Ricochet
I have to say, this kind of thing does a lot more to make me think less of the Metropolitan Washington Council AFL-CIO than it does to make me think less of DC Mayor Adrian Fenty. The crux of the matter here is that Fenty and Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee have offered DC teachers a very generous proposal that will create an option for teachers to move onto a career track that features more money in exchange for less job security. The Washington Teachers Union is opposing this for reasons that mostly seem to amount to paranoia, since the policy merits aside it’s hard to see how this proposal would make any of their members any worse off. The WTU leadership is going to do what it’s going to do, I guess, but the rest of organized labor would do well to steer clear of this particular spat rather than taking it up as an opportunity to paint Fenty and other proponents of the proposal as somehow anti-labor — I think most unions would be glad to be getting offers of large pay increases from management.
This comes via Ryan Avent. It’s worth considering that DC is, at this point, in better financial shape than the vast majority of American localities and also has much worse schools. Under the circumstances, it’s the best possible opportunity for teachers to get what Rhee’s putting on the table — generous reform that puts real resources on the table and thereby keeps teaching as an attractive career path even while building some additional accountability into the deal.
69 Responses to “Ricochet”
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August 28th, 2008 at 11:08 am
How do you know that job security isn’t more important to the rank and file? What safeguards are built into the contract so that teachers aren’t fired because of personal biases? Also, is Fenty DLC?
August 28th, 2008 at 11:11 am
Yes two tiering employees always is good for the employee! Of course those who don’t take the high pay tier are now lazy and shiftless, easier to demonize and to break the union over. Those at the top tier now have less jobs security and still can see wages cut as their bargaining power has been reduced! How can unions not run up and grab this poison pill!
August 28th, 2008 at 11:12 am
So, a little while ago, you noted how cool it is that bloggers can link to deeper source material to bolster their arguments.
That would sure be nice here, instead of linking to an article that discusses the namecalling with barely any regard to the specifics of the disagreement, which they boiled down into one sentence: “He backed D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s plan to cut staff and eliminate teacher seniority in return for higher pay.”
But the devil is in the details, you know? How many staff cuts? How big a pay raise? What does it mean to “eliminate” seniority — does that effect who gets let go? Annual raises?
From this, I can certainly see a case where they are trying to push more expensive and more experienced teachers out the door for younger and cheaper labor, even after those folks get some form of raise.
Is someone being sold out here? How do they decide who to let go? Seriously, these questions matter *a lot* when deciding who is doing the right thing in a conflict like this.
August 28th, 2008 at 11:16 am
I think it’s naive to believe that this isn’t an attempt to push out black teachers and bring in more teach for america types. why does the hiring/firing power have to be a part of the deal? Is there any precedent for it?
August 28th, 2008 at 11:17 am
The trouble is that “accountability for teachers” in large part means “high stakes testing for the students”. Given what a detriment that’s proven to be in terms of making actual non-test related progress in the classroom, I can see why teachers would want to stay far away from it.
Teachers don’t like teaching to the test, or having their teaching methods handcuffed by imperfect metrics. This scheme isn’t just asking teachers to sacrifice their job security, its asking them to sacrifice their professionalism.
August 28th, 2008 at 11:19 am
Unions are generally always against a two-tiered system.
Part of advocating on behalf of the workers, however, means that you are trying to argue that more benefits for the workers makes everyone better off. Since this is most demonstrably not true about DC public schools or local government, the unions aren’t really able to win this popularity contest.
August 28th, 2008 at 11:20 am
Isn’t this just two-tiered hiring?
August 28th, 2008 at 11:28 am
Given how teachers were deceived by “No Child Left Behind” with promises of increased demands for increased financing, it is no wonder that they are, as you so kindly put it, “paranoid” now.
What, now they give up their job security and then there turns out to be no money for the promised raises, just like with NCLB?
Teachers thinking is hardly “paranoid” – it is a natural defensive reaction to the way they have been used and abused and dropped by politicians in the past for political gain.
The plan has merit, but there needs to be more attention to and healing of past betrayals before it can go forward. Your words, Matt, just make the teacher’s actions all the more justifiable, feeding into the old “teachers are always to blame” meme.
