It’s no secret that I am not fond of the teacher’s unions. I get into a lot of arguments about this, in which I am accused of being uninterested in any school reforms that don’t involve breaking the power of the teacher’s unions. Of course, short of the not-very-successful class size reduction schemes, there aren’t many proposed reforms that don’t involve breaking the power of the teachers’ unions.
Exhibit B is Steven Brill’s new piece on the teacher’s unions in New York, which illustrates just how far the unions are willing to go at the expense of the kids. (Exhibit A is Brill’s piece on the NYC rubber rooms; he’s clearly assembling the material for a killer book.) They cost the state a chance at millions because they were 100% completely opposed to things like performance pay, or allowing the district to transfer teachers where they are needed, rather than where they’d like to be.
But in a 403-page appendix to its 348-page application, New
York
included the M.O.U. that actually had been signed by all of its school
districts. It was worded almost exactly as the federal government’s
M.O.U. — except that after reciting everything that would be done to
link student tests to teacher evaluations, and to compensate teachers
and move them up on a career ladder according to those evaluations, the
New York M.O.U. inserted this qualifier: “consistent with any applicable
collective-bargaining requirements.” The same phrase was also inserted
after the promise to “ensure the equitable distribution of effective
teachers” — a reform aimed at allowing school systems to assign their
best teachers to the schools most in need. Then for good measure at the
end of the entire M.O.U. this sentence was added to cover everything:
“Nothing in this M.O.U. shall be construed to override any applicable
state or local collective-bargaining requirements.”Of course the U.F.T.’s collective-bargaining agreements in New York
City, as well as union contracts in much of the rest of the state,
explicitly prohibit exactly the reforms promised in the application.
Changing that is the point of Duncan’s contest. When I asked Tisch about
this, she pointed to another added sentence, in which each school
system and the union agree to negotiate any necessary contract changes
in “good faith.” That’s the “way we solved that,” she says.“Right,” Klein says. “That’s like telling a woman you’ll marry her in
the morning.”
Nor is it true, as one often hears, that teachers and principals have
nothing to do with the problems, but are mere hostages of terrible
conditions in their neighborhoods. Brill points to a charter school
that actually shares all of its resources with a public school in the
same building–even, in some cases, the same families, as some send
different kids to the different schools.
But while the public side spends more, it produces less. P.S. 149
is
rated by the city as doing comparatively well in terms of student
achievement and has improved since Mayor MichaelBloomberg took over the city’s schools in 2002 and appointed Joel
Klein as chancellor. Nonetheless, its students are performing
significantly behind the charter kids on the other side of the wall. To
take one representative example, 51 percent of the third-grade students
in the public school last year were reading at grade level, 49 percent
were reading below grade level and none were reading above. In the
charter, 72 percent were at grade level, 5 percent were reading below
level and 23 percent were reading above level. In math, the charter
third graders tied for top performing school in the state, surpassing
such high-end public school districts as Scarsdale.Same building. Same community. Sometimes even the same parents. And the
classrooms have almost exactly the same number of students. In fact, the
charter school averages a student or two more per class. This calculus
challenges the teachers unions’ and Perkins’s “resources” argument —
that hiring more teachers so that classrooms will be smaller makes the
most difference. (That’s also the bedrock of the union refrain that
what’s good for teachers — hiring more of them — is always what’s good
for the children.) Indeed, the core of the reformers’ argument, and the
essence of the Obama approach to the Race to the Top, is that a slew of
research over the last decade has discovered that what makes the most
difference is the quality of the teachers and the principals who
supervise them. Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the Universityof Washington, reported, “The effect of increases in teacher
quality swamps the impact of any other educational investment, such as
reductions in class size.”This building on 118th Street could be Exhibit A for that conclusion.
It’s not necessarily that the teachers on one side are worse
teachers–but they operate in a very strict system of limits that, for
example, keeps their workday to exactly 6 hours and 57 minutes, while
the charter school classes run much longer. Even terrific workers can
underperform in that kind of environment. It doesn’t strike me that it
is likely to be much of an accident that urban schools have gotten worse
as the teachers’ unions have grown more powerful (though I certainly
wouldn’t argue that it’s the only contributing factor).
The issue with the teachers’ unions is not the unions per
se–agitating for higher pay wouldn’t make much difference, and is
indeed probably a great idea. The problem is that the structure they
impose makes it almost impossible (though not quite!) to innovate, and
to spread the innovations that work. The cushy job protections and
strict work rules are great for the teachers. But the schools aren’t
there for the benefit of the teachers.
