The Dregs of Society....

My sentiment toward the stimulus bill has been what I might call optimistically credulous. That is, I'm pretending that the goal here is to actually stimulate the economy. Thus, my reaction to the inclusion (or removal) of sensible public policy proposals has been to ask, "How well does this fit with the purpose of a stimulus bill?" Sure, this involves overlooking some of the compromise that has already been made to put together a bill that's expected to pass. Sure, if you look closely at the bill, you can find other similar provisions that arguably should be eliminated on the same grounds, but don't happen to be controversial. Because thanks to the nature of our political system, with any sort of spending bill (massive or minor), you're not likely to get more than 2/3 of the way to ideological purity. But shouldn't you try?

Not according to Richard Cohen. To Cohen, it is a great sin to put forth a stimulus bill that doesn't attempt to reform... things. The idea that a stimulus bill should focus on short-term spending, "shovel-ready" projects, and programs that don't require sustained, increased government spending? The idea that this should be a bill that passes quickly rather than getting bogged down in endless debate and controversies? Lost on him. But okay... there are lots of issues that need reform. Perhaps you're thinking, "Cohen wants to restore funding for birth control." Or "Cohen wants to use the stimulus bill to lay a foundation for further reforms, such as a national health care program, a cleaner environment, sustainable energy...." nope. Cohen wants to tackle education reform.

The funny part, if you want to call it that: Cohen doesn't know anything about education reform. Thus, instead of concrete proposals, we get platitudinous statements like this:

But if the money is going to be offered, why not couple it with demands for reform? After all, without the extra cash, the likelihood is that teachers across the country will be laid off. That gives the president some leverage: Take my money, take my reforms. Maybe a deal could not be done. We won't know. We do know, though, that the teachers unions have an understandable aversion to some reforms. We also know that the unions supported Obama in his campaign.

You see? The most obvious reason that a federal stimulus bill doesn't micromanage education, something traditionally though of as a state issue, is that "unions supported Obama." It must be nice to live in a world that... simple.

Do your reading on education and you will find an emerging consensus. Abolish tenure.

That's right... stretching from the WSJ editorial page to its op/ed page, the emerging consensus is right there for you to see. I've spoken about this before, but I guess it bears repeating: If tenure were the real issue, the problems attributed to tenure would be seen in every school district. Getting legislatures to act against tenure wouldn't be an issue, because everybody with kids in public schools would be screaming for reform. The problem in schools like DC's is that between an unpleasant work environment and incompetent administrators, classrooms were filled with available applicants, steps weren't taken to weed out bad teachers before they got tenure, and the environment for teacher burnout is exceptional. As a consequence, no doubt, you have a lot of kids being taught by teachers who should never have obtained tenure or who are counting the days until they can retire. That happens in other school districts as well, but at nowhere near the same levels. Also, the good teachers from a district like DC? They can seek jobs in other districts where they will again get tenure - but without the controversy.

There are other ways to ensure that teachers are fairly treated without guaranteeing the jobs of the inept. (Cops don't have tenure, and neither do columnists.)

That's almost funny. Columnists don't have tenure, meaning they could be fired at will? No, as Cohen knows, name brand columnists work under contract. Now I'll grant, they don't have a CBA that will get them their job back if they're wrongfully terminated, but they will seek full compensation under their contracts.

Police officers? Come now, Richard. Tenure is a form of job protection that follows your probationary period. It doesn't mean "we can't fire you", and it certainly doesn't mean "we can't fire you for cause". It means that once you complete your probationary period you can (normally) only be fired for cause, and you may have to offer an employee improvement plan or follow an incremental disciplinary process. It could be said that any union employee past the probationary period has "tenure". And yes, that includes officers in unionized police departments (which is to say, most of them). Believe it or not, there's nothing talismanic about the term - you can find state legislation describing police officer tenure, and police disciplinary hearings may be described as "tenure hearings".

Let's look at Cohen's version of a "solution" - how do we "ensure that teachers are fairly treated without guaranteeing the jobs of the inept"?

Ensure that the best teachers teach at the most challenging schools and ensure also that they get paid lavishly for doing so.