August 28th, 2008 at 11:34 am
How terrible a thing accountability would be! Welcome to the world the rest of us live and work in every day. Wouldn’t we all love to work for two years then be guaranteed a job and pay raises, irregardess of how little work we did, for the rest of our careers.
As for the school system being taken over by “teach for america types”, again – how horrible that would be – a school full of hard working, well-educated, and motivated teachers. The HORROR!
I have a feeling the DC teacher’s union has finally met their match in Ms. Rhee. Let’s hope so, for the future of our schools.
August 28th, 2008 at 11:41 am
Also, this:
Giving up job security and due process for a raise that’s dependent on the whims of philanthropy? Really?
August 28th, 2008 at 11:45 am
It amazes me the degree to which teachers unions have been able to use the job security argument to forward their agenda. This sort of defensive posturing makes sense in a more industrial union, wherein the end product doesn’t necessitate protection on moral/ethical grounds. But, guess what? Education is different, in that we’re relying on the system to generate not the components of an auto engine, but rather educated children, the engine of future American dignity and prosperity.
This job security argument – “we need unions to protect teachers from capricious principals” – smacks of the same argument folks use against the death penalty. Instead of “if one innocent person is executed,” it becomes, “if one innocent teacher is fired.” The HUGE logical inconsistency here is that, in a school, the teacher isn’t the one who needs the most protection, it is the STUDENTS. If one innocent child bears another day learning from an incompetent teacher, we should all be ashamed of ourselves, and too often the unions are on the wrong side of this argument.
August 28th, 2008 at 11:53 am
This is why there ought to be a pro-teacher case for charter schools. People who study labor relations say that unhappy workers have two options: exit & voice. If you’re unhappy you can quit (exit) or you can organize and gain some control over your workplace (voice). Unions provide teachers with the latter but breaking up big districts into independent schools would give them the former as well.
Right now, if a teacher is unhappy with their employer or is fired unjustly, they basically have to move to a new city because we’ve got these huge school districts. So instead they unionize and fight like hell. The result is a one-size-fits-all compensation plan and lifetime tenure because no one trusts the administration to exercise judgment.
If we had smaller districts or networks of charter schools then administrators could exercise judgment in running schools and if teachers didn’t like administration policies they could quit. Administrators that pissed off all the good teachers would then get fired. In the end we’d have better administrators and happier teachers. The way things work now no one is accountable.
August 28th, 2008 at 11:58 am
It amazes me the degree to which teachers unions have been able to use the job security argument to forward their agenda.
The reason this is an effective line of defense is that teachers salaries are, or are seen as, lower than the salaries the same bright young college students could earn were they to choose other fields.
So, to make up for the income gap, there need to be different incentives to lure good people to the field. Job security is one, community respect is another, and of course the self-satisfaction of doing a ‘noble’ job is yet another. In material terms, though, job security is just about the only consideration that helps them make up the gap. It’s not about keeping the wrong person from being fired, its about keeping the enough people interested in getting started.
The answer? Higher pay, of course. For example, in contrast to underpayment, overpayment would create a scenario where job security is not only unnecessary, it is counter-productive, because you have a constant influx of good young talent scrapping for plum jobs, with the motivation that the rug could be yanked from under if they are slacking. That, of course, would require serious funding.
August 28th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
We now see that Matt can almost – but not quite – grasp the idea that “big unions” – just like “big management” – eventually end up caring more about job security than about the supposed goals of the organization.
August 28th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
Careful, or you’re going to start sounding like Mickey Kaus. Unions are always against two-tier personnel systems since they undermine union power and worker solidarity, since workers no longer see themselves as rising or falling with all their fellow workers. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, especially if it helps deliver a much needed service to the community. But you need to consider what you’re supporting here.
August 28th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
I always say, Don’t trust any union leader who prefers job security over higher pay because they have a conflict. In this case, though, the President of the Union was initially favorable, but got spooked by a challenge from his vice-president. Admittedly, he’s showing poor leadership here, but he’s trying to hold onto his job and appears not to be acting self-interestedly.
Ultimately, the teachers should vote on this. Most professional school administrators will tell you that you want teacher buy-in for any scheme of this type, so the vote should be held for independent reasons.
