Contributors
jonathan woahn
david blake
The "Why" to Firing Teachers
Some great excerpts from Megan McArdle's article on why its important that we can fire teachers:
Let me start by saying that I think there are some jobs that are too important to let any consideration intrude other than the best way to get the job done. Nuclear power plants, firefighters, poison control--I don't want to let other social goals, no matter how laudable, hamper their mission. Teaching is one of those jobs.
I just can't prioritize making teachers' work environments fair, interesting, or pleasant for them--not if there's any potential conflict with the goal of providing the best possible education for kids. Particularly disadvantaged kids, since I basically assume that educated and competent parents are going to ensure that their offspring are educated and competent. But where there are needy kids, my entire focus is on them. I want to make teachers' lives pleasant only insofar as this advances the goal of helping kids who need a lot of help.
So what are the benefits of making teachers easier to fire?
- We get rid of the worst teachers--the ones who now take years to fire. The kids they're teaching would be better off with an utter neophyte. As Noah Millman points out in the post I linked above, very bad teachers are not just a problem for their class; the effect spills over to other classrooms when those kids go from period to period, or year to year, degrading the effectiveness of the school as a whole.
- We end the temptation for long-time teachers to phone it in: teach the same lesson plans over and over, give essentially the same tests, etc. Yes, there are many dedicated teachers who keep putting in 110% for decades, but it is ludicrous to suggest that this describes every single teacher in America.
- We shift the selection pool from people who are more interested in decades-long job security to people who are more interested in money. Not everyone who is interested in job security wants to be able to coast--but people who want to be able to coast are likely to be very attracted to job security. Universities mitigate this effect by making it so spectacularly hard to get to the point of being a tenured professor. Primary schools don't have that option.
- We end up with fewer burned-out teachers still in the classroom. If we make teaching the high-intensity, high reward job it should always be, then we're going to get people burning out.
- We give teachers an incentive to do what works the best, rather than what is most satisfying for them. I warn you that if you are about to suggest that this never happens, I am going to ask you if you have ever met any human beings, and if so, whether you actually spoke to them. As Ian Ayres points out, boring-but-effective systems like direct instruction have been blocked for years by teachers because it reduces their autonomy. I grant that teachers convince themselves that they are doing this for the children. Journalists also convince themselves that they have a special right not to have their emails read the way they do to everyone else . . . and I assure you, they genuinely believe that this is a principled moral stand.
- People will not invest so much in educational credentials, which are completely useless outside of schools. Since these credentials show zero impact on teacher quality, it would be better for the teachers to be studying literally anything else, including a reality television show from the couch. At least they'd get something out of that.
- Laying off older, more expensive teachers is not good for those teachers . . . but it is good for the schools. It means you can achieve necessary budget cuts by laying off the fewest teachers.
via The Atlantic
Bill Gates walking the knife's edge
Bill Gates is getting great at saying American teachers are the problem with American education in the least offensive way possible. Tact.
For more than 30 years, spending has risen while performance stayed flat. Now we need to raise performance without spending a lot more.
The single most decisive factor in student achievement is excellent teaching. It's astonishing what great teachers can do for their students.
To flip the curve, we have to identify great teachers, find out what makes them so effective, and transfer those skills to others -- so more students can benefit from top teachers and high achievement.
It's the one thing we've been missing, and it can turn our schools around.
Obama Buckles to Unions
President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have made charter schools a big part of their reform agenda, but the pushback from unions has been fierce. Perhaps that explains why the new $10 billion federal teacher bailout will be dispensed in a way that discriminates against charters. The Administration's initial guidance excluded many charter school teachers, even though charters are public schools.
via WSJ.com (Subscription Required)
Teacher Unions vs Wall Street
“Wall Street has always put its money where its interests and beliefs lie. But it is far less common that so many financial heavyweights would adopt a social cause like charter schools and advance it with a laserlike focus in the political realm.
“Hedge fund executives are thus emerging as perhaps the first significant political counterweight to the powerful teachers unions, which strongly oppose expanding charter schools in their current form.”
Via NYTimes
Gates Foundation drops $335M on teacher reform
Three school districts and a coalition of charter schools have agreed to be test kitchens for some radical ideas for improving teacher quality — from paying new teachers to spend another year practicing before getting their own class to letting student test scores affect teacher pay.
In exchange, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is handing them the biggest pile of cash it has spent on education reform in about a decade.
The foundation announced $290 million in grants to the four groups on Thursday, plus another $45 million for education research aimed at uncovering what exactly is an effective teacher.
Via the Associated Press.
Obama Wins a Battle as a Teachers' Union Shows Flexibility
By NEIL KING JR.
A showdown between the White House and the powerful teachers' unions looks, for the moment, a little less likely.
This week in New Haven, Conn., the local teachers union agreed, in a 21-1 vote, to changes widely resisted by unions elsewhere, including tough performance evaluations and fewer job protections for bad teachers.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan, as well as the unions, said the New Haven contract could be repeated in other school districts.