It's one of the problems with the simple-minded union busting mantra, that somehow unions are to blame for everything that's wrong in the schools. Even giving due respect to Michelle Rhee's apparently unsustainable plan to provide teacher raises, the fact is that there's no popular will to give teachers more money. Cohen just got through telling us that things are so bad that states are looking at laying off needed teachers. Either Cohen's looking at the stimulus bill as the magic federal money tree - a gift that keeps on giving - or he's not considered that if you increase teacher pay, once funding levels return to normal you have to lay off even more needed teachers. Actually, it's probably both.

If Cohen were to venture out of his office and stop by some inner city private schools and religious schools, he would likely find that there are good teachers in many of those schools who have chosen to make less money in order to teach in a school environment that they find to be more secure, stable, and supported. That's an issue Rhee likes to sidestep, and people like Cohen don't even seem to know exists - there's more to a job than money. The focus of making individual classroom teachers responsible for the failures of parents, schools and school administrators kind of misses the point. Or perhaps it is the point - by placing the focus there, Rhee creates instant insulation against the failures of her own, substantive reforms (or lack thereof). Rhee, for example, favors mainstreaming - something that saves the school district money and... it's the teachers' fault if they can't deal with high numbers of emotionally disturbed or learning disabled kids mainstreamed into their classrooms, right?

Cohen likes solutions that "sound good" (to him), even if he has no concept of what they would mean:

How about extending the school day, maybe for an hour or so? How about extending the school year? How about tinkering with the No Child Left Behind law but insisting that testing - accountability - be maintained?

Because it's free to keep schools open for extra hours or days, we'll have already busted the teachers unions so they won't be able to object to an increased work day or year, and surely more classroom hours will automatically translate into more learning, right? That's why when you go to college you spend more time in classrooms than ever before. Personally, I do think that we should revisit the school year, the paring away of school days to save money, the structure of the school year around an agricultural calendar, etc. But I don't see it as a magic cure, as something that should be imposed on school districts as part of a stimulus bill, or as a legislative priority for preempting teachers' collective bargaining rights.

You want specifics, Cohen's got them - he's thought long and hard about "No Child Left Behind" and came up with the insightful solution that it can be improved by "tinkering". Um... Thanks. But it gets better:

How about doing something about the sad fact that teachers aren't what they used to be? Now that women and minorities have more opportunities in almost every field, the best of them have abandoned teaching.

Ah, the good old days when women and minorities didn't have good job opportunities other than teaching. Now everybody with a brain has moved on to better professions, and those that are left.... (Is it just me, or is Cohen's statement oh... just a wee bit sexist and racist? What does he have to say about white men who teach?) Mix that sentiment with the idea that the best way to keep the best of the remaining dregs happy is to force them to work in inner city schools, increase their workday and work year, and take away their job protections and... what more needs to be said?

One of these days, somebody will need to explain to Cohen that you can have a teacher who works wonders with suburban fifth grade students, but who would be stretched to (or beyond) the limits of her capacity trying to maintain order in an inner city fifth grade classroom. A teacher who is able to handle the most difficult classrooms is likely to be able to handle an easier classroom, but the opposite isn't always true. But to Cohen, teachers are apparently all dregs who can't get real jobs, so perhaps he sees 'em all as fungible.

Why Rhee Wants To Break the Teacher's Union

CWD comments,

Clearly, Rhee is trying to sell the teachers a pig in a poke. On the other hand, these are the same teachers who have had union president's steal millions from them and who readily admit that they wouldn't want their children to attend the schools where they teach . . . and are surprised that anyone would expect them too . . .

I'm not sure that busting the Union is a necessary step in the process, but blowing the whole system up and starting over has some theoretical merit . . .

I'll admit, Rhee's professed goal - giving teachers a big raise and merit pay - is not the traditional opening gambit of a union buster. I do think it's a "pig in a poke" - that the proposed pay structure is unsustainable. But for now, let's assume otherwise. Obviously the goal here isn't to coerce the union into letting its members be paid more. Nobody's talking about expanding the school year. So what's left... oh, yeah....

Tenure.