Of the membership votes against it, then you have a problem with teachers, not necessarily teacher’s unions. But ultimately, the City Counsel can legislate on the issue.
August 28th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
So, after searching around a bit, I’ve found these articles describing some of the details.
First: the raise. 6%. That’s a nice enough raise (certainly above cola), but it isn’t huge, and not a big bump over previous negotiated raises. If you say that it is generous by about 3%, that would be about a $1,200 gift to the average teacher.
Second: the seniority thing. It looks like they want to take away the ability for long-standing teachers to move from one district to another. That doesn’t sound like a terrible thing from the outside – I don’t particularly like the idea of a constant flow of the best teachers away from the toughest schools. But from a union perspective, it is right to ask which is worth more to the members: a $1200 bonus, or the option of where to work. I can see why they want that option. Throw in the fact other concessions, and this starts to look even worse.
There is another problem with the seniority thing, and that is that it seems like someone is talking out of both sides of their mouths. Experience teachers are more valuable, except we need to buy them out because they are too expensive. There seems to be a feeling that young talent might do better than the people they replace, except that we need the experience in the worst schools.
Which is it? Is there too much dead wood around (which has moved into the good performing schools), or not enough senior talent (because it has moved away from the poor performing ones)?
This seems like a real, and somewhat nuanced, issue that could use some good analysis to me, instead of a drive-by opinion.
August 28th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
Oops.
These…
Articles…
August 28th, 2008 at 12:29 pm
It seems that the options here are less about generosity and more about giving school administrators yet another club to weild. The promise of a carrot doesn’t excuse the use of a stick.
And if unions were all, and solely, about increasing the size of the paycheck then they wouldn’t be of much use at all. In the case of teachers one of the primary functions of the unions is constant vigilance against the use of teachers as footballs… Regardless of the size of the payout, giving in a little invites getting kicked around alot.
August 28th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
I wrote this in an email to some other people as part of a longer-term conversation, and one of them said I should post it here. So here it is. Context: everyone in this conversation is strong self-identified as liberal and holds many polical views in common with the author of this blog, even when our policy views differ.
________________________
Title this: when liberal ideology wrecks liberal intentions
Sometime over a year ago, [name] and I had an email back-and-forth about education reform. The gist of my position was that Matthew Yglesias was being naive in his decision to (in effect, if not explicitly) reinforce the position of teachers unions, which was that there’s no sense in thinking about anything you can do to improve K-12 education until you give teachers massively more money. Since teachers are underpaid, said Matthew, you won’t be able to keep the good ones, they’ll always turn over, schools will always suck, etc. Econ 101. While there was more to detail, the summary of my response was that this position was the kind of large stinking pile of BS that liberals come up with when they’ve spent almost no time thinking about high school education reform.
Today Matthew has another post, in which he seems to express some surprise that the DC teachers union is opposing a reform proposal that would give teachers more money in exchange for allowing the district more flexibility in how they run schools. Matt says the union’s actions ‘seem to amount to paranoia’ I suspect because what Matt seems to not grasp is that the core position of teachers unions is to oppose every possible change to American public education except for large, unconditional increases in teachers pay. This is not an interpretation of their position. This has been the position they have stated in so many words for years now, going on decades. [aside: The calculation seems to be that by making every other possible option politically untenable, the union will inevitably get their members more money]. Union leadership (disclaimer: not membership) has been very blunt (on the record, in the press) that one cost of this strategy– in the destruction that large numbers of lousy schools create in lives of millions of kids—are costs they couldn’t care less about.
Matt– and Ezra and other liberal bloggers who don’t pay much attention to high school reform — seem to take a classically liberal world view and inappropriately apply it to education reform. Their thinking seems to be loosely that since unions are important for helping “the little guy”, then education reformers should “work with the teachers unions” (a concept only vaguely tossed into sentences and rarely explored) to make schools better for the downtrodden. What they don’t seem to register is that teachers unions have decided that they are going to actively work to keep horrible schools from getting even an iota better (thereby working to keep horrible schools a destructive forces in the lives of millions of kids) in order to create the kind of political situation that they hope will someday get their members raises. Obviously this position creates real tangible damage in the lives of real children in the present and near future; and only the potential for uncertain benefit to teachers in the future. In this DC situation Matt is referencing, the union is turning down cash on the barrel. On principal. Because that’s what their long-term strategy calls for.
