The Pandemic’s Original Sin

I was loudly and vehemently opposed to conventional wisdom on school closure and really all pandemic restrictions, from March 2020 to today. But that’s me. I’m a little weird, plus I don’t get sick much. My standard for closing down schools is Contagion. Or The Last Ship.

I’m nobody, of course,  but a nobody pretty clued in to media coverage, and I’m well aware that  arguing against school closure back in March 2020 was a fool’s errand. Then, ironically, I was likewise mostly alone on the right in refusing to blame teachers or blue state governance for remote education that persisted well beyond what those on the right thought was necessary. So for the better part of forty months I have been a lonely voice in the wilderness, which has given me a lot of time to argue fruitlessly with the fact-ignorant, but also a lot of time to wonder productively what could have been done differently

If the remote education push was bottom-up rather than top down, what could have been done differently from March 2020 to June 2021 that so devastated the public school system? I have mulled for many months, using this factbase:

1. Parents were guaranteed remote education at their local school for the entire 20-21 school year, even Florida and Texas. This guarantee was not extended to parents wanting in-person education, with the notable exceptions of Florida and Texas.
2. Student disability law is ferocious and unrelenting and while it wasn’t much reported, had a considerable impact on district constraints in remote education decisions.
3. Race played a huge role in parental preference for remote education, with white parents being the only group with majority support for in-person instruction.
4. Politics played a significant role in CDC compliance, with Democrat majority states adhering and Republican majority states generally ignoring.  Schools required to follow CDC mandates could not realistically offer full-time in-person instruction. (Example: both Florida and Vermont offered in-person instruction for most of the 2020-21 school year, but Vermont was in hybrid while Florida was full-time)
5. Individual American schools do not represent national demographics. About a third of all schools are majority non-white. A third of whites attend schools that are majority non-white. On average, a third of non-whites attend majority white schools, but fewer than 20% of blacks and Hispanics do. (Cite)

Understand this fact base and nothing else about the year is relevant.

Points 1 and 3  combine to explain why NAEP scores aren’t explained by more than 10% of a state’s use of remote instruction.  Florida and Texas may have guaranteed parents in-person instruction, but only if they wanted it. Blacks and Hispanics, regardless of state, were far more likely to select remote, so those students would see a decline in scores regardless of policy. And so Florida and Texas actually lost more total NAEP points than California.

Points 1, 3, and 5 explain why most parents were content with their school instruction policies but a small vocal minority of whites was not. Non-whites, regardless of school demographic, were able to choose remote instruction. Most white students attend majority white schools, so got what they wanted as well. But that 33% of whites in majority non-white districts, which tend to be wealthy whites in high immigration urban or sububan areas, are a small but highly influential group with access and ability to make a lot of noise.

Points 2 and 4 explain much of the hesitance that schools had about rolling back restrictions.  Lawsuits are the form of accountability schools fear most. States and districts were crushed between disabled students with polar opposite needs–kids with mental disabilities needed in-person instruction, kids with physical disabilities had airtight claims for the wildest and most extreme protections. The CDC guidelines supported any lawsuit by the kids with physical disabilities. Blue states in general give much more support to these laws. Blue states with large non-white populations (pretty much all of them except Vermont, Washington, and Oregon) were under tremendous pressure to heed CDC guidelines with the progressives adding vocal pressure to then non-white existing preference. And the minute a state vows to follow CDC guidelines, their decision to *not* follow those guidelines becomes a material fact that gives weight to parental demands for adherence to the education disability laws.

So there’s the fact base. Very little to do with teachers unions, a little to do with blue state politics, but not as much as the day of reckoning demanders claim. The facts aren’t really in dispute. Randi Weingarten’s nonsense: irrelevant. CDC guidelines: a bit relevant, but in the context of governors could and did ignore them. Blaming the rhetoric for scaring parents: well, explain how whites weren’t fooled but non-whites were without getting hinky. What, non-whites are just more gullible?

