Teachers and Unions and Better Schools

It’s been a long time since I posted an original thought here. The speech is kind of an original thought, but it doesn’t necessarily belong to the blog; it was posted here that it might inspire the thousands of readers who visit this site every day, fingers crossed that there might be a new message from the mountaintop.

It’s not that I haven’t tried. A few weeks ago there was a great article in The New York Times Magazine that probed the question, Are teacher unions killing education reform?” The answer, of course, is yes. So I marked up my copy of the article, scrawled notes in the margins, and set myself the task of responding to the article piece by piece. But a coherent response failed to reveal itself to me.

What has stuck with me in the ensuing six weeks or so are the convictions that:

1. tenure, as it is currently constructed, is not a good thing
2. it is almost farcical that student achievement data is not part of teacher evaluation
3. performance-based pay is essential to educational improvement

The main problem is that teacher unions would have you believe that reforming the system is synonymous with destroying the system, that the alteration of any safeguards to teacher employment is a removal of all safeguards from the arbitrariness of poor administrators.

Let’s take tenure, for example. One can easily get the impression that change to tenure equals removing tenure, putting every teacher in his or her free agent year. Who says tenure can’t be adjusted into a thing that comes in five year or seven year increments? If districts had some flexibility with tenure, they could more easily remove poor teachers. And a multi-year system would allow a teacher to develop a history of performance evaluations, which would protect teachers from arbitrary decisions by administrators, and protect schools from teachers who only occasionally decide to work hard.

Union rhetoric about tenure seems to be rooted in the assumption that all teachers are hard-working, and that administrators are generally ill-intentioned. Neither of these is true. And in the event that an administrator continues to fire qualified teachers: well, how long will that pattern last before the administrator’s employers start to wonder why he is so ineffective at retaining employees, why he is so bad at hiring, why he is so bad at developing teachers. Changes to teacher tenure would demand as much improvement from the evaluators as it would the evaluated.

And why in the world are schools incapable of coming up with performance-based evaluation? The current rhetoric gives the impression that student performance data equals standardized test data. Well, just as we are supposed to look at student performance across multiple means of assessment, so we should look at teacher performance using multiple means of assessment. Students have to meet all sorts of standards: school-based performance standards measured by assessment rubrics; state standards and national standards, where they exist (SAT and ACT, for example).

If a district doesn’t have local standards, then get off your asses and develop them. Why can’t reading and writing be assessed based on local benchmarks? Why can’t levels of math or language or science have standards that inform curriculum, instruction and assessment? Given the amount of community control over schools, it is irresponsible not to have community standards for learning that are guided by relevant state standards, but also reflect the character of the community. If there is a way of giving a kid a report card grade for music or art, then there is a way of articulating a standard for performance. And if end-of-year reviews for special education students are designed to assess progress toward goals, then we have standards, and we have evaluation – what more do we need?

When we talk about teacher evaluation in the abstract, it is this very cold, unhuman thing. The truth is that evaluators and evaluated are co-workers. They have human relationships. They have ongoing communication about the challenges that exist in each classroom. But when we hear performance data as part of teacher evaluation, we tend to ignore the “as part” part. Everything exists in a context; make the assessments fit your district context, make your teacher evaluation responsive to building and classroom contexts, and you should be able to have more valuable teacher evaluations.

And once you do, you can start to tie evaluation to performance. This doesn’t mean we scrap contracts; it just means that contracts establish a level of base pay, and teacher evaluations then dictate whether or not a teacher will be paid above base, and if so, how much. Come up with a formula that has a low base in the contract within the existing seniority system, and then have performance-based compensation that raises pay to existing levels for teachers whose students achieve an acceptable level of performance. Let those whose students exceed performance expectations, or whose students achieve excellent results (in improvement, not necessarily in raw scores) make more money than they do now.

But because unions have a fundamental distrust of their employers, we automatically believe that the threat of abuse and subjugation of teachers is inevitable. I simply don’t think that’s true. So under the existing system, excellent teachers are valued exactly as teachers who don’t suck. That’s why a thirty year veteran whose students underperform on every standardized measure can makes scores of thousands more than a five-year veteran whose students consistently outperform standards. What’s the difference between the two? Not students. Not curriculum. Just that one has, for whatever reason, continued showing up for work for a much longer time.