I can’t help but wonder if you replaced the word ‘union’ in the names and called them ‘teachers Republicans’ or ‘teachers neo-conservatives’ or ‘teachers John McCains’ if Matt and Ezra’s positions wouldn’t change 180 degrees overnight. Which blinds us most: ideology, loyalty to political allies, or both?
August 28th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
As I said in a coment at Ezra’s yesterday, teachers have spent the last few decades watching reformer after reformer come in, lower job security, weaken worker protection, and make the day to day of being a teacher a much less liveable proposition all in the name of increasing student achievement. But then they don’t actually increase student achievement! So what was the point? Oh yeah — busting the union.
This is enhanced in this case by the way Fenty’s Administration — and Rhee in particular — has been extraordinarily secretive and hide-the-ball with all their policy initiatives. Hizzoner’s given no one reason to trust him and every reason to doubt him, even on those few occasions when his policy proposals are not based on dismantling worker protection measures in the District.
August 28th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Brad L: That’s a 6% raise per year. Maximum salaries for senior teachers would be in the six figures under Rhee’s proposal. It’s very, very generous. And again, nobody is forcing any given teacher to take the deal.
I can understand why the union leadership feels it’s undermining their power, but that is not in and of itself a sufficient reason for opposing the initiative. Clearly something needs to change in DC schools, and clearly a necessary part of that process may be giving management the ability to get rid of bad educators.
August 28th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
Seems most everyone is missing the central problem with the Mayor’s position here. According to the DC Examiner link the problem relates to “a plan to cut staff and eliminate teacher seniority in return for higher pay”.
This plan might work if you were making widgets. Lay off the older workers who think more about safety, hire younger workers at piece rates, and go for the speed-up. And, hey presto!, having sped up the line you don’t need so many employees.
But in education there are only two tested certainties- that children’s reading will reflect that of their parents, and that smaller classes are better. In education you don’t get better results by putting more kids in the class of the super-duper teacher who supposedly can teach faster than his less efficient fellow teacher. A high school with a great teacher doesn’t just hire an auditorium so that everyone can get smart, they keep the class size small because they know that’s part of what makes the teacher great.
In fact, most of you reading today had a class in college taught by someone who was absolutely brilliant, and you never had a clue- because there were 300 people taking the class, learning rote basics to clear that 100-level requirement.
And that’s probably what Fenty is proposing for the schools- large classes where supposedly great teachers gaze benignly on unskilled aides who keep order while children learn by rote the answers to “achievement testing”. How droll.
And while we’re at it, let’s remember one other little point- the teacher has the kid for six hours, the family and/or society have the kid for the other 18 hours. Thinking you can drop just anybody off at the door of the schoolhouse in the morning, and get back a scholarship-winning student at the end of the day, just ain’t gonna work.
There’s a major disconnect in Matt’s thinking on this, as he seems to think teachers unions are like the Teamsters used to be. Even the Teamsters aren’t like they used to be, and there’s no reason to believe that a group of people who all have college degrees are stupidly ignoring the real issues here. In fact, from what I’ve seen so far, it seems to be Matt who has never really learned what the issues are, and can thus be manipulated by clever phrases and honeyed promises.
He could correct that by, y’know, learning.
August 28th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
I can’t help but wonder if you replaced the word ‘union’ in the names and called them ‘teachers Republicans’ or ‘teachers neo-conservatives’ or ‘teachers John McCains’ if Matt and Ezra’s positions wouldn’t change 180 degrees overnight. Which blinds us most: ideology, loyalty to political allies, or both?
Maybe you should have edited before you posted. You wonder about nonsense.
August 28th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
Brad L: That’s a 6% raise per year. Maximum salaries for senior teachers would be in the six figures under Rhee’s proposal. It’s very, very generous. And again, nobody is forcing any given teacher to take the deal.
