Unions fighting a phony ‘war on teachers’
No longer is education reform an issue of liberals vs. conservatives. In Washington, the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program rewarded states for making significant policy changes such as supporting charter schools. In Los Angeles, the Times published the effectiveness rankings — and names — of 6,000 teachers. And nationwide, the documentary Waiting for Superman, which strongly criticizes the public education system, continues to succeed at the box office.
All sides of the educational policy debate now accept that the key determinant of school effectiveness is teachers — that effective teachers get good achievement results for all children, while ineffective teachers hurt all students, regardless of background. Also increasingly accepted is that the interests of teachers unions aren’t the same as the interests of children, or even of most teachers.
Until recently, the unions asserted that they spoke for teachers and that they should judge which reforms are good. Any proposal they didn’t like, they labeled part of a “war on teachers.” Their first response to the Los Angeles Times and to Waiting for Superman has been to drag out that familiar line. According to the American Federation of Teachers, “The film’s central themes — that all public school teachers are bad, that all charter schools are good and that teachers’ unions are to blame for failing schools — are incomplete and inaccurate, and they do a disservice to the millions of good teachers in our schools who work their hearts out every day.”
What’s really going on is different. President Obama states that we can’t tolerate bad teachers in classrooms, and he has promoted rewarding the most effective teachers so they stay in the classroom. The Los Angeles Times published data identifying both effective and ineffective teachers. And Waiting for Superman (in which I provide commentary) highlighted exceptional teachers and pointed out that teachers unions don’t focus enough on teacher quality.
This is not a war on teachers en masse. It is recognition of what every parent knows: Some teachers are exceptional, but a small number are dreadful. And if that is the case, we should think of ways to change the balance.
My research — which has focused on teacher quality as measured by what students learn with different teachers — indicates that a small proportion of teachers at the bottom is dragging down our schools. The typical teacher is both hard-working and effective. But if we could replace the bottom 5%-10% of teachers with an average teacher — not a superstar — we could dramatically improve student achievement. The U.S. could move from below average in international comparisons to near the top.
Teachers unions say they don’t want bad teachers in the classrooms, but then they assert that we can’t adequately judge teachers and they act to defend them all. Thus unions defend teachers in “rubber rooms” — where they are sent after being accused of improper behavior or found to be extraordinarily ineffective — on the grounds that due process rights require such treatment. (In a perverse way, rubber rooms are good as long as it is not feasible to remove teachers that are harming kids; it is better to pay these teachers not to teach than to have more children suffer.)
So we are seeing not a war on teachers, but a war on the blunt and detrimental policies of teachers unions. If unions continue not to represent the vast numbers of highly effective teachers, but instead to lump them in with the ineffective teachers, they will continue doing a disservice to students, to most of their own members, and to the nation.
There is a place for an enlightened union that accepts the simple premise that teacher performance is an integral part of effecting reform. As the late Albert Shanker said in 1985, when he was president of the American Federation of Teachers: “Teachers must be viewed . . . as a group that acts on behalf of its clients and takes responsibility for the quality and performance of its own ranks.”
The bottom line is that focusing on effective teachers cannot be taken as a liberal or conservative position. It’s time for the unions to drop their polemics and stop propping up the bottom.
Eric Hanushek is the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. He has been a leader in the development of economic analysis of educational issues. His newest book, Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses: Solving the Funding-Achievement Puzzle in America’s Public Schools, describes how improved school finance policies can be used to meet our achievement goals.
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Teachers have almost no effect on how students turn out. Genetics, Family & Peer/Social groups have a far more determinative effect on how an individual matures. You can take a loser and give them the best teacher and they still will lose and vice versa; take a kid with good genes, family structure (regardless of income) and healthy social/peer group and they will win even if they go to a lousy school or have bad teachers. Some day we will realize that trying to dump responsibility for kids on the schools in the absence of stay at home parents, good genes, morals and lifestyle is a failed scapegoat.
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And with that pro-union broad brush, we’ll just kick the can don the road again. Unfortunately, some teachers have been in the union so long they forget that there is a private sector to compare against where performance counts and can be measured…and it has nothing to do with the fact that some private institutions don’t take all comers. There’s plenty of socio-economic disparity in many private schools to make the comparison. Think about it the next time you see one of those “Teacher of the Year” awards and other recognition programs that belie the unions’ “Can’t Measure Performance” mantras.
