the claims that the unions were too powerful, and the Democrats too beholden to them, to allow any overhaul of U.S. education. Unions may often fight sensible policies, but they don’t always win.
With union recalcitrance in full retreat, it’s worth stepping back and considering the broader liberal vision of education reform. That purpose is to remake teaching as a profession that both attracts top talent and weeds out failure. Enabling schools to fire poor teachers will not, by itself, make it easier for them to hire good ones. The quality of teachers largely reflects the price for them. And that price is low—teaching salaries rank near the bottom of occupational categories that require a college degree. Teaching recruits mostly from the bottom two-thirds of college graduates.
There is every reason to believe that, without pressure, the political system will invest too little in education. Politicians tend to work on short-term horizons. Things like roads or lower taxes, offer tangible benefits to voters. The benefits of better schools, by contrast, tend to accrue well into the future. Voters often set local tax rates to fund education, and the constituency that votes most consistently and doggedly is the elderly, who will not get to enjoy the productivity gains of stronger education.
Even if both politicians and voters were acting out of far-sighted motives, a significant share of students eventually move away from the town or the state where they attended public school. When choosing between improving its graduates and improving the riverfront, government can hardly overlook the fact that many of the students will move away while the riverfront will stay put.
Teachers’ unions provide a natural bulwark against the political system’s tendency to under-invest in education. Transforming education from a low-risk civil service job into a high-reward, high-status occupation requires both doing away with tenure and creating the political will to pump money into a system that deserves to have money pumped into it.
Teachers’ unions may still resist a world like that. (The Washington, D.C., chapter of the AFT famously refused to consider an offer that would allow-not require—teachers to give up tenure protection in return for the chance to earn salaries well into six figures.) But they can’t hold off reform forever. And, after the worst aspects of the tenure system disappear, education reformers will discover that teachers are their best allies.
Jonathan Chait is a senior editor at The New Republic. This article originally ran in the April 7, 2011, issue of the magazine.
18 comments
This is indeed a very complicated problem. Any solution to it depends upon what we descide we want education to be/become. If performance on standardized tests is our choses method, then, yes, look for those who can drill and cram effectively. If we are interested in helping each child develop its potential, then we must look for team teaching with highly sensitive teachers who can still work efficiently. Or there are Monessori or Steiner approaches. Do we want the old "dictatorial" memorization and repeition? We can't attack the teachers' unions until it is clear what we want. My wife here in Austria worked under a fixed union contract with seniority and no firing possible except for grave moral failings. She was an excellent teacher and received the same as other teachers of the same seniority "not quite as excellent". The point here is that most any system must have competent monitoring of performance and consequences and training for those who don't match expectations. The unions could very well work together with those who oversee teacher performance. But all of this seems to suggest the "nanny state" with govermental overseers encroaching upon the rights of local school boards. Education is a local/state concern. Should each state choose its own method? This is a very crucial subject, Mr. Chait (Go Blue!) and in my opinion you have begun to attack this question with serious intent. Ann Arbor's view about their schools may be very different from Richmond's (where I come from in MI) view, and their monetary resources are vastly different. How to we get the best for everybody?
- kras
March 22, 2011 at 9:37am
Well, I agree on the basic premis - that teacher's unions are both dangerous and beneficial, but you petered out at the end with the weak argument about local pols caring more about bridges. People care about their kids education, and you can see this in the money that gets spent where there is money to be had. I would say the bigger threat is an aging population that loses sight of the under 20 set, and consistently votes against spending that is not related to their prostate or pension. I also think the whole subject needs some original thinking from liberals about how to reform the unions without destroying them. Walker is not wrong in looking for ways to change the collective bargaining landscape to be more about compensation (strong unions can raise compensation, thus making the profession more attractive) and less about work rules (which are the source of seniority favoritism, and general stasis in the profession). Where he is wrong, or at least where he got me to stand up for the unions in Wisconsin (no small feat - I don't like teacher's unions), is in his complete and unreconstructed hostility toward public employees and their collective bargaining rights generally. As much as I dislike union work rules, teachers are people who deserve the right to stand up for themselves and their profession.
