The New Republic

It is difficult to turn children into competent, contributing, ethical members of society. Basically, we have three main shots: 1) Parents. [One problem is that it is too easy and too much fun to engender children, so too many people lacking interest and/or competence do so.] 2) Education. I was a teacher for a while. The division of duties with parents is difficult and confusing. Being confused (I was young) I often tried to act as a substitute parent for my students who obviously had not been parented very well and/or not very successfully. 3) Society in general, perhaps most commonly expressed through media such as television, Internet, Facebook, and so on. Sometimes this is done well/effectively (Mr. Rogers, Sesame Street), dubiously (Walt Disney), dreadfully http://www.examiner.com/parenting-in-long-island/worst-tv-shows-for-kids . Matt means well, but as the article points out he may be on a bad road called Good Intentions.

- skahn

August 3, 2011 at 5:47pm

Couldn't agree more. And it's a 60's liberal utopian hangover in the Anglo-Saxon economies, generally. Our teachers get the most leave off a year...in_the_world. So, you're getting good value. I know a lot of teachers, cause I drink with them. And some of them have been ruined by an absurd career path. Automatic, length of service pay grades need to be replaced with performance based rewards and the great teachers need to be paid great money and the bad ones need to be moved on. (In saying that, cut Damon a bit of slack. He's a good actor and he makes decent movies. His heart's in the right place.)

- IggyPop

August 3, 2011 at 5:51pm

You can measure the outcomes of teaching either purely functionally (grades, student skills, time to graduation etc) or on a broader scale (quality of classroom relationships, students' ability to think/read/engage, character development, enthusiasm etc). If the criteria include the latter, then it's very difficult to see how uncertainty of employment would make a better teacher, because the results are qualitative rather than quantitative, hence difficult to reduce to measurable points on a quantitative ladder that would enable "bad" teachers to be dropped. There's no connection between security of employment as a general principle and quality of pedagogy. To that extent, Damon is quite correct in his comment. And unlike in corporate life, love can actually have some good effects. This is Taylor Mali's more famous clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxsOVK4syxU

- ironyroad

August 3, 2011 at 5:55pm

Why is it when an actor says something even remotely controversial the right-wing propaganda machine takes it as if it came from the leader of a massive movement? I don't listen to Damon unless it's in a movie (and rarely if ever do I watch his films). Who cares what he says? It's all faux outrage so enough already. JC don't give the people at UnReason any extra publicity.

- tmmats

August 3, 2011 at 6:00pm

But what's the point here? To make teachers' jobs as expendable and as insecure as actors'? And why do I somehow doubt that in Chait's case "if I were guaranteed a fixed salary that was tied to my tenure, I would work a lot less hard than I do?" Which doubt's basis is Damon's point. And since when is reasonable job security to be frowned on? In my work, some people work privately and live or die by what they produce or fail to; but some work for government, usually at lesser pay, doing in their work public service, and get benefits and reasonable job security as a trade off. I don't, generally, see Chait's post, one of his weaker ones by my lights, as being responsive to Damon's essential point that a feast or famine model--under which actors, for example, work--is appropriate for teachers who accept lower pay, relatively speaking, in part for reasonable job security. I also can't see--though this isn't Damon's point--paying some teachers more than others for "better performance." I'd worry about how that will be measured, how teaching will bend and be bent, at the cost of really educating students, to meet those measures and about the corruption of the school environment by the competition such pay incentives would unleash.

- basman

August 3, 2011 at 6:10pm

Correction: ...--is appropriate for teachers ... should be ...--is inappropriate for teachers...

- basman

August 3, 2011 at 6:28pm

Jon's made several goofy (being generous here) arguments defending his position on teacher tenure and metrics used to measure performance. One of the more recent was the role of local control in resisting change in education. That one and others, have left me shaking my head as one of Jon's few (quite) blind spots in an otherwise sharp record of analysis on politics and the functioning of government. Needless to say, very little of what he's said about education is convincing.

- jet

August 3, 2011 at 7:18pm

Don't take my critique of Jon as support for Damon's comments either.

- jet

August 3, 2011 at 7:19pm

I often read the comments just for basman. As usual, he is spot on. Excellent teachers don't always get very good students. Mediocre teachers can thrive in wealthy areas. It seems that most propose that teachers be judged by how their students perform. It seems that exposing education to market pressures is about as bad as it has been for healthcare.

