LaborPains.org

The leaders of teachers unions often say that they want to help kids. Somehow, they’re just looking out for the young ones by blocking reforms like merit pay and changes to tenure. And by putting $25 million in federal funding at risk because they don’t want to work a full week:

That announcement was made this afternoon by Grand Rapids school administrators, who said they failed to reach a labor agreement with the teachers union to implement turnaround plans in five troubled city schools.

The failure jeopardizes a $25 million federal school improvement grant available to the district, administrators said. The state had set today as a deadline for submitting turnaround plans.

Requiring teachers in those five schools to move to a 40-hour work week, up from 33.6 hours, was a main sticking point, board President Senita Lenear revealed today.

Teachers unions are doing it for the kids! That’s why they’re instituting “work to rule” in cities with labor strife across the country, right? Like in Detroit:

The president of the Detroit Federation of Teachers has instructed some teachers to stop writing lesson plans, stop grading students and to not attend parent-teacher conferences.

Or in Berkshire, Massachusetts:

The 600-member United Teachers of Pittsfield (UEP) voted on and are now under a “work to rule” provision in an effort the union hopes will jump-start negotiations, according to union president Scott Eldridge. Teachers who work to rule strictly follow the terms of the previous contract and don’t volunteer to provide extra help for students or work on school activities beyond what is required of them in that contract.

But hey, I guess we should just take Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, at her word when she says that “We are doing our part to help kids succeed.” Because nothing screams success like doing the bare minimum amount of work, right?

Cognitive dissonance is the holding of two diametrically opposed ideas at the same time and believing both of them equally. I think of this phrase often when confronted by the demands of teachers unions. On the one hand, the unions believe that teachers are incredibly important to the development of children — that they are dedicated educators who can change the lives of any child through their efforts.* On the other, unions resist methods to judge the efficacy of educators because, they claim, factors for success in school have little to do with what goes on in the classroom and everything to do with factors out of their members’ control: poverty, parental involvement, and other factors are more important, they claim.

In other words: Pay teachers more because they’re incredibly important, but don’t hold them accountable because they’re not really that important. This is textbook cognitive dissonance.

I again thought of that phrase while reading this satirical “apology” from a teacher who received a poor evaluation. He sarcastically complains

If the “complex rubrics” cost this guy his job, I wouldn’t shed a tear. Would you?

*For the record: I totally agree with this sentiment. A good teacher can work miracles.

Here’s an interesting essay from a teacher on the front lines. He’s a Republican teacher in New Jersey who is disgusted by the way union officials demand that teachers vote how they are told by union bosses. Writes the anonymous teacher:

I had the displeasure of being a NJEA member. Having been born to a father that was a Teamster and believing in unions all of my life, I was in for a rude awakening. After an election the union representatives at my school actually had the audacity to ask me, “Did you vote the way we wanted you to vote?”  It was understood that because I was a teacher I was a rubber stamp for the union team.  My response was, “Maybe I did, and maybe I didn’t.”  I was appalled at the openness with which they tried to sway my vote because I am a teacher. Not all teachers are Democrats. I worked with many teachers at this district who were closet Republicans.

You should read the whole thing.

I’m willing to consider the notion that teaching is a profession that is more likely to attract Democrats than Republicans. I am not willing, however, to buy into the idea that 93 percent of National Education Association members are Democrats. I find it even more ludicrous that the American Federation of Teachers thinks that 99 percent of its members’ dues deserve to go to Democratic candidates. Do these unions really think they are representing the makeup of their memberships?

The leadership of teachers unions don’t represent the rank and file. They act as little more than a conduit to funnel money to their friends and allies in Congress. It’s a ridiculous situation, and one that needs to stop.

That is the headline of an excellent new op-ed from Eric Hanushek, one of the leading proponents of school reform. He makes a point that people sometimes miss: School reformers focus on teachers unions because they are an unambiguous impediment to reform. But it’s hard to focus your scorn on teachers unions without coming across as opposed to teachers of all stripes. Reformers like Hanushek don’t hate teachers. They dislike what the teachers unions are doing. As he puts it,

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.