- IowaBeauty
March 22, 2011 at 9:40am
I think another problem is the desire to find universal, comprehensive reform, which risks destroying good schools and disillusioning creative teachers where they do exist. (And there are places in the US where public education is very good and creative.) Evaluating teachers is a very tricky problem, and basing the teacher's pay or retention on test scores ultimately means more rote learning and less creativity. It also makes a strange chain of accountability: to what extent is a student's failure to learn a reflection on the teacher? Learning is not automatic; students with bad work habits do just as badly under good teachers as with weak ones. At some point, we have to recognize that students' (and their families') attitudes have more influence on outcomes than teachers. And good teachers can stimulate and motivate students only when they have some freedom to be creative, and not just teach for tests. Getting rid of tenure completely seems to me to be more of a politics of resentment (in an era where few non-public employees have job security) than a way of improving teacher conditions. Yes, let's make it easier to fire irresponsible, burned-out teachers. But without tenure, what would stop financially strapped towns from regularly laying off good, experienced teachers to hire entry-level staff, just to cut salaries and benefits?
- stanalama
March 22, 2011 at 12:18pm
1. Brill's piece and "Waiting for Superman" were both hatchet jobs which made extensive use of inaccurate information and out-of-context conclusions. Please take the time to fully evaluate them before you praise them. 2. You don't go into what the kids bring to the enterprise. Study after study has shown that youngsters from homes with no books, parents with limited vocabulary and educations, kids from abusive homes, are at a disadvantage that virtually no amount of good teaching or good schools can overcome. It's critical to spend for early childhood programs and to get as many kids as possible into them. For the most part, even overwhelmingly, the best schools and teachers later on will not be able to compensate for the early deficits. 3. Your claim about teacher effectiveness is simply wrong, as wrong as the likes of Brill and his pals. Even what you point to -- that it makes a difference of a full grade -- is just plain silly, and likely somethng that can't even be measured. In a highly complex brew, how can that one ingredient be the one that matters the most? 4. Interesting, isn't it, that both the right and the left/Dems and Repubs, are after the teachers and their unions. Ever think that it's because the AFT and even the NEA have been just a wee bit strong enough in the current time frame to make them the most useful targets for the union busters? 5. Take a look at current AFT and NEA efforts, programs, and proposals before you write again about the teacher unions and their roles. Please.
- LISAH
March 22, 2011 at 1:58pm
Leave the unions alone. Recognize they are there to negotiate for the workers they represent, not to manage the schools. Management has that responsibility and has mainly fumbled the ball. Nobody seems to recall that there is such a thing as management, and nobody seems to understand that management is primarily responsible for the failure of the schools. Just as it was in the case of GM and Chrysler. The schools are run by clowns, but the teachers, and their unions, are to blame? Nonsense. Neil
- purcellneil
March 22, 2011 at 3:09pm
This article gets it partly right. The important thing is attracting smart and talented people to teaching in the first place. The way to do it is obvious to anyone not blinkered by ideology. Make the profession pay well and have good benefits and job security (most easily ensured by teachers' unions), but be as selective as possible in hiring and have a rigorous system of review during a probationary period. This is almost exactly the system that helps make our universities among the best in the world. The only problem is we're unwilling to pay for it, and instead seek cheap fixes that are almost guaranteed to make things worse.
- jhigbie
March 22, 2011 at 3:14pm
Nuremberg found Nazis guilty - "repression of organized labor." Walker is in some really 'fine' company.
- Bukharin
March 22, 2011 at 4:15pm
It is ignoring reality to say that school system administrators face nearly insurmountable hurdles firing incompetent teachers. In the Boston Public Schools, the CBA allows for a teacher identified as not meeting standards at the beginning of the school year to be fired by the end of that year if the administration actively evaluates the teacher, provides information to the teacher about what needs to improve and then further evaluates the teacher to determine if the improvements have or have not occurred. If the teacher has not made the necessary improvements, the administration is empowered to fire that teacher. The adminstrations of many BPS schools completely abdicate the teacher evaluation process and do not provide the necessary feedback and supervision to identify bad teachers. That abdication is not the fault of the union.
- aylwards
March 22, 2011 at 4:56pm
In the school I work at, all the kids' scores factor into the final overall scores for grade levels. And my principal has been telling some teachers that they may not be able to teach that grade level anymore because their scores are too low. What she fails to take into account (being a first-year principal with four years of teaching experience) is that if you have fourteen kids, and seven of them are special ed, there's no way your scores aren't going to be lower. It's not as simple as some people would like to think.
- beija_flor4
March 22, 2011 at 5:07pm
In the school I work at, all the kids' scores factor into the final overall scores for grade levels. And my principal has been telling some teachers that they may not be able to teach that grade level anymore because their scores are too low. What she fails to take into account (being a first-year principal with four years of teaching experience) is that if you have fourteen kids, and seven of them are special ed, there's no way your scores aren't going to be lower. It's not as simple as some people would like to think.