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Mr. Hanushek, I have heard your research quoted so often that your name is on my Word spell check as synonymous with refute. You have provide the data we all needed to validate the theory we all have supported ever since we had that horrible, strident Ms-squeaky-voice in the sixth grade. Parents use to tell their children that everyone will have bad teachers or bad bosses in their life, learn to live with it. Now we agitate to fire them — all 176 of them at a time. I have listened as Administrators justify egregious decisions by sighting your work. I even listened to a streaming of Michael Krasny’s panel on ‘Waiting for Superman.” I found you charming. But you have made it easier to legitimize ways to slowly destroy public schools. When you set up these false dichotomies, it enables administrators to squeeze all sorts of dubious factors into the puzzle of ‘good teaching.’
I returned ten years ago from a 25-year stint in Europe, where I also taught in both public and private schools, learned of educational systems around the world, and played an active roll in European Forums on learning disabilities and the International Baccalaureate. Then we came back. OMG. I had left a well financed special needs project with an emphasis on Bilingual education. But, now, with limited resources, administrators are forced to compress programs together, while claiming to meet standards and use best practice. The onus is on the teachers, but the control is gone. Let me explain. Before the Williams Decision ensured every child had a text book, if the teacher bought the program kit herself, she could use, say, “History Alive,” which was flaunted in WFS Movie by the Harlem Zone Charter—fabulous. But the ‘shovel-ready student group work handouts,’ (that were worth the price to any teacher,) assumes that one has walls to hang the student-made graphs to show differences in South American Countries. Besides the handouts, it assumes that each student has a text (even a class set of 36– prohibitive). It assumes that the teacher can organize the projects for easy student access, but no, not by sharing two different rooms, fiefdom of two different teachers for two sections of the same course, one of which had 36 desks crammed into a room made for 20. Now think of PI and ‘NO-Child-Left-behind, imagine having to use “High Point,” made for ‘early middle school kids,’ with both ELL and Far-Below-Basic students, doomed by State regulators to remain in one class for a year, all because they didn’t know or didn’t care to try on another stupid test in the 8th grade. Just imagine the common history many of those youngsters shared of being tracked together for years in the “class for stupid kids,” the insult of already having used Level Three of High Point and now being told from District Office they would have to use Level One. Eight of twenty-nine original students were expelled by the years’ end. Think of the learning, behavioral, or social handicaps that were pushed into this class.
My point of these tales is that it is too easy to blame teachers and ignore the situation the teacher is forced to accept. Your work is so often quoted, as “class size doesn’t matter.” Hah, tell that to me as an English teacher, who believes high standards means lots of writing, revising, and more writing, Correcting 25 papers is not the same as correcting 39! Where as you, factored for 17 to 22 in high schools, in your Rochester work, think of now 36- 39 in an English class, justified with, “we now know that the most important factor is a good teacher.” Think of the ban-the-book- influences in some communities. Or no student discussions about proposition 8 here.
The reason that I belong to this Blog, is to stay abreast of the Evaluation Tools being developed and criteria that administrators will use to judge Good Teaching. Now, criteria can be anything the principal wants to put down. I am not convinced that answering factual questions on the Cat-6 gives as a good picture of the excellence for which we think we are striving. And with all due respect to Nash, I don’t believe number theory can dismiss the real factors that affect good teaching.
In short, your boogie man, unions who protect bad teachers, is too simplistic for words.
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Teacher quality – wouldn’t that be the job of our institutions of higher education that spend 5 years making our California teachers? Why are schools of education graduating people who cannot do an effective job of teaching? Shouldn’t our schools of education be a gatekeeper to quality?
Better training of administrators at the higher education level would also be a great improvement. Check administrator credential coursework. Very little is provided regarding teacher evaluation and practically none is provided on how to dismiss an inadequate teacher.
Blaming teacher unions for doing their primary job of representing all their members isn’t very productive. Overhauling preparation programs to meet the needs of today’s education demands would be useful.
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Private sector schools do not have the education standards that apply to California’s K-12 schools. Nore do the take the same tests as students in our public schools. Things would get mighty interesting if they did.
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The Review in the Teacher’s College Record highlights the issues that emerge in dealing with Program Improvement and NCLB.