Melanie Stengel/RegisterKim Torello, left, and Karen Lavorgna, teachers in New Haven, Conn., discuss the contract that was ratified by their union this week. Terms included tough performance evaluations and fewer job protections.
"I rarely say that something is a model or a template for something else, but this is both," said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who helped broker the New Haven deal.
"This shows a willingness to go into areas that used to be seen as untouchable," Mr. Duncan said.
His cause for optimism is this: If teachers' unions start showing flexibility in other cities, the administration's high-stakes push to boost graduation rates and improve test scores at public schools could get a lot easier. That might even spare the administration an unwanted fight with a labor force that gave Mr. Obama a big lift in his election.
Under pressure from the Education Department, the country's two powerful teachers unions, Ms. Weingarten's AFT and the larger National Education Association, are already budging in ways that were previously unthinkable. The two unions have a combined membership of 3.6 million employees.
The AFT recently issued a batch of innovation grants to districts that are tying teacher pay to performance -- a practice usually frowned upon by unions. The NEA is taking similar steps to encourage tougher evaluations and to loosen seniority systems, moves that Mr. Duncan called "monumental breakthroughs."
It is also noteworthy that the AFT seems almost as pleased with New Haven as Mr. Duncan.
Public schools in many bigger cities, including New York, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., are seeing the usual tension between unions and school administrators.
In Washington, Chancellor Michelle Rhee has collided with both the national and local unions. The city moved ahead recently with the firing of 388 school employees, nearly 6% of the work force.
In New Haven, by contrast, all sides agreed on the new contract after months of closed-door negotiations. The deal allows the city to close its worst schools and bring in new management, though any new teachers would have to join the union. In exchange, the union got an average 3% raise each year for four years.
"We now have unusual flexibility for a unionized system," said New Haven Mayor John DeStefano.
A big question now is whether Mr. Duncan can proceed with federal efforts to remake U.S. public schools without stirring up storms like the one in Washington.
His one big advantage is financial. The administration plans early next year to distribute $4.3 billion under its "Race to the Top" program to help states set new testing standards, boost teacher quality and help rescue -- or close -- thousands of the worst-performing schools in the U.S. Beyond that, the department has another $5 billion for various school-improvement and innovation grants.
The administration is using its pot of money to get states to revamp rules that bar performance pay and charter schools, which rely on public money but are run outside the public system. Nearly 10 states have taken such steps to qualify for the funds. Select states will have to use the money to reward and encourage the changes.
So far, the administration has avoided a fight with unions. Mr. Duncan meets every few weeks with Ms. Weingarten and the NEA's president, Dennis Von Roekel.
But there is still plenty of room for friction.
Mr. Duncan, the former superintendent of Chicago public schools, got booed by teachers in July when he praised performance-based merit pay at NEA's annual convention. "You can boo," he told the crowd, "just don't throw shoes, please."
A few weeks later, the Education Department released tentative guidelines for changes states have to undertake to qualify for the federal grant money. Unions, school boards, city governments and outside groups responded with more than 1,200 recommended changes.
With the final rules scheduled to be out in mid-November, the unions are warning about limits on their flexibility. The groups are most troubled by Mr. Duncan's quest to link teacher pay to student performance, especially if it is measured only through standardized tests.
"To evaluate a teacher or a school on a single test makes no sense," said Mr. Von Roekel, who used to teach high school math in Arizona.
The unions also are wary of some of Mr. Duncan's other prescriptions, including his proposals to shut down and reorganize many of the country's most troubled schools.
For now, potential antagonists are holding fire. "I may disagree with their tactics," Mr. Von Roekel said, referring to Mr. Duncan and his team. "But I wouldn't question their intent or motivation."
Write to Neil King Jr. at neil.king@wsj.com
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A3
The enemy concedes some ground. A battle is won, what now of the war?
[Teacher] unions are out of touch & are courting irrelevance.
A great WSJ article on the rising success of charters and the downfall of the unions:
All the reforms unions oppose—charter schools, testing, accountability, No Child Left Behind, performance pay—have been around for a while now and the disasters the unions predicted have not come to pass," said Richard Colvin, who runs the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media in New York. "The unions are out of touch and are courting irrelevance.
Teachers and administrators who once relied on a steady stream of critical stories about charter schools (which they see as competitors) now witness a flow of laudatory articles. Fly-by-night charter operators still get their comeuppance in the press, but these days reporters are just as likely to profile the high-performing charters saving thousands of inner-city children from near-certain academic death . . . and then to ask why regular public schools can't do the same.
Through the growing list of high-profile success stories, like KIPP [charter schools], the public is starting to understand that reform is actually possible," says Joe Williams, a former journalist who is now executive director of Democrats for Education Reform. "That's a big deal," argues Mr. Williams, "because the hopelessness that marred previous reform eras took a lot of people's eyes off the prize.
