After years of critiquing the public schools, I’ve seen any number of rationalizations from their defenders in education (who, in Minnesota, largely control the DFL party) and the media (who, in Minnesota, are largely in bed with the DFL) and the crop of “think tanks” that routinely mix people from the media, DFL and education. Kids spend too much time playing videogames; parents don’t support teachers; unallotment; “diversion” of funds to charter schools.
I’ve seen bad teachers blamed – but rarely in left-leaning publications like Newsweek, and never in an article that notes that a sitting Democrat administration is participating in the blaming:
Yet in recent years researchers have discovered something that may seem obvious, but for many reasons was overlooked or denied. What really makes a difference, what matters more than the class size or the textbook, the teaching method or the technology, or even the curriculum, is the quality of the teacher. Much of the ability to teach is innate—an ability to inspire young minds as well as control unruly classrooms that some people instinctively possess (and some people definitely do not). Teaching can be taught, to some degree, but not the way many graduate schools of education do it, with a lot of insipid or marginally relevant theorizing and pedagogy. In any case the research shows that within about five years, you can generally tell who is a good teacher and who is not.
It is also true and unfortunate that often the weakest teachers are relegated to teaching the neediest students, poor minority kids in inner-city schools.
And the union:
Nothing, then, is more important than hiring good teachers and firing bad ones. But here is the rub. Although many teachers are caring and selfless, teaching in public schools has not always attracted the best and the brightest. There once was a time when teaching (along with nursing) was one of the few jobs not denied to women and minorities. But with social progress, many talented women and minorities chose other and more highly compensated fields. One recent review of the evidence by McKinsey & Co., the management consulting firm, showed that most schoolteachers are recruited from the bottom third of college-bound high-school students. (Finland takes the top 10 percent.)
Of course, grades aren’t necessarily an indicator of that innate ability to teach – and while teachers (especially in small, rural districts and many troubled urban ones) don’t make spectacular money, the pay and benefits are pretty excellent in much of the profession.
I maintain that money isn’t the hitch – and the stats seem to bear that out. We’ll come back to that.
The unions are a problem – a huge one – but not the only one:
At the same time, the teachers’ unions have become more and more powerful. In most states, after two or three years, teachers are given lifetime tenure. It is almost impossible to fire them. In New York City in 2008, three out of 30,000 tenured teachers were dismissed for cause. The statistics are just as eye-popping in other cities. The percentage of teachers dismissed for poor performance in Chicago between 2005 and 2008 (the most recent figures available) was 0.1 percent. In Akron, Ohio, zero percent. In Toledo, 0.01 percent. In Denver, zero percent. In no other socially significant profession are the workers so insulated from accountability.
The unions have done one thing that’s immensely more damaging to education than insulate their membership; they have turned education into a 12 year procedural assembly line, bolting bits of knowledge onto students subject entirely to union-directed work rules that treat students like cars or coffee makers.
The article goes through some of the changes that are burbling up through the system – largely outside of the union system and the mainstream academic academy; Teach for America, Knowledge is Power, and charter schools, all of which are highly successful, and thus targets of intense counterpropaganda from the establishment.
It is difficult to dislodge the educational establishment. In New Orleans, a hurricane was required: since Katrina, New Orleans has made more educational progress than any other city, largely because the public-school system was wiped out. Using nonunion charter schools, New Orleans has been able to measure teacher performance in ways that the teachers’ unions have long and bitterly resisted. Under a new Louisiana law, New Orleans can track which ed schools produce the best teachers, forcing long-needed changes in ed-school curricula. (The school system of Detroit is just as broken as New Orleans’s was before the storm—but stuck with largely the same administrators, the same unions, and the same number of kids, and it has been unable to make any progress.)
The big bellwether? The Obama Administration is actually on board with the dissatisfaction:
The teachers’ unions—the National Education Association (3.2 million members) and the American Federation of Teachers (1.4 million members) are major players in the Democratic Party at the national and local levels. So it is extremely significant—a sign of the changing times—that the Obama administration has taken them on. Education Secretary Arne Duncan is dangling money as an incentive for state legislatures to weaken the grip of the teachers’ unions…
And that’s starting to weaken the force of the unions’ Thin Plaid Line:
One of the unions, the AFT under Randi Weingarten, seems to realize that sheer obstructionism won’t work. “One of the most hopeful things I’ve seen is that the union people don’t want to spend so much time defending the not-so-good teachers anymore. I think the pressure of accountability is paying off,” says Haycock of the Education Trust. “They know they will be held responsible if they are defending teachers who aren’t any good.”
The danger, of course, is that while the current Educational-Industrial Complex – unions, academia and politicians – are a self-serving monster that gets terrible results, it’s not stupid. We’ve been through these reform drives before. Remember the Reagan-era initiative to get more, better teachers into the profession? Remember the Bush-era demands for accountability? All were either successfully resisted by the Educational-Industrial Complex and the Thin Plaid Line, or absorbed, neutralized, neutered.
While the Administration’s actions, and the success of non-traditional systems like charter schools and New Orleans’ system provide hope, we’re going to need something along the lines of the Tea Parties to save our educational system.