Accept that the public discourse on this is completely off-base with no connection to the underlying problems, and look at the history of the pandemic with the only facts that matter, and it becomes clear that one key decision set everything in motion, from which I can see no certain path to undoing.

The schools should never have been closed in the first place.

And that’s sadly hilarious. In the entire history of the pandemic, with all the political and racial schisms that developed around remote vs in-person education, masks, lockdowns, vaccines, vaccine mandates, social distancing, the only milestone about which seemingly everyone acted and argued in lockstep was shutting down the schools in March 2020.

So hey, good news! No accountability needed. The decision that caused all the damage had everyone’s approval. Well, except mine.

The decision to close the schools was bipartisan. Omni-partisan, really. Everyone with a voice in the public sphere supported school closure, lockdowns, masks, and censure for the non-compliant. Even the voters apparently supported closed schools in March 2020.

The media pressure was unrelenting and likewise bipartisan. The negative blowback on politicians who balked at shutting down was tremendous.  Bill DeBlasio took an extra two days to close NYC schools and was excoriated. I have yet to see anyone acknowledge that his stated concerns for poor kids being robbed of education were well-founded. Florida governor Ron DeSantis was willing to ignore the media and set fewer restrictions and was likewise subjected to waves of criticism.

So. Close the schools, all the shit rolls right downhill to parent majorities determining method of instruction, zoom school, social isolation, the whole Mission burrito.

If everyone had continued to agree on the dangers of covid19, well, we’d all be just looking at the test scores as a regrettable but necessary expense of saving America.

Instead, in less than three months, the unity had fractured.. The progressive left remained firmly and loudly in support of remote education, masking, and if anything held that the country was moving beyond covid too quickly. Most non-white parents agreed,  from all available evidence, but didn’t chime in.

Meanwhile, conservative media and politicians, originally and loudly in favor of closure, switched effortlessly in the summer of 2020. (Republican voters, of course, had never particularly favored shutdown–as early as June, GOP support for opening schools approached 60%.)

Since it was largely conservative media that flipped on school closure, it’s worth expending a paragraph to demonstrate just how thorough, unrelenting, and total the 180 was amongst the people who are have been howling for accountability for a couple years now.

Timothy Carney originally praised the “reasonable and responsible” school closure and  chastised President Trump for demanding the schools open in ALL CAPS. But his kids were depressed and unhappy without school, so soon he was a vocal activist demanding that his private Catholic schools stay open. Recently Carney acknowledged that the lockdown he demanded may have done more harm than good.  Michael Brendan Dougherty emailed his district superintendent begging him to close schools, then a few months later said gosh,  I’m not sure how long I can keep doing this remote education thing, and finally began pressuring the school board to end its mask mandate. Karol Markowicz screamed loudly for then-mayor DiBlasio to close the schools; a year later she howled just as furiously for him to re-open the schools, finally moving down to Florida and a much whiter school district to get in-person education for her kids. Jim Geraghty did a ticktock on what he saw as DiBlasio’s terrible failure to close the schools in  timely fashion and called for an end to clickbait opinion journalism when an op-ed predicted catastrophic damage caused by school closure. Our “improvised solution, keeping kids out of school, is going to have some bad effects”  doesn’t get the clicks of “setting back a generation” he wrote, dismissing the very notion that closed schools could do any serious damage.Two years later, Geraghty wrote an article talking about the toll the pandemic took on America’s kids and it sure sounds now like he thinks it’s a generational setback as opposed to “some bad effects”.  And let’s never forget “don’t touch my baby’s hands” “for god’s sake people social distancing! Stop going!”  Bethany Mandel, who was hysterically against killing Grandma before she was for it. For equal time, Damon Linker was chastising people who wanted to open the schools and submit his kids to the trauma of guilt at being the cause of their parents’ death until he saw the trauma of his kids’ remote education. But by and large the flippers making the most noise were on the right.