Title: Making Failure Pay: For-Profit Tutoring, High-Stakes Testing, and Public Schools
Author(s): Jill P. Koyama
Publisher: University of Chicago Press, Chicago
ISBN: 0226451747, Pages: 192, Year: 2010
Here is a link to the review.
http://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentID=16165
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The Civics teacher I had in High School had five classes of about 125 students each. He taught the entire senior class. At the same time he was also an elected politician. His class was one of my best classes.
On another topic, you cannot rate effectiveness of teachers without taking into account the quality of students they are given. Often senior teachers are given AP classes where students want to learn. Often new teachers are given students who refuse to learn. i.e. Senior pre-algebra where the students refuse to study, refuse to do homework, refuse to participate in class, and some also refuse to take any test.
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We need to remember that this discussion is about the kids. If the teachers union wants my respect and me to go to bat for them to increase funding, they’ll have to prove to me that the kids are first. The Unions will have to show me that like doctors and lawyers they are policing their own. Otherwise how do I trust them?
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Local teacher unions across the state have negotiated peer assistance and review requirements in their contracts. The problem is, the state funding for the program has been cut.
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If unions were the problem, we’d expect non-union states not to have these problems – but they do. Unions can only protect bad teachers when administrators fail to follow contracts, and if the contract is too strong, then the school boards and superintendents signing them bear half of the blame. A recent survey by the national assoc. for high school principals found that about 75% of principals felt they could get rid of teachers when necessary. You can argue that it should be even higher and I would agree, but you never seem to hear the teacher union bashers conceding anything like that.
The simplistic notion that we can use mostly weak state tests to measure teacher quality has an intuitive appeal, but little support in the research community. The American Education Reasearch Assoc., National Council on Measurement in Education, and American Psychology Association have long held that it is inappropriate to use a test validated for one purpose to draw conclusions or make high stakes decisions for other, non-validated purposes. I’ve read Mr. Hanushek’s work and seen him speak, but I’ve never heard how he or other test-o-philes get away with dodging that admonition from the leading professional organizations in the field. The Economic Policy Institute recently reiterated that warning and cited ample research showing the flaws with relying on test scores, and a Department of Education study released this summer showed 25% error rates in this approach. In response, I anticipate someone will say that I’m just a teacher trying to dodge accountability – far from it. I have subjected my teaching to the highest level of scrutiny currently available in our profession, and achieved National Board Certification. I have no concerns for my own testing data, but I’ve seen what a focus on testing has done in recent years. Any policy that gives greater power and importance to the stupid testing regimen we’re already pursuing will only do more harm. For alternative ideas about teacher evaluation and professional development, I encourage people to do a little reading and research rather than accept Mr. Hanushek’s assumption that we can reliably measure teaching quality using tests that are not designed for that purpose, and that, even if they were of higher quality, measure such a small slice of what we really want from students and teachers.
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Sorry, one more thought – from where we sit, it does actually feel like a war against teachers. We’ve got billionaires who know little about education, and high profile vulture-philanthropies bankrolling the propaganda in Waiting for Superman, and even investing millions in the publicity effort for the film; they’re putting themselves and their proxies on NBC’s Education Nation and the Oprah Winfrey Show, and where is the teacher voice in all of this? Barely heard, and usually pre-selected from charter schools and the ranks of Teach for America. The L.A. Times did us a great disservice with their research-for-hire and “we just report the facts” excuses, and probably contributed to a teacher’s suicide as a result. Our president and secretary of education engage in “faith-based” education policy, promoting failed ideas like merit pay despite the poor track record and recent research suggesting it won’t work. They go on and on about charter schools as a solution, despite their ambiguous results and small overall share in the education system. They intrude on local control with prescriptive “school turnaround” models that rarely work, and imagine that teachers just aren’t trying hard enough, so with more pressure and more fear, we’ll work harder. Any coach or psychologist would tell you that won’t work. So, yes, Mr. Hanushek, when politicians, businesses, and the media all fail to their jobs and blame the teachers, it feels like we’re under attack. It seems that the weak economy has people nervous and looking for someone to blame, somewhere to focus their fears and feel like they’re taking some useful steps. Teachers and unions are a convenient scapegoat since the worst ones provide such vivid examples, even though the latest PDK survey found most American parents are quite satisfied with their children’s school overall.