Bad teachers need to be removed from classrooms. This isn’t an anti-teacher stance: It’s common sense. But teachers unions are, by design, required to defend teachers good and bad. Hence their resistance to efforts to introduce objective evaluation standards: Without a way to judge people, they can argue that it’s impossible to tell who’s good and who’s bad, therefore no one should be fired. It’s an ingenious gambit in its own perverse way.

No one would accuse Courtland Milloy of being a staunch supporter of school reform in the District of Columbia. After Michelle Rhee moved to eliminate underperforming teachers from the classroom, Milloy described the move as “Rhee’s way of showing students how to throw a teacher under the bus,” “how adults play Halloween tricks on kids,” and “dumb as chalk.” Later, he rhetorically asked “Can you raise an academic bar if you don’t have an ethical leg to stand on?”

Milloy was at it again this week in a column given the misleading headline “Despite Rhee’s missteps, her egalitarian vision inspires.” Instead of embracing Rhee’s efforts to tighten DC schools by eliminating under-utilized buildings and getting rid of under-performing teachers, Milloy suggested that the real problem is – wait for it – underfunding of DC’s schools. “Elitism [is] the most stubborn obstacle to school reform,” he wrote. “Not teachers’ unions, dysfunctional families, lazy students or black prejudice against a Korean American schools chancellor, but reluctance by the city’s haves to share classrooms with the have-nots.”

He bases his belief on a quote from billionaire Warren Buffet who once told Rhee that if “it would be easy to solve today’s problems in urban education. ‘Make private schools illegal,’ he said, ‘and assign every child to a public school by random lottery.’” Let’s leave aside the totalitarian impulse to remove options from people looking to find better ways to educate their kids. Buffet and Milloy have this idea that if we could only force families to send their kids to public schools, a spigot of money would open up because the elites finally realized the necessity for public schools. This is, in a word, asinine. It is class-baiting nonsense of the first order.

As a reminder: Washington’s public schools are among the best-funded in the entire country. As of 2008, D.C. was spending almost $25,000 a year per student, good for the third-highest rate in the country. What have we received for all that money? A local school system that will see only 9 percent of its students graduate from college within five years of graduating high school. A local school system that only sees two out of every five tenth graders score as proficient or advanced in math and reading tests. A local school system that is, in a word, broken.

But it’s all the fault of the elites, right? Those evil elites who send their kids to private schools, away from the deprivations of those well-funded public schools – they’re the ones to blame. It’s odd, though, that those very same elites would support things like the federal voucher program that helped poor families afford private schooling for their children – a voucher program that I can find no record of Milloy ever supporting.

If Milloy was really in favor of reforms that would help lift students out of poverty by providing them with a better education, he’d support efforts to get struggling teachers out of classrooms. Of course, this would hurt his standing with his pals at the Washington Teachers’ Union – and we wouldn’t want that, now, would we?

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve seen a couple of stories pop up that suggest some teachers are simply tired of their union’s anti-reform stances. First came news that a backer of education reform was putting up some money to help fund a “cheaper, non-political alternative to teacher unions” in Florida. Reports the Florida Times-Union:

The Orange Park-based educators network has been around since 1995 but has only about 2,000 members statewide. …

But Tim Farmer, who spent the last two years as a teacher with Teach For America at Eugene Butler Middle School, is ramping up the network’s recruitment efforts here.

Farmer, a former member of the union, said Duval Teachers United is “completely out of touch” with what teachers want and the services it offers are “overpriced.” The network, Farmer said, isn’t political and membership costs $180 a year compared with $680 for the union.

“I felt like it was time that teachers were given a choice,” he said.