That’s a fair point – I overlooked the fact that this was a three year deal, so that the gift is not 1200 for one year, its closer to 4k over three years. I’m still not sure I’d characterize that as “extremely” generous (I was one of those that considered teaching but went a different way, and as a mid-level cube-dweller my annual bonus has often been higher than the proposed 3-year total — at more than one company).
And again, nobody is forcing any given teacher to take the deal.
This is where more details of the proposal would help me — are teachers then given an option of taking the new package (more money, no seniority) or keeping to a more standard package?
August 28th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
What safeguards are built into the contract so that teachers aren’t fired because of personal biases?
Welcome to the real world that the rest of us live in.
Yes, without the union all these excellent teachers would be getting fired left and right because of “personal biases”. Principals across the country are thinking “God I’d love to fire that asshole Johnson, I just don’t like his weaselly little face, but drats, the union!” And in the rest of our jobs every day otherwise competent and productive people are fired because of personal biases. Hell just last week we lost a few of our best people because the boss is a Red Sox fan and he found out they liked the Yankees.
Everyone deserves an employment contract that makes it nearly impossible to get fired, it would do wonders for our national productivity.
I’d also request that a pony is thrown in. I like ponies.
August 28th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
This is where more details of the proposal would help me — are teachers then given an option of taking the new package (more money, no seniority) or keeping to a more standard package?
Yes.
Here’s a pretty good, straightforward description of the offer on the table.
August 28th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
Something else a lot of people seem to forget, or maybe they’re white males and just don’t ‘get it’.
For a century schools relied on two captive worker classes- women and nuns. The women earned about half what a man would earn (or less) and the nuns basically didn’t earn anything.
And people didn’t learn anywhere near as much. I’m guessing people graduate from the 8th grade today at about the same rate they did in 1935, but in 1935 that was an accomplishment and today that’s a problem.
All things considered, you might expect the costs of education to rise with the coming of modern times, but instead we get people with magic beans that they say will make it cost even less. How does that work?
Well, here’s a modest proposal. Decriminalize drugs and let the users out of prison so they can take care of their children and be role models by having jobs and paying taxes. Take the $50 billion we spend each year on the drug war, and use it to provide treatment to the one-tenth of one percent of us who actually have a drug problem, and to provide better schools to the vast majority who occasionally use drugs because neither their schools nor their families provide a more attractive alternative.
This doesn’t have the glitter of “something for nothing”, but it has the solidity of something for something, taking the money we’re already wasting and using it for something that works.
If only we had some educated adults around who could be role models in making this change.
August 28th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
Brad L., I don’t think I see your confusion here. Presumably we just want GOOD teachers. Experience can obviously be a big part of that, but the whole problem here is that under current conditions it’s not the case that a teacher with 20 years experience is necessarily any good.
To the extent that this is true, we would be better off replacing poor performing teachers, no matter how “experienced”, with new talent.
The intra/inter district transfer thing is interesting though. Does anyone know more about how that works?
It wouldn’t surprise me if bad schools tend to be used as dumping grounds to get rid of poor teachers (that can’t be fired outright), while richer/good schools are able to poach away more talented teachers (if not through direct salary and benefits, than other perqs, such as offering more control over lessons, better parent involvement, equipment, etc.).
That would obviously just make the poor performing teachers perform even worse, because they end up concentrated, with no high performing peers nearby to compete with or learn from, and a generally more disadvantaged/challenging student body to begin with (which also provides a convenient excuse).
August 28th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
But in education there are only two tested certainties- that children’s reading will reflect that of their parents, and that smaller classes are better.
This is an oversimplification with respect to both factors. Yes, when one measures the reading ability of a child ONCE, the independent variable that consistently tracks point-in-time reading ability is parent income. However, this does not take into account student growth over time. And growth, after all, should be the metric with which educators concern themselves, right? (Otherwise, what exactly IS the purpose of schooling?) Anyway, when growth is measured, the single factor that consistently impacts growth from year to year is teacher quality.
Moreover, yes, lowering class size at some threshold levels can have a positive impact on student achievement. But compared against a litany of other factors – i.e. teacher quality, using data to drive instruction, strong job-embedded professional development – class size reduction falls close to the bottom of the list of factors that drive achievement.
(Tangentially, you know who loves class size reduction? Unions. Small class size mandates lead to more teachers … more teachers lead to more dues … you get the picture.)