- beija_flor4
March 22, 2011 at 5:07pm
Chiat -- I have to agree with purcellneil. Why no accountability for school administrators and school boards? Management of and funding for public schools is HIGHLY political -- competition for funds among various departments is fierce and works against reform, as do ideological and funding priority competitions between managers, between school board members, and between school board members and managers. Also a huge obstacle to effective reform (in my view the most important obstacle) is this; the careerism and self-promotion our highly political educational system encourages in administrators. Lets not forget that while teachers and their unions may, based in their experience and what they see as the best interest of both students and themselves, object to some reform ideas embraced by ideologues and the media, they also are, at the same time, the source of many, many reform ideas themselves -- ideas that face a gauntlet of vested political interests and objections from management careerists with their own interests to pursue, who often will fight tooth and nail to prevent one cent of their departmental budgets being diverted to other priorities, and who ju7st as often are happy to throw both teachers (as scapegoats) and children under the bus while they juggle for bigger paychecks, career-enhancing media recognition and more power and money for their own priorities. I saw all of this on display when, as a student jn the late 1960s in San Francisco, I worked on a 6 month special assignment at the San Francisco Board of Education. In a more than 40 years of work, this was my first and last job in the public sector -- and it made a lasting impression. I was hired to help edit a research report, and prepare it for publication, on a new and controversial reading program aimed at improving reading scores for minority children. The program required the introduction of totally new materials and a team teaching method that had never been used by the school system before. It, in other words, required teachers to -- very quickly -- learn and effectively adopt new classroom methods, become familiar with new materials, rework the use of their class time, and cooperate with each other in unprecedented ways. Implementing it required a lot of work, and change, on the part of the teachers, but the teachers, who had no say in the matter anyway, didn't complain and weren't the problem in terms of resistance to the program (and its inevitable demise). The resistance came from completely from political (ideological) opponents and from the heads of other administrative departments who were competing with the head of this new program for funds, for career recognition, and for their own pet projects. One of the first things that worked against a fair test for this new reform was the very research project I was hired to help with. The Research Department had secured funds to test the effectiveness of the program at the beginning of the same year it was implemented. These funds had to be used within a very short period of time. This meant that the success or failure of this new and major reform would be judged on one set of tests taking place less than 6 weeks into the school year. This testing schedule had nothing to do with an optimum timeline for testing the effectiveness of a program that 1.) teachers had never encountered before the start of the year, and 2.) a majority of teachers would not have yet been fully trained in when the testing started. Instead, the timing was based in budget considerations for the Research Department. Whether the research was meaningful or not, and even more so, whether the program being tested actually improved reading levels for the children or not, was of absolutely no concern to the Research Department Head. His only concern was how to play the game to maximize funding for his department. This, and other political manipulations from other departments, made for a poisonous atmosphere in which department heads refused to ride the same elevator together (I was even warned against sharing a coffee break with an administrative assistant who worked for the head of the new reading program). Among all the drama, the only individual actually overtly devoted to the children and their success (and actually the only person I ever heard use the word "children" in the halls of the Board of Education) was the 6th Grade Teacher who had been tapped to train teachers in the new program, help implement it in the classroom, be a liason between teachers and the administration, and prepare her own report to be included in the final research report. Whether this reform could have been effective or not, I don't know. It died among all the politics and fighting over funding and competing priorities. When I see celebrity, media pet administrators like Michelle Rhee, who demanded an unprecedented $300,000 in compensation from the DC school district, being feted by media pundits who at the same time blame unions and teachers and their supposed "greed" for everything that is wrong with education, or read that the superentendents of the nation's 66 most populous school districts saw their salaries increase by 20% between 1996 and now, while average compensation for teachers decreased by between 1-2%, I tend to think things haven't changed much over the last 40+ years. Why do so many in the media accept the silly and obviously self-serving argument from powerful administrators and politicians, who are looking after their own career interests and looking for scapegoats for their own failures, that teachers have ALL THE POWER? It is obvious nonsense.
- esmense
March 22, 2011 at 5:17pm
Scott Walker doesn't give a crap about public education. Not mentioned here is that Wisconsin's largest teachers' union had already agreed to new performance evaluations and merit-based pay for teachers, and also to splitting up the Milwaukee schools into four separate school districts before Walker introduced the budget-repair bill. The repair bill, which cuts more than $800 million from public schools, and now SB 22 and a voucher bill to follow, which will further devastate public education. I can also tell you that in the second year of the contract my union just negotiated with the school board in Madison, the administration is free to set the wages for my non-teacher bargaining unit at anything they want, and to make us pay as much of our insurance premium as they decide. Do you think they made any such cuts to the administration? Probably not. A school board member here who identifies herself as a fiscal hawk has publically stated that it's not the teachers here who stifle innovation, it's the administration. Again, things are not as simple as some people would like to think.
