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we still need unions.

Posted by: dlemmons on Aug 26, 2009 4:53 PM

i'm all for reform measures, but the frightening thing about everything i'm hearing -- from the president's administration to most ed. reform advocates -- is that fundamental worker's issues, like job protection, healthcare, pay, simply aren't being addressed. unions are still necessary. education isn't just the issue of academic performance; it's also a profession.

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• » RE: we still need unions. Posted by: Aaron
• » RE: we still need unions. Posted by: dlemmons

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There is power (and progress) in a union

Posted by: ForStudentPower on Sep 3, 2009 10:25 PM

A few points I'd like to respond to:

...fund's requirement that states allow student achievement data to be used for the purposes of evaluating school and teacher effectiveness

It may seem like common sense, Aaron, but when we look at it in real-world applications, it's a disaster. Kentucky tried this in the early 1990s and the program was scrapped before the decade was out. What researchers find is that when teachers are assessed by test scores of their children, nomatter how the assessment is tweaked, pedagogy and quality learning actually suffers. It's kind of like a sociological Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.

...fund's requirement that states not have caps on charter schools

It's an ideologically-motivated requirement - no studies, even done by pro-charter research groups, have found that charter schools generally outperform similarly-situated public schools. Indeed, under several criteria charter schools actually perform significantly worse. The only thing they excel at is removing students and resources from public schools.

...fund's encouragement of alternative teacher certification -- the idea that we should be lowering barriers to teaching for individuals who show a clear capability and passion for teaching and who demonstrate success in the classroom.

I'm not sure I follow your logic - if you're interested in making sure we keep good teachers in and bad teachers out, why lower the bar when it comes to entry in the field (which is exactly what alternative certification does)?

...If Secretary of Education Arne Duncan proceeds as planned with dispensing the RTTT fund dollars to only those states who have met their reform demands, will that signal the end of the NEA's grip over Democratic officials?

Oh man - the NEA has so little of a grip over Democratic officials it's crazy. If either the AFT or NEA had any pull at all in the Obama Administration, the President would not have nominated a corporate suit like Arne Duncan to the post. (Linda Darling-Hammond, who is an actual progressive education reformer and adviser to Obama's transition team, was passed over for the spot.)

If you look at the history of the teacher union movement, you won't see crusty schoolmarms clinging to outmoded practices and not caring about anything but their paychecks. You'll see that unionized teachers, both individually and collectively, have been the ones at the forefront of pushing public education in a more humane, participatory, student-centered environment. Teacher unions are also some of the most socially progressive organizations in the country. A few examples:

• In 1912, the NEA endorsed Women's Suffrage (it had elected its first woman president two years earlier).
• In 1948, the AFT kicked out all local chapters that were still segregated, and threw its legal weight behind the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education.
• In 1968, the NEA was the key player in getting the Bilingual Education Act passed - the law granted federal money to help instruct students for whom English wasn't their first language.

It may seem unfathomable to TV/radio/newspaper pundits in DC, but teachers and their unions have ideas for how to reform schools, increase test scores, and improve teacher quality. Unfortunately, because those ideas don't appear to have come out of economics departments, they're ignored, and the "reformer" label is only tacked on those who have spent the least amount of time in an actual classroom (folks like the Gates Foundation, the Chamber of Commerce, Third Way, etc.).

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RE: There is power (and progress) in a union

Posted by: Aaron on Sep 4, 2009 1:10 PM

Thanks for your insightful responses. If I may, I'd like to add a few thoughts for what they are worth.

First, you're right that Kentucky did not have a successful experience with pay-for-performance in the 1990s, and it's also true that there have been multiple iterations elsewhere of attempted and ultimately flawed efforts to pay teachers what they are worth in terms of how much they help children learn. The difference today is that we have better data systems than ever before. Psychometrics have advanced a great deal and we are now able to find clear evidence of some teachers being consistently outstanding and others being consistently below-par. It's true that the data systems aren't sophisticated enough to sort out teachers in the middle two quartiles or so, but the research is pretty clear in demonstrating that value-added assessments are accurate enough to enable us to reward really good teachers and weed out those who aren't dedicated to helping children achieve their full potential.

On the subject of research, I'm a bit concerned that the "research" you cited in opposition of standards and accountability was an opinion piece by Alfie Kohn. Don't get me wrong, Mr. Kohn is a terrific educator and has some important theories regarding student motivation, but at the end of the day the hard data out there shows that teachers do make a difference in how much kids learn and good teachers are consistently, measurably, and most important, identifiably better at increasing student learning than bad teachers.

As far as charter school caps are concerned, I'll be the first one to say that not all charter schools are good. I also completely agree with your point, as as have most studies, that charter schools in general produce student learning that is about the same as traditional public schools; in some cases better and in many cases worse. I taught at one such charter school that was worse than its traditional district peers.

However, the fact that whole networks of schools perform measurably better--KIPP of course being the most notable--should be reason enough for us to be open to the idea of charters, so long as bad charter schools are shuttered (which is an advantage of charter schools--states can close down bad charter schools more easily than bad traditional public schools).

That much said, I agree with your overall sentiment that charters shouldn't be considered a magic bullet in school reform. At best, good charter schools provide an option to desperate often disadvantaged parents of children who deserve a quality education just like any other child from a family of more fortunate means. At worst, they don't remove resources from schools in fact, since although the absolute dollar amount to the district falls as each kid chooses to go to a charter, the per pupil amount actually increases since all charter schools receive less state funding than the traditional schools (generally around 70 cents on the dollar - though many schools fill that gap with private funding from foundations).

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• » RE: There is power (and progress) in a union Posted by: ForStudentPower
• » RE: There is power (and progress) in a union Posted by: Aaron