- Sancho

August 3, 2011 at 8:09pm

Jonathan's post is sharp and intelligent, as usual, but I have an open mind, so I was eager to read jet's critique. Well, there was nothing there, other than tut-tutting at JC's post. I guess I should not be surprised. Another thought experiment I would love to see carried out: if the educational establishment in this country were run by the right, with the same results as we have now, how soon would it be until many of TNR's commenters waxed roidian in their indignation at the educational climate in America? I think I have the answer: about two seconds, and that on a slow day.

- liberalref

August 3, 2011 at 8:33pm

I agree with irony and basman. Moreover, Chait misrepresents what Damon said. He does not claim that teachers universally are motivated by love of children. He claims no more than what Chait acknowledges -- that it is widely true that, given the relative lack of financial reward, people pursue teaching because they love teaching. (tmmats, I don't necessarily care what Damon says either, but I do care about the reactions to what he says.) I do think it is refreshing to hear a defense of teacher-tenure in this time of rampant teacher-bashing. Tenure does not have to mean retention of bad teachers. Tenure is not absolute security. It means that there has to be some due process before a teacher loses his or her position. If there is a failure, it is with school administrators in being unwilling, perhaps to lazy, to invoke that process. Absense of tenure would leave teachers vulnerable to being fired for capricious reasons or to being fired to cull from the faculty older teachers whose wages the adminstration does not way to pay. Dhurtado

- NR143296

August 3, 2011 at 8:53pm

And what does your post add, libref, other than tut-tutting jet's post, and tut-tutting how you imagine TNR commenters would react to an educational establishment run by the right? Dhurtado

- NR143296

August 3, 2011 at 9:01pm

I love ya JC - but this is a really hateful post, ideological cant at it's least defended - lazy, if you will. Do you really think "teachers" (whatever that means) are *lazy* because of tenure? Do you know any teachers? I know dozens and tenure is the last thing on their minds when they chose their profession. They mostly do it because they love it, despite the increasingly thankless nature of it. Sure there are lazy teachers, there are lazy doctors, lawyers, writers too. How is this meaningful again? I have yet to see you respond in any concrete way to the reasons tenure was created in the first place: to draw well educated people in to an underpaid, clearly thankless field with few benefits. Do you disagree with this premise? Then say so and make a real argument - stop attacking the integrity of an entire field with tired cant dressed up in glib DC-ease. Is there anything more reliable than a fat salary to those that are educated at the right schools and/or born in to the right families? Do bankers and elite journalists somehow earn their keep more than the average teacher? How? Is the percentage of crappy journalists lower than crappy teachers? Matt Damon's mother has been a highly respected child psychology teacher in Boston for 40 years, good for him for defending her field. Damon is famous for two things: being a brilliant actor and a normally unfailingly polite man. I agree with every syllable he said. What, exactly, was the point of the camerman's question anyway? It was unbearably stupid. Dopey journalists asking ignorant, insulting questions rarely get what they deserve and I was pleased to see it for once. Go Matt.

- WandreyCer

August 3, 2011 at 9:16pm

I agree that opposition to reform has some pretty bad ideas and I also disagree with tenure, but let's not kid ourselves. The "reform" approach supported by Reason and the various other Koch enterprises is not about turning teaching into a profession. It's about turning it into a minimum wage proposition with all the security and incentives to produce that an illegal immigrant at a meat packing plant has.

