Matt Tully has a column wherein he expresses confusion about why Democrats embrace the status quo over proposed changes advanced by Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tony Bennett. I don’t think it’s so complicated, I think it comes down to a lack of trust.
Tully suggests that the status quo is broken, so why should Democrats object to change just because teacher’s unions might suffer? The answer, I believe, is because busting the teacher’s union is not just an incidental side-effect of attempts to improve the system; it looks to be the point of the exercise. If proposed changes came from someone who was supportive of teacher’s unions generally but saw certain union practices as detrimental to education, there would probably be room to compromise. But Bennett isn’t that guy.
Tully says:
The only missing piece in Bennett’s agenda is a call for more spending on early childhood education. The problems that cripple so many schools would be eased if at-risk students were better equipped to learn before they walk into a kindergarten classroom.
How would more spending on early childhood education hurt the unions? I doubt you’ll see any serious push for early mitigation coming out of Bennett’s office. Of course, I’d be happy to be wrong.
I don’t think that you can separate what is wrong with the public schools from the teacher unions. The entire way compensation is set up in schools (pay increases for time served and the obtaining of education school credentials) needs to be done away with, but the teacher unions will never give in to that necessity. Ditto for tenure, termination of the poorly performing, etc. etc. etc.
You can say that Bennett is the problem, that his style is all wrong, that he has the wrong motivations, whatever. The fact is that someone sympathetic to teacher unions is not going to do what needs to be done to improve performance. Exhibit A is Arnie Duncan.
I’m not unsympathetic to the notion that you should pay teachers more if they put in more energy and have more creative solutions for teaching kids. I had a few teachers (not that many though) who were at the end of their careers and were phoning it in.
But, I’m at a loss as to how you would write up standards for evaluating the performance of a teacher with students who, by and large, have a chaotic home life who are shuttled from school-to-school and class-to-class as their parents’ living situation changes against the performance of a teacher with students who, by and large, come from stable homes, stay in the same schools, and have parents who give a damn about education.
Did you see the recent LA Times analysis of LA county schools data? Using some simple statistical techniques, they could see which teachers were actually increasing the performance of their students, and which teachers were an actual detriment to their students.
A radical interpretation of that story is that schools need to be free to hire and fire. Hire a lot of new teachers, see if they work out, and if not, can ’em and bring in a new batch. For all the money spent on teacher colleges, pedagogy is far from a science and you can never tell who is going to be a good teacher and who is going to be a hack.
If poor teachers were the only problem, then Superintendent Bennett would be right on target. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. If this were such a simple problem, I imagine that some other smart person would have fixed it long ago.
I’ll have to go look up that LA Times piece, Buzzcut. I am always suspicious when “simple statistical techniques” are applied to anything. Usually, the “simple” part are the people who are “using” statistics to advance their own theories.
Interesting piece, Buzzcut. Certainly wouldn’t hurt to consider using that methodology around here for awhile, as long as it didn’t merely supplant ISTEP as the sole indicator (which ISTEP was never intended to be) of student progress.
Okay, again: 1) we’re all supposed to simply agree that schools are failing, by which we mean other people’s schools, mostly, if not entirely, those others who happen to live in large urban districts. The evidence for this is whatever we say it is: test scores, graduation rates, whatever’s handy that proves the point. And–again–these things have no philosophical justification and no logical antecedents. We don’t know what graduation rates were in the 1950s (we really don’t know what they are today, but that’s another side trip). We do know, roughly, that they wouldn’t pass muster for today’s Sky Is Falling partisans. (It is sometimes replied that back then one could get a good job without a high school diploma, which merely begs the question. Why don’t we focus on creating those sorts of jobs, instead of trying to create a blue-collar workforce which speaks the King’s English and can factor binomials?)
2) Teaching is a team process. The willful blindness about that is telling. Teachers in public schools do not simply deliver four lectures a day. They maintain discipline. They counsel. They shepherd students with learning and emotional disabilities. They watch each other’s backs. Artificially inflating the salaries of some, say those who happen to specialize in fields amenable to empirical testing, is going to break that bond. The insistence that some Entrepreneurial Model can be imposed on teaching with, of course, the miraculous, human-nature-changing results the Entrepreneurial Model always has, absent real-life examination, is just a measure of the apodictic certainty of its proponents, as well as their total lack of familiarity with the public classroom. It is, like the man once said, too damned important to fug with.
Excellent point, Doghouse. If, as seems likely, the vast majority of Americans will in future be forced to lick the Corporate bootheel for scraps, why should they first be forced to sink into debt via school loans?
How can the average Joe get ahead if he is forced to pay for the priviledge of Higher Education in order to sling burgers at White Castle? One can hardly get a manager position in State government now without a bachelors degree.
We can’t all be CEOs after college, we can only expect to be less satisfied in our work due to increased knowledge and decreased opportunity.