August 28th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
Ben, you talk a lot about what union leadership has stated they’re pushing for. How about a link or two?
August 28th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Thanks Antid! This definitely helps, and there was this article under related links, which also helps.
So, from these descriptions, this does certainly sound like a much fairer approach – far more generous on the one side, a little riskier than shown on the other side, and being optional makes such a huge difference that it is a genuine gamechanger.
I can see the union wanting to negotiate the finer points, but this is a proposal that one could really get behind.
August 28th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
With Fenty’s indiscriminate firing of government employees, I’d take security over a pay increase any day. I like my DC job, I do good work, it pays me a fair wage, I have great health care, I would not give up my union protection.
August 28th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
Yes, without the union all these excellent teachers would be getting fired left and right because of “personal biases”. Principals across the country are thinking “God I’d love to fire that asshole Johnson, I just don’t like his weaselly little face, but drats, the union!” And in the rest of our jobs every day otherwise competent and productive people are fired because of personal biases. Hell just last week we lost a few of our best people because the boss is a Red Sox fan and he found out they liked the Yankees.
Actually, in my experience, schools ARE above average weird workplaces, with more than their share of inexplicable rivalries and politics. They often seem to be run as private fiefdoms, with incompetent administrators in cozy relationships with the school board.
I think this probably has something to do with an excess of local control and “democracy”. In any case, it’s a real problem. Probably tenure isn’t the best solution, but it does need to be addressed.
August 28th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
With Fenty’s indiscriminate firing of government employees
It wasn’t indiscriminate. The administration discriminated on the basis of competence.
Look, just because Marion Barry handed out a job several years ago to the nephew of someone who did him a favor, does that mean we have to keep him on for life?
August 28th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
So, school boards hire teachers on the lowest rungs with low pay, and when they come in for higher pay, whether on seniority or performance, they get fired. Is this a good deal? Remember the standard propaganda point of union-busters is that workers must have “choice”, which translates into weakening unions. If you think that workers’ best strategy at any time could be to deal individually with management, you just don’t get it. Pay scales must be set collectively if unions are to succeed.
August 28th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
Abuse of a process, or a system, is not grounds for indictment of that system. When a bad cop shoots an innocent, do you immediately call for disarming ALL cops?
August 28th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
One thing which is clear from this thread is that a lot of people blame school administrators and teachers for bad schools and bad achievement records. In fact NCLB is based on the idea that the whip can be cracked over teachers and performance problems will be cured.
Have none of these people noticed that the main problems are in low income areas which for various reasons are not conducive to learning? This certainly applies to DC public schools. The problem is socio-economic, and abusing teachers will never solve it, only discourage able people from going into teaching.
As for reports about schools which magically reverse this trend, they are are usually based on egregious cherry-picking of students, and/or fraud or misrepresentation of test results (see Bob Somerby’s blog for examples).
August 28th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
If you think that workers’ best strategy at any time could be to deal individually with management, you just don’t get it.
I guess I don’t get it, because I didn’t realize that the union was willing to abdicate its negotiating responsibility for all of its members. It might be naive to think that they would address both a traditional model of pay and an incentive-based model of pay on behalf of their constituency, but I did.
Seriously, what is to keep them from saying:
“Hm. That second tier sounds good — after all, our members do get paid quite a bit more. But you know what? We won’t agree to it unless they are not starting on probation, but would start as usual, have a probationary period if they don’t succeed, and then are subject to being let go for performance after a serious attempt at performance redress fails.”
“Oh, and let’s have a look at the performance metrics, shall we? Because we don’t want it to just be the whim of one supervisor, and we don’t want it just to be one bad year of scores, because any particular class can be an outlier.”
This seems like something the union should be doing. It doesn’t sound like union-busting to me, just a different negotiating construct.
August 28th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
You obviously don’t know very much about unions. Their power is derived entirely a monopoly of labor across an industry or craft. Their ability to bargain collectively is somewhat undercut when workers are bribed into opting out of the collective.
On the other hand the teachers union has been so beaten into a self-defense posture it’s almost totally worthless and needs a big reboot for anyone to care about it
August 28th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
“One thing which is clear from this thread is that a lot of people blame school administrators and teachers for bad schools and bad achievement records.”
