One More Time Around the Track
“So we’re supposed to react to a situation in which our schools are failing and the teachers’ unions are one of the biggest forces standing in the way of commonsensical and much-needed reforms by increasing what we pay our teachers, and … leaving the unions alone.” ~ John Schwenkler, responding to me.
John, of course, presupposes here that unions are in fact “one of the biggest forces standing in the way of…[education] reform.” With that as a leaping point, his response actually makes a good deal of sense, since my original piece didn’t say much about union reforms. Now, to be very clear I do favor sensible reforms when they are necessary, and there are indeed times when unions are too strong. But my point earlier and again now is that teachers unions are not the underlying problem with our educational system. Teacher shortages still lie at the heart of this, along with the lack of really talented, enthusiastic new teachers entering the field. This is certainly not because of the unions.
Now, having read Jason Song’s two-parter in the LA Times, I can see why a lot of people are concerned about the difficulty facing schools who want to fire really, really bad teachers. This is because Song’s articles are intended to shock and alarm us. Billed as investigative journalism, Song’s tales of teacher debauchery make for an entertaining read, but not really a fair and balanced look at the problems facing our educational system.
One teacher with cerebral palsy, accused numerous times of inappropriate touching of students, is “housed” by the school district, with full pay, year after year while investigations and appeals continue. In another case, a 74 year old teacher who had trouble containing her class was unsuccessfully outed by the school district after a commission decided that maybe a 74 year old, rather than being fired, ought to be moved into a training position. In a third case, a special education instructor who, “despite allegations that included poor judgment, failing to report child abuse, yelling at and insulting children, planning lessons inadequately and failing to supervise her class” was still not removed from her position. In Song’s mind, of course, allegations are essentially proof of guilt. Due process, it would seem, is simply far too expensive. [Read more →]
May 7, 2009 35 Comments
Teachers Unions, Performance Pay, and Autonomy
So we have a few problems to address. First is the notion of quantifying performance. There are obviously cases where you’ve got an exceptional teacher. Everyone knows they’re great. The students love them. The parents love them. Other teachers love them. And then there are cases where teachers are obviously bad. They’re disliked, have terrible results, etc. But I’d say most of the time the situation is much, much more difficult – most teachers are hard to quantify. It’s hard for many reasons, including who their students are, where their school is, how the funding is at that school, how the teachers at the school work together, who the principal is, and so on and so forth. So the government wants to quantify the performance (for whatever reason, not currently teacher pay, though) and the only way to do that is to use standardized tests, graduation rates, and future success of students.
Of course, standardized testing is a terrible metric (and the others aren’t much better) for student or teacher success. Standards require uniformity, and across the country uniformity simply doesn’t exist. A lot of the new data on learning indicates that even across one school, or one classroom, countless differences exist in how students learn. Some students are visual learners, others very physical, still others social, and so on and so forth. Some students do very well when they are lectured to and assigned long papers; others do better when put in group projects. Some are good test-takers, others are not. By forcing teachers to teach to tests we leave a lot of these kids behind. By paying teachers based on abstract and arbitrary national (or even local) standards, we are going to sabotage teacher performance because we’re going to ignore how kids learn, and inevitably how teachers ought to teach. Any professors out there want to start teaching to national standardized tests?
I didn’t think so. [Read more →]
May 6, 2009 79 Comments