- miceelf

August 3, 2011 at 10:23pm

Look, if we are going to go all Manichaean, there are the education conservatives and the education radicals. Purist dogmatics would defend the established order to the tooth and radicals would attack it with every tool in the arsenal. Interestingly, like with "entitlements", this is an issue that hard-line liberals tend to be temperamentally conservative about. That is to say, they defend the teaching establishment no matter what. But remember that America is not all that Manichaean: hard-line conservatives are a much larger, cohesive, and more influential bloc than hard-line liberals. And on that side lies the gutting of teaching as we know it to replace it with teaching as shift work in a network of private schools, religious schools, and homeschooling. (Does this sound like our health care system at all?) In some sense, our primary and secondary education system is the most universal socialist thing we have in this country: right-wingers would make quick work of it, as libref ominously suggests. For this reason, it's important to note two more things. First, as should be apparent to people, liberals tend to prefer compromise. Moreover, liberals still have intellectually honest policy shops. This means that a typical liberal will be open to reform to improve the already-socialist education system we have, and will probably support this stance with arguments that proceed rationally from demonstrably axiomatic premises. (There is no "the government is always better than the private market" fallacy on the left, for example.) Second, the nuanced position of properly liberal education reform, which I have yet to see consistently argued on this site, takes the successful parts of our current system--the universality, the ubiquity, the diversity of our student population, the sheer devotion of the vast majority of teachers in the face of low pay and crappy treatment, and the almost obscene amount of funding we casually spend on education--and builds upon them to make a better system. There are problems with some low quality teachers, and if you hold Randi Weingarten's feet to the fire, then the AFT will work with you to get rid of the rubber rooms and institute a more credible process to weed out the bad teachers. But you have to really ask yourself whether the major problem that differentiates our performance stats from our better peers is really in the teaching profession (which in other countries is unionized, but with better pay) or in the 80% of school-external factors that conspire to make educating a child a mean feat. Run-of-the-mill schools in your average suburb are doing fine enough--of course, we could improve them so they compete somewhat better with Japan, Korea, and Singapore, but that's not what everyone is focused on. What people are really throwing fits about are poor schools. And just like "programs for the poor make for poor programs", we have a problem making sure schools where poor people go (because of redlining or our regressive property tax caste system) are as good as schools in upper middle class neighbourhoods. Part of it is money, and part of it is culture, but since there are a lot of working and lower middle class people, there are a lot of people who, because of concentrated poorishness and the pathologies of poverty, are living in not-so-great neighbourhoods with not-so-great schools because there is a critical mass of not-so-great parental households. And that is a problem without an education policy solution. But, since the moderate right has to have an equal and opposite education policy, it happens to be supporting competition in education by weakening union rights for teachers (making the profession crappier) and taking money out of the public schools in the form of vouchers and charter schools. I wonder what happens when you allow richer people to take their ball (tax money) and go home to spend it on whatever they darn well please. I think the Bush tax cuts were the preamble to that story. As Boehner said, so I say to this new class of neoconservative education wonks in the Democratic Party: get your ass in line!

- chaitless

August 3, 2011 at 10:34pm

Bravo WandreyCer! Thanks.

- kras

August 4, 2011 at 3:19am

Chaitless, whoever you are, your analysis is much more insightful than Chait's. I'm all for looking at ways to increase teacher accountability while also making the profession (and it is a profession in my view) a more attractive one to pursue. But teachers are not the problem in our educational systems. Dhurtado

- NR143296

August 4, 2011 at 7:51am

This argument is completely disingenuous. If it really is true that a "few [teachers] are lazy and bad" then it hardly follows that "their badness and laziness has serious consequences for children," 'cause after all, there's only a few of them. Of course Chait doesn't really think there's just a few "lazy and bad" teachers he thinks there's tons - that's why he thinks we need reform!

- NR851651

August 4, 2011 at 10:51am

And what, exactly, is the basis for the conclusion that there are "tons" of lazy and bad teachers? Dhurtado

- NR143296

August 4, 2011 at 10:59am

chaitless says "But you have to really ask yourself whether the major problem that differentiates our performance stats from our better peers is really in the teaching profession (which in other countries is unionized, but with better pay) or in the 80% of school-external factors that conspire to make educating a child a mean feat. " Chaitless. I think the most salient point of your post is our collective inability to analyze and assess the 80% of school-external factors that affect educating children. I responded to another post about how the obsessiveness of primarily focusing only on teachers (their performance, their 'gold plated benefits', and union influence) and ignoring the other 80%. The impact of parenting or lack-there-of, privatizing services, political influence, administrative power struggles, and the local cultural influences. I've mentored several high school students from poor, inner city neighborhoods, who have suffered from years of negative reinforcement from parents & family about how they won't amount to anything, education is a waste (look at me), are getting uppity, etc., etc. and you kids that are afraid to apply themselves, not for lack of trying, but for lack of wanting to go beyond the soft-bigotry of low expectations. Couple that with the deplorable learning conditions of the schools themselves and one begins to realize the vast chasm that we face in improving education for the poor and low-income working families.

- singlspeed

August 4, 2011 at 12:02pm

Chaitless's 4th paragraph is a much better analysis. External factors are more important than school factors, and educational underperformance is an issue of poverty and culture more than bad teachers. But we should be careful not to say that the external factors are too daunting to address. They are difficult, but the solutions are pretty obvious: good, stable jobs and, in the schools, policies which improve the home educational life (book distributions; more after-school tutoring and mentoring; pledges to turn off games and tv). Chait seems to be fixated on teacher issues. Bad gym teacher at one point, JC?

- polcereal

August 4, 2011 at 12:29pm

I agree with all the comments that clarify the erroneousness of making teachers, their relative job security and their unions the significant causes of educational ills.

- basman

August 4, 2011 at 4:26pm