I’m with skeptonomist on this one. I had this debate ad nauseam with professors throughout college who thought they “knew” the cure. An argument for which there was no answer was as follows:
First when we talk about “underperforming” schools we’re talking mainly about “urban” and when we talk mainly about “urban” we’re talking about black. Agreed? (professor nods)
Second if you take the highest performing schools in any of these metro areas tangential to the “urban” schools and look at the percentage of students with married parents and/or parents who went to college you’re almost certain to find a positive correlation with performance. That is students with married parents who went to school perform well vis-a-vis their urban counterparts. Agreed? (Professor mumbles something about accepting it empirically)
Thirdly, if you were to take the teachers teaching the urban students and replace them with the teachers teaching the high performers would the high performers now become failures as a result of the teachers? Would the failures now become high performers? (Professor mumbles something about seeing my point.)
My point is that every problem can’t be solved by government. And every schools is not failing. And it is not an urban issue as much as it is a parent/expectation/home environment issue. I’m urban that’s why I make this argument but I fit the caste of a high performer in that my parents were married went to school and set expectations. Am I saying that only children of married college graduates succeed? Absolutely not, but I guarantee if someone were to study this causality vis-a-vis our “education problem” this is what they would find more often than not.
August 28th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
Umm, it’s called solidarity. The entire point of a union is that by pulling together all the workers in a plant/school/industry/whatever, you get increased bargaining power. By giving the “option” to people to get out of the union and keep working, you divide the bargaining power. Even worse, the people who leave the system get the benefit of the union’s work (their wages will be higher then what the union bargains for), while paying in nothing to the union. And, depending on how the contract works, the union may still have to represent the non-members in any dispute.
It’s a fairly classic tragedy of the commons question. How does the union resisting that while management attempts to exploit it make the union look bad?
August 28th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Their ability to bargain collectively is somewhat undercut when workers are bribed into opting out of the collective.
I didn’t see anything in those articles about teachers, in either tier, opting out of their union representation. Are you saying that, as a matter of practicality, negotiating two separate sets of benefits for two different groups within their constituency would be destructive? Why/how would that happen?
Play the scenario out for me where having more than one pay package destroys the union.
I think unions are necessary where you have any sort of skilled labor combined with a big monopsony. I’ve got no truck with teachers being unionized. I just don’t see where more than one compensation package does that.
August 28th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
From the article that Antid posted, first graf:
Emphasis is mine. If the union isn’t actually negotiating these terms, this lead paragraph is deeply misleading.
I don’t see where this is peeling off union members.
August 28th, 2008 at 3:24 pm
Well… isn’t that the deal? Isn’t this explicitly asking union members to go against that contract which the union has already bargained? Without an actual slap in the face, I can’t see how this could be much clearer. It’s kinda like Massachusetts saying “well, I know you elected that guy as president… but we’ll give you lower taxes if you pretend this other guy is the president…”
August 28th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
Isn’t this explicitly asking union members to go against that contract which the union has already bargained?
No. This is a new contract. The union is being asked to put it to the membership for a vote. It would still be a collectively bargained contract. Members would not be opting out of union membership, just tenure.
August 28th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
I don’t understand. Why change things? The public schools in DC are doing great! I mean, sure the kids are getting screwed, but the important thing is that teachers get good pay, benefits, and total job security.
You can’t have everything.
Having said that, the FUD engaged in by the entrenched teaching bureaucracy is revolting. Fortunately, DC schoolteachers all live in Maryland, and can’t vote in DC politics, so the pressure on Fenty & Rhee to gut the WTU will just grow stronger as the demographics of DC continue to change.
For a look at the shape of things to come, look at the way Fenty roundly bitch-slapped the Taxi Driver’s union earlier this year.
August 28th, 2008 at 4:06 pm
I had this debate ad nauseam with professors throughout college who thought they “knew” the cure.
This, of course, assumes a certain worldview, one in which there is a “cure,” like a lightswitch that can be flipped to remove all of the problems. I really don’t think most people think this way. Nor do I think they neglect very real problems where they exist.
What they do think about is how to take a situation that is difficult, and improve the results. What do solutions look like?
