THOMPSON: Mr. Duncan, Rebuild That Wall

Senator Michael Bennet writes that "the accountability system we have ought to be a way to check right direction/wrong direction. The idea that from Washington we're going to be able to materially inform people's instruction is a little bit of an illusion, and I'm not sure we should be trying to do it anyway. And I think there's usefulness to having some distance between the accountability framework and the tools that people use every day to (give) quality instruction to our kids."  (emphasis mine)

That essential "distance" has traditionally been protected by due process, collective bargaining, and tenure. Bennet’s Denver Plan for performance pay, like the Toledo Plan and other methods of peer review, are great examples of negotiating improved systems for the 21^st century.

The next steps should be a "no-brainer" for President Obama. We can tear down the "firewalls" between teacher identifiers that link test scores to individual teachers when we have a firewall that prevents that data from being used for evaluations or tenure. The rationale should be obvious. We have Value Added Models that are valid enough for incentives or for rough "right direction/wrong direction" judgments regarding schools. But results from primitive growth models are not reliable enough to destroy a teacher’s career.

Similarly, the Citizen's Commission on Civil Rights, apparently, just came out in favor of "comparability," or methods to achieve equity for poor schools that would not allow forced transfers of teachers in violation of collective bargaining agreements. Create a firewall prohibiting school systems from forcing transfers or denying transfers in violation of seniority provisions, and together we can seek equity for poor children. - John Thompson

Comments

[Tom Hoffman]

Hm. Bennet comes off sounding more reasonable and experienced than Duncan. It certainly seems like the imperatives of the Race to the Top funding circus is pushing Duncan off track for the longer NCLB II game. It is unfortunate that he couldn't spend a year planning and coalition building instead of pushing people around and making threats.

[Steve]

John,

Unlike my usual posts, I don’t have a thesis to promote today, just some questions to ask.

You obviously understand a lot more about teacher unionism than I do. In my work as a consultant, unions have never entered into anything I’ve done. At the level of teaching practice, I’ve never run up against union opposition or had much union support. Still, I do understand how difficult it can be to fire an incompetent teacher. So here are my questions:

1. Why do teachers feel that they need (or are entitled to) different job security provisions than, say, a para-legal working at a law firm or a programmer working for a computer company? Personally, I’ve held many jobs in my life and my sense of job security was simply based on whether I knew I was doing a good job or not filtered through how I thought my boss regarded me. I was fired once. But I survived. Why in 2009, do teachers feel they need unionized support to hold onto their jobs?

2. With the NEA having all but lost its general popularity, and with the power to strike at an all-time low, why don’t more districts simply force unions to bargain away their traditional job protections?

3. If teachers had “employment at will” agreements, do you honestly think there would be a rash of firings given that we have a severe shortage of teachers right now? And that any fired teacher would have any trouble at all getting hired some place else?

Thanks for your thoughts here. I always learn so much from your postings and this is an area I need to learn more about.

Steve

[tracey]

Steve - yes, i honestly think there could be a rash of firings!! see - chicago public schools (formerly led by arne duncan) and new york city schools. the underlying issue here is an underhanded, malicious push to privatize public schools and have them run by business leaders. if privatization is successful, i'll expect to see massive firings with experienced, credentialed teachers being replaced by minimum wage 'teachers'. (current thought seems to be - if you can read a script, you can teach.) there will be profit to be made off of the backs of children living in poverty! i've always found it fascinating that only K-12 teachers have to go through the massive amount of hoop-jumping and testing in order to be a credentialed. college and university teachers are not required to do so, nor are they under attack like K-12 teachers. not only do i think it's insane to have schools/districts run by businessmen/women, i find it 'insaner' that our department of education is being run by a basketball player with a BA in Sociology who has never taught a day in his life NOR DOES HE EVEN HAVE A TEACHING CREDENTIAL! as an elementary school teacher who chose to teach at an inner city school, i find these constant attacks on public school teachers to be demoralizing at best. requiring teachers to be highly qualified yet allowing our leaders, such as arne, be highly unqualified is perplexing to say the least!! i think this 'debate' could be answered definitively in one school year by trading places - the teachers at the university of chicago lab school (where arne's and obama's kids attended), or the teachers at the sidwell school (where the obama girls currently attend) can trade placed with those inner city school teachers. i'm willing to bet gains will not be made in the inner city schools - especially an ENORMOUS gain that arne guarantees will happen! just because arne says it's so, doesn't mean it is! i wish the media would attempt to verify his claims regarding the efficacy and success of these inner city charter schools! just because you deliver the same lie to people time after time after time will still not make the statement true!

[john]

1. I'd enthusiastically support unionization of para-legals, nursing aides, and similar people, although I don't know enogh about computer programming to comment. They question is why do you undercut the working conditions of employees. (I worked at non-union packing houses, trucking companies, and I've dug ditches and slung iron in non-union oil fields so I know how much the lives of non-union laborers are. With the breaking of unions, conditions are even worse) The question is do you help students by attacking teachers, and putting the profession at risk? Besides, its not a question of entitlement. Its a question of duty.

That's why we must negotiate new systems like the Toledo Plan to efficiently fire bad teachers And that's why union membership needs to be more than a "fee for service" organization. We owe it to our kids, just like we owe it to paras to help in their organization.

Primarily we need unionization to do our jobs well. Without union protections who will send honest information up the chain of command? (by the way, I'm half-way through your excellent book on Reading and it often contradicts the simplistic conventional wisdom that's being imposed from on-high.)

2. The AFT, which serves more urban areas, had no choice but to support NCLB and partially because we serve a poorer population of students, we have to compromise more and fight less. But the way to appeal NEA, I believe, would have been to work with them to help serve poor children and children of color in suburban schools who had been overlooked because of the high average scores. But you can't expect suburban teachers to allow NCLB to damage their higher-performing students in a quixotic (sp?) effort to help poor kids.

3. I doubt the firings would be as much as a factor as a huge outflow of talent from the system. If you got a bad principal or if the district experimented with a bad policy, you'd never have any peace of mind. Let's just say your evaluation is driven by a Value Added Model that misfires every three or four years, or you are teaching at a troubled school where nobody is able to raise test scores due to the unintended effects of policies beyond your control. Even if you weren't fired, think of how nerve-wracking the next year would be. They may not be able to fire everyone, but they could make everyone miserable who doesn't follow mindlessly.

Lastly, who would want to sacrifice their 1st amendment and 14th amendment rights in order to teach? Walmart doesn't have to respect the constituional rights of its greeters, and that is awful because everyone deserves more respect than is required by at-will employment. But you can't help kids by disempowering their teachers.

[Steve]

Thanks all. Really appreciate your insights on a subject I am only now catching up on.

Steve