Minnesota’s 2012 legislative session began on Jan. 24, and interest in right-to-work legislation is already heating up. The Pioneer Press reports State Sen. Dave Thompson (R) plans to introduce legislation in the coming weeks, and the conservative think tank Center of the American Experiment released a report claiming if the state had prohibited closed union shops when the majority of other right-to-work states had, then on average Minnesota workers would have made from $2,260 to $3,072 more in 2008.

Providence Eye Witness News reports that Rhode Island State Sen. Nicholas Kettle (R) has plans to introduce a right-to-work bill for teachers. The current laws mandate public school teachers must pay union dues or agency fees as a condition of employment. “The National Education Association uses questionable tactics when dealing with our legislature… harming the reputation of many fine teachers and placing our children at the bottom of our priority list,” said Kettle.

While these bills may not find the same success as Indiana, they are sure to face the same critics – unions. In response to Kettle’s legislation in Rhode Island, NEA government relations director  Pat Crowley said, “The results are always the same: more profits for the 1%, more work for the 99%.” This is a bizarre response considering that giving teachers the option to opt out of union membership doesn’t create profits for anyone (though it would take money away from union leaders). If anything it could reduce the cost to the tax payer (the 99%).

While good teachers have nothing to fear – and may even receive a bonus – unions are standing up for bad teachers by making sure that they don’t have to undergo any scrutiny whatsoever.

Up North, Massachusetts’s largest teachers union plans to circumvent the democratic process and go to the courts. The Massachusetts Teachers Association has filed a lawsuit against the state for allowing a ballot initiative that may breakup the union’s monopoly, making a teacher’s performance, rather than years of service, the primary factor in deciding who should be laid off.

In the Empire State, United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew has rescinded his invitation to New York City education officials for training sessions on the new teacher evaluation system. This has only increased tensions between the union and Mayor Michael Bloomberg in the city’s effort to hold bad teachers accountable.

A proposed constitutional amendment in Missouri would prohibit tenure for teachers in that state. Under the amendment, districts would be required to use local performance standards for employment decisions that consider student performance, a notion that supporters argue would improve education. Under the proposal, school districts receiving public funding could not enter into new contracts with teachers for a period lasting more than three years.

The Louisiana Federation of Teachers and Louisiana Association of Educators both blasted Gov. Bobby Jindal’s proposal to expand the school voucher system and significantly change how teacher pay increases and tenure are applied.

“The coalition of the status quo will always say we need more time and more money,” Jindal’s communication director Kyle Plotkin said. “When we’re wasting almost a billion dollars on failing public schools, we don’t have any more time to waste.”

There is no reason for unions to protect bad teachers at the expense of good ones, other than maintaining an overinflated base from which to collect dues. Maybe if bad teachers focused more on teaching, rather than keeping their jobs through arcane labor agreements, unions wouldn’t be in this predicament.

Photo Credit: Ralph Alswang

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg made a strong stand against the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) in his State of the City address on Thursday.  With the city standing to lose up to $60 million in education grants due to the UFT’s resistance to teacher evaluations, Bloomberg wants to bypass the union with a bold plan.

Reforming the evaluation system has been a top priority for many districts since it is one of several prerequisites to receive federally sponsored Race to the Top funds. The union had agreed to work towards a new evaluation system, but UFT President Michael Mulgrew refused to give principals full authority to remove ineffective teachers and stalled existing disciplinary cases by failing to select arbitrators.

Rather than working with the union to develop a new evaluation system, which could possibly help replace 10 percent of teachers, the city will create school-based committees to evaluate teachers on merit and replace up to 50 percent of the current faculty if necessary. Under the new evaluation system teachers with a “highly effective” rating for two years in a row would receive a $20,000 raise per year. Not only would the new system help retain current exemplary teachers, but also in order to attract more high-quality teachers the city would pay up to $25,000 off student loans for college graduates who finish in the top quartile of their class to become teachers in New York.

In addition to evaluation reforms, Bloomberg also wants to close down ineffective schools and open 100 new schools, 50 of which would be charter schools, within two years. Twelve new career and technical schools would also open with extra money from private sources given to schools that have shown success graduating minority men.

Mayor Bloomberg appears to have an ally in Governor Cuomo, who also took a hard line against the teachers union in his State of the State address. Evaluation reform is one of the best ways to get rid of bad teachers, which with union interference is otherwise often impossible. It is incredibly encouraging to see Bloomberg and Cuomo take such a bold step towards desperately needed education reforms and away from malignant teachers unions.

according to a state Education Department database obtained by the Times Union through a Freedom of Information request, it appears to be nearly impossible for a school district to fire a tenured public school teacher. The reason is twofold: job protection for unionized teachers is strong and the process for firing bad teachers — called a 3020-a hearing — is so drawn out and costly that most districts can’t afford it. …

Though it has been well-documented that the cases drag on for years and can cost a district hundreds of thousands of dollars — they last an average of 502 days and cost $216,588 — the database shows that 3020-a hearings rarely result in termination. Of the more than 2,000 cases brought in the last five years, just 167 teachers were fired, the vast majority in New York City. Only 38 cases brought by schools districts upstate and on Long Island ended in termination, though a number are still undecided because it takes so long for a case to be completed. Statewide, 593 cases were simply settled and another 164 were withdrawn or consolidated.

Even though the New York City Department of Education employs about half as many teachers as the rest of the districts in the state, it brought twice as many 3020-a cases. The NYCDOE employs 70,000 full-time teachers and brought 1,356 such cases in the last five years, according to the database. On Long Island and in upstate, where there are a combined 132,000 teachers, districts brought just 731 cases.

Emphasis added, because it’s important point out that, over a five year period, only 38 of 132,000 teachers in upstate New York (i.e., teachers outside of New York City) were fired for any reason whatsoever. When people complain about union work rules serving as an impediment to reform, this is the kind of nonsense they’re talking about.

Ah yes. The typical union solution: spend more money! He also criticized proponents of merit pay for implicitly wanting to keep ineffective teachers in the classroom — a pretty rich criticism for a guy who runs an organization dedicated to keeping ineffective teachers on the job.

But let’s look at the NEA’s proposed solution. If we spend more money on teachers, will the problem of ineffective educators protected by tenure and an endless appeals process just go away? It’s hard to see how: Over the last 50 years, adjusting for inflation and enrollment increases, spending on education has roughly tripled. Pouring more and more money into a broken system doesn’t seem to have done us much good.

Meanwhile, there’s no doubt that better teachers in classrooms result in better outcomes for students. Eric Hanushek, of Stanford University, has found that eliminating the bottom five to ten percent of teachers would lead to in-class gains capable of vaulting America to the top of the global rankings. On an individual level, Hanushek has found that a good teacher can be worth as much as $400,000 in increased individual student earnings over the course of their career.

Is merit pay necessarily the best way to attract better teachers into the classroom? That’s the bottom line here. It would undoubtedly make the profession more enticing to those who are motivated by working in a professional environment. As it is, the unions want to treat teachers like interchangeable cogs, paid more for earning seniority or master’s degrees (neither of which has an impact on teacher excellence) while ignoring the advancement of students. As Terry Moe puts it in Special Interest, this “bears no resemblance to the way doctors, lawyers, business managers, and other professionals are paid” and “undermines the productivity of schools: by paying good teachers and bad teachers the same, wasting huge amounts of money on criteria that are irrelevant to student performance, and restricting what teachers do in the workplace.”

Is merit pay “naive”? Here’s a better question: Was Einstein right when he said that doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different outcome (i.e., pouring more money into the black hole that is our education system) is the definition of insanity?

(Photo via Wet Napkin)