1. More teachers. Lower class sizes, more personal interaction.
2. Better teachers. Make sure that good teachers are applied to tough situations.
3. More school-related opportunities, such as pre- and post-school activities.
4. Up-to-date equipment, such as books, computer labs, etc.
It seems uncontroversial to think that any of these things would have some effect on outcomes or quality of schooling. And, of course, they all cost money. If we can get out of the “cure” mindset and be willing to think about where investment would yield genuine results, and start thinking about real costs/returns, we could have an actual debate. Shutting down any approach to making improvements because we face hurdles seems unnecessarily defeatist to me.
August 28th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
Well, I guess I’m glad somebody does. From what I can see though, your reasoning rests on there being exactly two types of students (failures and high performers), and that these are determined by parenting and background.
Those are both pretty indefensible assumptions. Student performance is obviously a continuum, and it’s determined by a whole host of factors. Background and parental involvement are very important, but we’re also an awfully long way from a point where we can say that we’re doing everything possible with government, and those are bottlenecks.
Give kids better teachers, smaller class sizes, better facilities, and they’re going to do better. Then there’s things like expanding early childhood education programs. Maybe things like infant and childhood nutrition programs. Poverty reduction programs in general. Adult education programs. And all kinds of things nobody’s thought of or researched yet because we have a fragmented system and nobody really in charge of finding and implementing educational best practices.
Better teachers won’t turn a poor kid with a crap home life into a middle class kid with two college educated parents, but it’s still going to be a heck of a lot better than crappy teachers…
August 28th, 2008 at 5:38 pm
I know many teachers, including both my parents, and none of them like merit pay for teachers… because the only way to judge it is by arbitrary testing of students’ results, or by similarly arbitrary methods like peer review, etc. The fact is, there’s no effective way to systematically judge whether a teacher is good or not, and the achievements of their students on standardized tests is a particularly crappy way.
Everyone gives the teachers unions grief for opposing this sort of thing, but they’re right.
August 28th, 2008 at 6:20 pm
Every time that Matt writes about something local, something that happens in the city in which he lives — Washington, DC — he seems to be completely ignorant of the facts and of what’s important about the issue. In this case, Fenty and Rhee are engaged in pure union-busting. They want to replace the merit system of hiring public school teachers, who are government employees, with a spoils system controlled by politicians, under which politicians can fire “disloyal” teachers who are “not with the program.”
Fenty and Rhee want to get rid of older, experienced teachers in the DC school system, trading on public anger against teachers because of poor schools. They want to replace these teachers with young college graduates who intend to teach for just a few years before starting their real careers. These young teachers, the only ones who support the proposed contract, don’t care about tenure or seniority rights because they don’t intend to stay long enough to need them. But the contract is bad for all public school teachers because in it teachers trade tenure and seniority rights for all new hires in the future in exchange for illusory bonuses that have only temporary funding, at best.
If Matt can’t be bothered to find out the facts of something that’s happening in his own city, why should we pay attention to his opinions on national and international affairs, which he knows even less about?
August 28th, 2008 at 9:45 pm
Late to the discussion:
Love it, Matt calls teachers unions paranoid at the urgings of Ryan Avent. Seriously, step outside. Have you ever held a job and had a family and needed security. Maybe you would be paranoid after all the hatchet jobs thrown at you.
Moreover, I love the Fenty praise. White gentry liberals love Fenty, he’s helping move the natives out with efficiency, and the teacher program is another effort to push the ambitious “Teach for America” types into the schools, who will abandon their duties as soon as they see the fiscal restraints and exotification of the teaching in DC wears off.
August 29th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
We forgot, Matt. Tenure and golden parachutes for strictly for the elite, not the hoi polloi of teachers who sacrifice years of higher earning potential to serve kids.
I’ve forgotten my classist manners yet again.
My sister almost got fired for ruffling feathers on educational policy. 4 years later she was named state teacher of the year. Don’t you get it – its the good teachers who are most vulnerable to administrative arbitrariness and who most need union protection.
How about someone who’s burned out after 20 years of struggle in inner-city schools? (my sister had 15) Should they be tossed overboard, or should space be made for them?
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