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You mention, “My research — which has focused on teacher quality as measured by what students learn with different teachers — indicates that a small proportion of teachers at the bottom is dragging down our schools. The typical teacher is both hard-working and effective. But if we could replace the bottom 5%-10% of teachers with an average teacher — not a superstar — we could dramatically improve student achievement. The U.S. could move from below average in international comparisons to near the top.”
Since you mention the LA Times, I assume that you are referring to the Value-added system of teacher evaluation. Value-added has some serious problems.
At first blush, most folks seem to like the idea of the “Value-added” system of teacher evaluation. It seems intuitively satisfying to think of a system that can rule out the many non-academic issues, school-wide issues, societal issues that children walk into class with like a loaded backpack. With “Value-added” we seem to think we’ve got a system that will isolate the contribution to a students education caused only by her/his teacher. The NYC Education Department, “believes that the Value-added model is an accurate evaluation of teachers.”
“Believe” is a really good word to use. Folks seem to believe in the value-added model because the rhetoric feels so gosh darn solid.
The science of value-added looks a lot different. This week, the Annenberg Institute released a report detailing the chimera-like realities of the Value-added model.
1. The quality of the teacher is the most significant factor that school’s can control in a child’s education. The quality of the teacher, and all other factors in a school’s control are actually quite small. The research actually points to teacher quality being only 10-20% of a child’s overall education. While identifying and replacing our worst teachers should have a positive effect, we cannot pretend that this is a silver bullet and that family, poverty, and community factors are still more significant than the adult in the classroom.
2. The test scores that the Value-added model is based are highly suspect. Even at their very best, they only measure a tiny sub-set of all of the things we hope children learn in school. Economist Alan Blinder argued in 2009 that the skills vital for success in the labor market in the near future, such as “Creativity, inventiveness, spontaneity, flexibility and interpersonal relations” will be those least amenable to standardized testing. Unfortunately, in the interest of testing children on the cheap, we reduce our definition of “learning” until it is small enough to fit into the bubble of one these tests.
3. Value-added is grading teachers on a curve. It is, by design, a system that ranks teachers. By design, 50% of all teachers will rank “Average.” By design, another 20% will be labeled “Below Average” and another 20%, “Above Average.” The top 5% will be called, “Excellent,” while the bottom 5% will be labeled “Failures.” It will always look this way, no matter how many “Failures” we fire. There will always be the worst 5%. A district or school’s dream of having all “Excellent” teachers is impossible to achieve.
By design, Value-added will never achieve your goal of replacing the bottom 5% of teachers with “average” ones.
Instead of using our current, overly flawed assessments, teachers associations and districts should come together to talk about what makes a child well-educated and what kinds of teacher behaviors help foster that outcome. When we agree on these ideas, then we can develop a tool that measures if teachers are doing our agreed-upon behaviors.
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Repeating myself here, but determining whether value-added is a sound and valid way to measure teacher effectiveness is beyond the scope of journalists — outside their role, beyond their training. It was a violation of journalistic standards and ethics for Los Angeles Times reporters and editors to take it upon themselves to make that determination and base a journalistic project on it. It goes beyond the role of messenger to put them in the role of judge.
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In New York City schools, a battle is on right now between schools chancellor Joel Klein and teachers over Klein’s plan to publicly release value-added data on teachers.
According to New York Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez, “…the very consultants who designed Klein’s rating system warned it should be not be used to judge teacher performance.”
Gonzalez quoted from a report by the consultants who designed the value-added rating system, saying that “they specifically refused to endorse ‘any particular use [of the method] for accountability, promotion or tenure’ of teachers.
” ‘Test scores,’ they warned, ‘capture only one dimension of teacher effectiveness, and . . . are not intended as a summary measure of teacher performance.’ ”
Gonzalez also reported that the data contained errors. “A half dozen teachers told The News
yesterday they discovered errors in the raw student data used to calculate their scores,
but were not allowed to see which students they were being judged on.
”For example, [teacher Doreen] Crinnigan got low ratings for the reading and math scores of her fifth-grade class.
” ‘I didn’t teach math that year,’ she said.”
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/education/2010/10/22/2010-10-22_schools_chancellor_joel_klein_wants_nothing_more_than_to_release_data_on_more_th.html#ixzz137GiocJp
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I would just like to say ‘Thank You’ for the very insightful remarks of David C. and David O. and Caroline G. and Jan D. I am going to copy this article and the comments and share them with all the other teachers at my public school. thanks
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