In each of the above cases, the writers are now sublimely oblivious to their original support for closure. All they remember now is their rage at not getting the open schools they wanted exactly when they demanded them.

But sorry, folks. Did you call for closing the schools in March 2020? You own the results.

This might strike some as unfair.  Of course, the argument goes, *everyone*–or at least everyone who mattered–supported school closure in March 2020. People were scared.  Uncertain. Worried. Best to close the schools, keep people home. But once “the science” made it clear that schools were safe, it was incumbent on everyone to change their minds and do what was best. And Democrats didn’t do what was best. They didn’t follow the science.  It’s those stupid woke educators and the Democrats in thrall to the unions that caused the damage.

Ah, yes.  “I supported closing for two weeks, but…” or “Look, we didn’t know. It made sense at the time to shut down. But times changed.”

There is no “but”. It didn’t make sense at the time. Why close the schools? The goal was never to save the children because as early as February 2020, everyone knew children weren’t at risk. Mike DeWine and most governors closing schools expressly said the objective was to “slow the spread” or “flatten the curve”.

To restate: attendance requirements enabled and overwhelming opinion mandated that no parent be required to choose in-person instruction for their student, while parents were not given a similar guarantee out of remote.

Another fact rarely acknowledged: March school closure set a standard for unacceptable risk.

That standard set the stage for lawsuit threats over the following year. As can be seen from the Washington Post’s covid statistics, deaths and infections were far above the March 2020 levels for all of the next 18 months. This data made it very hard for schools even in the states that had no “mandatory remote option” requirement to deny parents the right to an in-home education.

See, here’s the thing: People are just stupid. In all ways, all the time. We all get to define stupid for ourselves. I personally think anyone under the age of 70 who *ever* felt unsafe about covid is pretty damn dumb. I also think the flippers who couldn’t accept that not everyone agreed with their change of perspective were idiots. I think the columnists endlessly yammering about infection rates and deaths in the apparent conviction that covid19 could be somehow controlled were foolish obsessives wasting print space.

Stupid is multi-directional.  Matt Ygelesias’s comment section is filled with self-styled thoughtful progressives who soberly discuss methods to educate MAGA folk out of their moronic devotion to Trump. Commentary podcast regulars smirk at the woke mentality and the MAGA morons. Pick your population, they’ll find a whole new stupid.

I’ve always known fixing stupid is hard, particularly in our polarized society with little agreement on what, exactly, stupid is. This explains my opposition to school closure. I knew people would react in idiotic ways. Not who, when,  or how.  But I was sure we could bank on stupid. And that meant closing the schools, which was a horrifically drastic action, would be impossible to undo as easily as the jackasses yapping about two weeks to slow the spread assumed.

People supported closing the schools because they felt afraid. When they stopped feeling afraid and felt safer, they wanted schools open. It’s just….everyone didn’t feel safer at the same time. As I’ve been writing for a while, now, the race factor was the unanticipated gotcha.

I realize that to anyone who didn’t actually look at the data–or to those intent on ignoring the data because they want their audience to blame unions–this seems absurd. Am I really saying that giving parents a choice guaranteed the damages done by 2021? That we were simply lucky the damage didn’t go on for longer?

Yes.

I am also saying that the media’s agitation for school closure caused this.

I doubt opinionmakers will ever understand how much damage they did.

If you ever called for school closure, if you have any sort of public voice and you added it to the demands for lockdowns and school closures, then nothing you said or did after that point mitigates your joint responsibility for the following eighteen months.  You didn’t understand how school works. You didn’t understand the massive legal restrictions and mandates that schools face. You didn’t understand that other people weren’t going to recover their sense of security as quickly as you did. You didn’t understand, period.

So yeah, Tim, Jim, Bethany, Karol, Michael, and all the other media golems who demanded closure then complained about remote education, with your only guiding principals being MAKE ME FEEL SAFE: you caused this. You want accountability? Look in the mirror.  Publish your own mea culpas.