Today, the Wall Street Journal notes that more and more New York City teachers are joining a group called Educators 4 Excellence. Though they explicitly deny being any sort of competition to the local American Federation of Teachers affiliate, the new group is staking out positions that put them in diametric opposition to the union:

Ms. Morris stresses that her group is “not anti-union, nor are we an alternative” to the UFT. Instead, the group is made up of “educators committed to amplifying authentic teacher voices that are not yet being heard in order to improve the education system to benefit our students.”

Of particular concern is the practice of laying off teachers based on how many years they’ve worked in the schools. That “provides a safety net to be complacent,” said Margie Crousillat, a member of Ms. Morris’s group who is a kindergarten teacher in the Bronx in her seventh year of teaching. “Some veteran teachers have been teaching 25 years and they are incredible. But some aren’t. I don’t think age or experience should dictate whether you’re safe in your job.”

About the UFT, Ms. Crousillat added: “Their priorities are not my priorities.”

We at Labor Pains applaud these alternative efforts. It just goes to show something we’ve said for a long time: Teachers aren’t the problem – union bosses are. Hopefully these new groups can pressure the old guard into being more accepting of reform and less political in the future.

The Miami Herald reports that Florida’s statewide teachers union has filed a lawsuit to stop the state from counting votes on a constitutional amendment that would alter class sizes in the state.

A lawyer for Florida’s statewide teachers union asked a judge Wednesday to block the counting of votes cast on the Legislature’s proposed state constitutional amendment to loosen class size limits. …

Meyer argued Amendment 8′s ballot summary and title are unclear, ambiguous and misleading because they fail to say the proposal’s chief purpose is to change school funding. The Florida Constitution now requires the Legislature to “make adequate provision” for meeting the class size requirements.

What’s interesting here is that the state of Florida has actually written into its constitution the number of students who should be in classrooms. The union fought hard to pass an initiative that capped class sizes at 18 for first through third grades, 22 in fourth through eighth, and 25 in ninth through twelfth. This is literally in Florida’s state constitution. This kind of micromanagement is kind of mind-blowing, but given the power of the state’s teachers unions, it’s not terribly surprising. Allow me to explain.

The union claims that they just want to see kids get the best education possible, and small class sizes are the key to accomplishing that. Experts might disagree – most point to teacher quality as the single most important key to student success outside of said student’s home life – but let’s leave that aside for the moment. What teachers unions are really interested in is collecting more dues. How do they collect more dues? By having more teachers on the payroll. How does one get more teachers on the payroll? Why, mandate incredibly small class sizes, of course!

It’s an interesting shell game, one that we’ve seen play out recently in the “teacher bailout” pushed for by President Obama; the Wall Street Journal reported that the $10 billion subsidy to states to keep them from laying off teachers led to at least $100 million in additional dues for the National Education Association.

Milton, Massachusetts is going to miss out on a share of $200 million in Race to the Top funding because the union refused to sign on to the application. The union’s president, Margaret Gibbons, said that they did so “primarily because the board is opposed to tying teacher compensation and evaluation to a student’s test score,” but also because “In addition, we [opposed] states competing for funding. The whole idea means winners and losers. We felt all public schools in all states should be fairly funded.”

There are a couple of interesting, related things going on here. Note first that the president freely admits that she and the union does not believe in paying for better performance. Teachers are teachers, and they should be paid in a lockstep manner that neither rewards excellence nor punishes failure. Differentiating their pay would be unfair, and tying their pay to how well they do their jobs? Well, that would just be disastrous.

Keep that point in mind when considering the second part of her quote. Note the intense aversion to having to label “winners and losers.” There’s a deeper problem than simple resistance to reform at work here. There’s an ideology. An ideology that says we may not all be the same, but we all deserve to be treated the same: Why should the race go to the quickest or scholarships to the smartest or raises to the hardest working? Why should we reward those for how well they perform? From each according to his ability, to each according his needs, right?

Wrong. This is a policy destined to fail. How do we know this? Because we’ve seen this policy fail in school district after school district, where children are forced to endure bad teachers who are protected by unions because judging their performance is “unfair” and creates “winners and losers.” Why repeat a policy destined for failure?