- beija_flor4
March 22, 2011 at 6:09pm
Even as a guy with no love for Newt, I still think that's a pretty cheap shot at him.
- lyansaine
March 22, 2011 at 10:42pm
"Teacher effectiveness is the single most important determinate of a child’s educational success," And the basis for this opinion is what? The teacher is more important than the student, than the parents, than the home environment (class, culture, etc.)? The data, please.
- dbuck1
March 23, 2011 at 9:01am
The unions came into existence precisely because school boards and administrators paid teachers poorly, abused them shamelessly, and fired them at will if they protested. The quality of education and the concerns of parents (who?) or students (you're joking) had nothing to do with it. The pendulum may have swung too far but beware a return to closed meetings, hidden budgets, and personal or political grievances in the personnel office.
- RuthH
March 23, 2011 at 12:53pm
It's not true that teacher effectiveness is the "single most important determinate" of a child's educational success, because "determinate" is an adjective that means "having exact limits," not a noun that means "causal factor or element," which is a "determinant." Also, I've seen this statement repeated countless times, and "research" is always mentioned, but in briefly searching the web now, I couldn't find that study. Does anyone have a link? I've also heard that teacher effectiveness is the most important *school-releated* determinant, which is different.
- JakeH
March 23, 2011 at 2:37pm
I've been a TNR subscriber since the 1970s, and I've seldom seen a piece in the magazine that contained more half-truths and outright falsehoods. I'll just mention a couple, then go fume in private. First of all, the single most reliable and consistent determiner of student performance – going back to when researchers first started trying to measure these things – is NOT the teacher, it's the socioeconomic status of the student's parents. Mr. Chait needs to read a bit more widely. I'd suggest some time spent with Diane Ravitch's "The Death and Life of the Great American School System." As one of the other commentators mentioned, a kid coming from a home with no books, no place to study, no income to broaden that child's life by exploring the city, the countryside, whatever, is a kid coming into the classroom with fewer tools and skills than kids from more affluent households. Yes, a good teacher can make up a lot of that lost ground – assuming that the student is willing to do her part. Second Chait seems to fall into the same simplistic view of tenure that those on the far right typically do. Tenure doesn't "guarantee" anyone a job. All it does is ensure that due process is followed if a teacher's performance doesn't measure up to what's expected. You can't be fired as a teacher because the principal doesn't like the color of your tie. In the corporate world, at least in some states, you can. I see a lot of petty tyrants, masquerading as legislators, upset that they can't summarily dismiss a teacher they don't like because… well… just because. And it's the student who's largely missing from virtually all the discussion in recent months about education reform. The current reactionary mood makes teacher-bashing fashionable, but it's neither helpful nor accurate. Basing teacher salaries on standardized test outcomes has so many problems I'd need a whole issue of the magazine to briefly explain each one. The very best that ANY teacher can do is offer to the student his/her insights into the subject matter at hand. It's entirely up to the student whether or not to accept the offer. Blaming the teacher for the student's choice not to take the offer is beyond stupid. It reduces education to a cynical exercise in expediency – we'll attack the people we can (teachers) and leave well enough alone the people and forces over which we have no control (a corrosive consumer culture, self-absorbed parents, and, not least, children constantly distracted by relentless pressure from that materialistic culture).
- thephotoguy
March 29, 2011 at 9:58am
"...experience helps teachers only for the first few years, after which additional years in the classroom have no relationship to teacher quality." According to Chait, then, professional development is a waste of time, classroom management skills (learning how to deal with children's individual behaviors) end, new teaching techniques and development are irrelevant past the teacher's probationary period. In what other profession would we take such a view? If teachers truly do not grow professionally and personally after the first few years, then I suppose we should get rid of all of them after that. Who wants a stale teacher for another 30 years or so? Chait's simply regurgitates the age old refusal to recognize teaching as a profession at least equal in importance to medicine or law. I hope we don't think our doctor doesn't learn anything after his or her first few years practicing medicine. Oh, and by the way, take job security away from those a union represents and you will soon have no union to find so necessary politically. To paraphrase a Democrat speaking on anoter issue, when it comes to tenure, mend it, don't end it. If Chait is interested, he should look to the AFT's position to streamline tenure, or the probationary period teachers must pass, or remediation processes; or, for that matter., why we have job security for American workers in the first place.
- tamat43
April 12, 2011 at 4:48pm