Even when they offer wages comparable to other school districts, or above what other districts pay, school districts like D.C. have a hard time attracting quality job applicants for teaching positions. Why? Because teaching in an inner city school is considered to be a miserable experience. Teaching in a school where, despite your best efforts, you wouldn't send your own child? Where your best efforts, applied every single day, will do nothing to improve the status quo? Where your day is consumed with disciplinary problems and you struggle to maintain classroom order? I have admiration for teachers who can work like that, day after day, without burning out or quitting. But there aren't many of them.

So weak administrators hire weak applicants in order to fill positions, aren't diligent enough (or don't care enough) to ferret out those who don't have an adequate skill set before they get tenure, and the district ends up with large numbers of teachers who really aren't equipped to teach. Rhee supposedly will offer remedial programs for these teachers as part of her secret plan, so that they can in theory avoid being fired, but nothing is stopping her from offering remedial training right now. What she clearly wants to do is to break the tenure system so she can clean house.

I can't say that I blame her. I'm sure she can identify a lot of teachers who should never have been hired, and a larger group that may become highly motivated to improve their skills and performance if they can be threatened with termination. I have sympathy for an administrator who inherits a broken system. But let's be blunt: if teacher's unions were the cause of this problem, D.C.'s system should be typical of the nation's schools as opposed to being among the dregs. The roots of the problem lie in incompetent, unmotivated administration crossed with, in much of the system, what many teachers would find to be an unrewarding, often unpleasant, teaching environment.

Rhee was hoping that the offer of big money would be a sufficient enticement to get the union to voluntarily give up tenure, or allow teachers to opt into the merit system (possibly with the longer-term goal of trying to get the teachers who opted for the merit pay system to vote to decertify the union). But it's difficult to see why a union would regard a promise of an apparently unsustainable pay raise for some as grounds to surrender the largest benefit it has historically provided to its members - job security. And even if you're a good teacher, you have to have some concern about whether you would get merit pay, or have the bad luck of having a particularly bad class and be deemed to be underperforming despite strong efforts.

No Union Busting Here, Folks....

In an unsigned editorial, the Washington Post prevaricates,

Ms. Rhee has been accused of trying to break the union when, in truth, she rejected a plan to bring in a firm adept at union-busting in favor of working one-on-one with local labor officials whom she believed shared her philosophy that children come first.

A more realistic interpretation is that she was told by the union busting firm, "It's not going to work here."

It tells you something about Rhee that, before opening negotiations, she even considered hiring a "firm adept at union-busting" to attack the teacher's union. It tells you something else about Rhee (and the Washington Post) that the dream plan she has for teachers - the plan the Post gushes over every week or two - is a highly classified secret, and isn't available anywhere for people, be they curious outsiders like me or teachers who are told how wonderful it is, to read. Rhee's not interested in union busting? Perhaps Fred Hiatt and his editorial writers should, you know, read their own paper.

Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee are discussing a dramatic expansion of their effort to remove ineffective teachers by restoring the District's power to create nonunionized charter schools and seeking federal legislation declaring the school system in a "state of emergency," a move that would eliminate the need to bargain with the Washington Teachers' Union.

Nope... not even a slight interest in union busting there....

I'm prepared to believe that Rhee's proposal is the best thing since sliced bread. But if it truly is such a wonderful plan, and is sustainable, why isn't she focusing her energies on publicizing the plan rather than keeping it under wraps?

Using Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers

For many years, perhaps too many, schools have relied heavily on standardized tests to evaluate students - their performance, improvement, and needs. Teachers dutifully park their students at desks and have them spend countless hours filling in little ovals with number 2 pencils. But there are other potential uses for that data.

For quite some time there has been a showdown in New York, with the state's Department of Education trying to use the test data to evaluate teachers, and the teacher's union objecting to the proposal. Now there's a compromise that, in my estimation, should have been reached a long time ago. Why did it take so long? The state's legislature imposed a two year moratorium on the use of test data for teacher pay and tenure decisions and, with that off the table, the Department of Education and teacher's union quickly reached a compromise. To me, that was the Department of Education biting its own nose off to spite its face. Now it can illustrate the utility of the data for purposes of educational improvement, and can start building the case for expanding its use to teacher pay and tenure. Right now, there's good reason to believe that school administrators don't even know how to apply this data in a meaningful manner.

