{"id":572191,"date":"2010-05-20T12:56:54","date_gmt":"2010-05-20T16:56:54","guid":{"rendered":"tag:theatlantic.com,2010-05-20:mt-57026"},"modified":"2010-05-20T12:56:54","modified_gmt":"2010-05-20T16:56:54","slug":"teachers-unions-still-a-huge-obstacle-to-reform","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/572191","title":{"rendered":"Teacher's Unions: Still a Huge Obstacle to Reform"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.  <\/p>\n

Exhibit B is Steven Brill’s new piece on the teacher’s unions in New York<\/a>, 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<\/a>; 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.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

But in a 403-page appendix to its 348-page application, New
\nYork
\nincluded the M.O.U. that actually had been signed by all of its school
\ndistricts. It was worded almost exactly as the federal government’s
\nM.O.U. — except that after reciting everything that would be done to
\nlink student tests to teacher evaluations, and to compensate teachers
\nand move them up on a career ladder according to those evaluations, the
\nNew York M.O.U. inserted this qualifier: “consistent with any applicable
\n collective-bargaining requirements.” The same phrase was also inserted
\nafter the promise to “ensure the equitable distribution of effective
\nteachers” — a reform aimed at allowing school systems to assign their
\nbest teachers to the schools most in need. Then for good measure at the
\nend of the entire M.O.U. this sentence was added to cover everything:
\n“Nothing in this M.O.U. shall be construed to override any applicable
\nstate or local collective-bargaining requirements.”<\/p>\n

\nOf course the U.F.T.’s collective-bargaining agreements in New York
\nCity, as well as union contracts in much of the rest of the state,
\nexplicitly prohibit exactly the reforms promised in the application.
\nChanging that is the point of Duncan’s contest. When I asked Tisch about
\n this, she pointed to another added sentence, in which each school
\nsystem and the union agree to negotiate any necessary contract changes
\nin “good faith.” That’s the “way we solved that,” she says.\t\t<\/p>\n

\n“Right,” Klein says. “That’s like telling a woman you’ll marry her in
\nthe morning.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Nor is it true, as one often hears, that teachers and principals have
\n nothing to do with the problems, but are mere hostages of terrible
\nconditions in their neighborhoods.  Brill points to a charter school
\nthat actually shares all of its resources with a public school in the
\nsame building–even, in some cases, the same families, as some send
\ndifferent kids to the different schools.<\/p>\n

\n

But while the public side spends more, it produces less. P.S. 149
\nis
\nrated by the city as doing comparatively well in terms of student
\nachievement and has improved since Mayor Michael<\/p>\n

Bloomberg<\/a> took over the city’s schools in 2002 and appointed Joel
\nKlein as chancellor. Nonetheless, its students are performing
\nsignificantly behind the charter kids on the other side of the wall. To
\ntake one representative example, 51 percent of the third-grade students
\nin the public school last year were reading at grade level, 49 percent
\nwere reading below grade level and none were reading above. In the
\ncharter, 72 percent were at grade level, 5 percent were reading below
\nlevel and 23 percent were reading above level. In math, the charter
\nthird graders tied for top performing school in the state, surpassing
\nsuch high-end public school districts as Scarsdale. \n <\/p>\n

\nSame building. Same community. Sometimes even the same parents. And the
\nclassrooms have almost exactly the same number of students. In fact, the
\n charter school averages a student or two more per class. This calculus
\nchallenges the teachers unions’ and Perkins’s “resources” argument —
\nthat hiring more teachers so that classrooms will be smaller makes the
\nmost difference. (That’s also the bedrock of the union refrain that
\nwhat’s good for teachers — hiring more of them — is always what’s good
\nfor the children.) Indeed, the core of the reformers’ argument, and the
\nessence of the Obama approach to the Race to the Top, is that a slew of
\nresearch over the last decade has discovered that what makes the most
\ndifference is the quality of the teachers and the principals who
\nsupervise them. Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the University<\/p>\n

of Washington<\/a>, reported, “The effect of increases in teacher
\nquality swamps the impact of any other educational investment, such as
\nreductions in class size.”\t\t<\/p>\n

\nThis building on 118th Street could be Exhibit A for that conclusion. \n <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It’s not necessarily that the teachers on one side are worse
\nteachers–but they operate in a very strict system of limits that, for
\nexample, keeps their workday to exactly 6 hours and 57 minutes, while
\nthe charter school classes run much longer.  Even terrific workers can
\nunderperform in that kind of environment.  It doesn’t strike me that it
\nis likely to be much of an accident that urban schools have gotten worse
\n as the teachers’ unions have grown more powerful (though I certainly
\nwouldn’t argue that it’s the only contributing factor).<\/p>\n

The issue with the teachers’ unions is not the unions per
\nse–agitating for higher pay wouldn’t make much difference, and is
\nindeed probably a great idea.  The problem is that the structure they
\nimpose makes it almost impossible (though not quite!) to innovate, and
\nto spread the innovations that work. The cushy job protections and
\nstrict work rules are great for the teachers.  But the schools aren’t
\nthere for the benefit of the teachers.\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n



\n

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\n\"\"\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":80,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-572191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/572191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/80"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=572191"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/572191\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=572191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=572191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=572191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}