This data should help school administrators target classrooms in need of assistance, but should also enable them to identify teachers whose classroom performance is consistently good to excellent. (Although if that turns out to involve a lot of "teaching to the test", this whole venture would have to be reconsidered.) Data can be used to gauge improvement by class, ethnicity, gender, and perhaps even on an individual level. By making the initial focus corrective, teachers have the opportunity to improve their performance, and both teachers and administrators have the opportunity to identity classroom management and teaching techniques that could help everybody. And all sides will get a sense of how fair or useful this information is, prior to its being used for purposes of promotion, discipline or tenure.

Michelle Rhee's Secret Plan for Teacher Pay

The Washington Post is again pushing Michelle Rhee's plan for eliminating tenure at for new hires and any teachers who join the new program, and increasing teacher pay for those teachers:

The bold plan of D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee is two-tiered: Salaries as high as $130,000 would be available to teachers who forgo tenure and tie their pay to student performance, while those retaining tenure would still receive generous raises. No teacher with tenure would be forced to give it up under the voluntary plan.

I remain puzzled by this, for reasons also raised by this editorial:

Montgomery County teachers have been told that they'll probably have to forgo the 5.3 percent pay raise they had been promised for next year because of a worsening economy. Fairfax County, which this year could afford only 2 percent cost-of-living raises for its teachers, has no idea what it will be able to provide with revenue shrinking.

In other words, funds for increased teacher pay are unlikely to come from taxpayers - and given the state of the economy, school budget woes can reasonably be expected to get worse before they get better.

Still, union leaders have balked, thus jeopardizing the $200 million that Ms. Rhee says she has raised from national foundations willing to fund the contract -- but only if the District revamps how teachers are compensated.

Finally a hint at how D.C. will pay for the plan - at least initially - but more details are needed. That $200 million will last how many years? Followed by what? Massive reductions in salary? Teacher layoffs? Seriously - what's the plan to sustain this level of expenditure?

The Post complains about a critic of the plan:

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, criticized the plan in a letter to the editor of the New York Times even though, as she admitted to us, she hasn't seen the plan.

So the Post believes you can't comment on this plan unless you've seen it? Even though they have yet to print the plan, post it on their website, or point people to a place where they can read the plan?

I can't really argue with that, as I want to see the plan and its details so I can evaluate it for myself. I would like to know the specifics. Weingarten may be encountering the same problem I am having - the details of the plan appear to be a closely guarded secret, so to comment on the plan you have to rely on inferences and second-hand accounts.

But wait a second:

The union's refusal to put the proposal to a vote before its general membership is telling. Much misinformation about the proposal has been floated. Contrary to what has been said about the plan, there is apparently an appeals process for teachers who are terminated, as well as programs to aid in teacher development.

Apparently? So the Post hasn't seen the plan either, and the authors of this unsigned editorial are relying upon second-hand descriptions that they don't even know to be true. I guess it's okay to support a plan you haven't read, just not to oppose it.

Michelle Rhee's Proposed Reforms

In terms of this,

[Chancellor of D.C. public schools Michelle] Rhee proposes offering teachers the choice of staying in the seniority system or giving up their seniority and tenure rights in exchange for the opportunity to earn as much as $131,000 a year for raising student performance.

Does anybody have any details on the specifics of this proposal, or how it would work in practice? Is this going to be a typical "transformational" union contract deal whereby new teachers are pressed into the "bonus-based, non-tenured" positions while teachers already in the union get similar rewards without accepting similar risks? Given that the D.C. schools don't have the funds to double teacher salaries, how many (or should I say, how few) teachers will actually get the types of bonuses and merit pay Lieberman describes?

One of the advantages of tenure is that it insulates teachers from parental complaints. What incentive will school administrators have to stand behind teachers whose demands and classroom discipline trigger complaints from students and parents, particularly in schools where large numbers of students are disinterested and their parents unsupportive of education? How will student performance be measured? Simply by administration of standardized tests, thus overtly rewarding "teaching to the test" even if other teaching techniques are more inspirational or provide a better framework for learning?