Closing the schools was an act only fixable by ending remote education as a choice in local schools. And forcing kids back to in-person wasn’t going to fly that first year.

There aren’t always do-overs. There are mistakes that can’t be walked back. You can’t ctrl-z out of original sin.

Paying Teachers To Do Nothing?

I argued constantly during the pandemic that remote elementary education was a waste of time, and all parents wanting to reopen schools should have just pulled their kids and threatened their district’s funding, but that doesn’t mean an elementary school teacher’s job was easy.  But I don’t know enough about the day to day work to comment on it.

I taught mostly high school math during the pandemic, for eighteen months: March to June 2020, summer school in 2020 and 2021, and the entire 20-21 school year.  I did a good job at it, too.  I can attest that for middle and high school, teaching is much harder in remote and required far more time.

Check for Understanding: In person, math teachers give kids a practice problem and walk around the room to determine who gets it, who needs help, what common misconceptions exist. We make sure the kids are all working, check for common misunderstandings to address, give the kids who finish in 30 seconds an additional challenge, and do this all in five-ten minutes.

To say that this task can’t be done in remote understates the difficulty added by remote. In-person, student response and teacher checking  are done simultaneously. In remote, these tasks are sequential. To determine kids understanding on Zoom, teachers had a few options, from unstructured to highly structured, all of which took far more time in an online class of anywhere from 25 to 36 kids.

Easiest method for ad-hoc questions: ask students to put the answer in private chat. For example, put a liner equation graph up and ask for the equation in slope intercept. The question had to be something that doesn’t require math notation, which Zoom chat can’t handle.  In general, getting 90% of students to answer takes on average 10 minutes AFTER the time needed to work the problem. Teachers need a list of names handy to check off each answer. Some kids won’t answer until nagged by name–which assumes, of course, the kids are actually online as opposed to logging in from work or bed or Disneyworld, which you can’t figure out until you’ve called them out by name several times. (I would always mark those kids absent then, despite their Zoom login. Revenge, and it did improve actual attendance.) Despite the problems, I used this method often. My student participation rate was generally over 80%, focus and obsess as I might over the remaining fifth.  So I could ask a question and get close to half of the kids answering quicky, chat them back a followup question while I harassed the rest into responding. It wasn’t perfect but it worked well enough and besides (as I reminded myself frequently) in the in-person version, there were always kids who didn’t work until I nagged them. And inevitably, there were kids who forgot to put it in private, meaning everyone could see their answer, meaning those who just wanted to avoid work could copy the response just to get me off their backs.

Next up for adhoc questions: create a poll, Classroom question (in Google) or a Google quiz. These made it far easier to track who had answered and who hadn’t and teachers didn’t have to go into Zoom logs to figure out who said what. This method also allowed for more than one question, so teachers could get more granularity on misunderstandings.  Still the same math notation limitation and the same nagging issues, delay in response. Moreover, it was really hard to make these genuinely ad hoc. Zoom poll takes a minute, but they’re hard to track outside of Zoom. Google Classroom questions take maybe two minutes, Google forms longer than that. From a practical standpoint, they can’t be really adhoc. So you have to plan ahead, which some teachers do automatically and others (raises hand) find a difficult task. Google forms were great for actual quizzes (see below) but they’re a bit too much work for a simple check for understanding. I never used Zoom polls, used Google forms for quizzes. I used Classroom questions occasionally.

Creating a poll, classroom question or google form quiz can’t be done easily on an ad hoc basis, especially if the question involved formulas that need special font, which most polls don’t allow. So teachers had to either plan and create their questions ahead of time (more hours of work) or create something simple in the moment–again, with response time for each taking ten minutes or so, for the same reason.

Classwork: Both of these methods give no clue as to what errors are being made and in fact, there’s no way online to check for understanding and get a real insight into student thinking. Checking for understanding by its nature has to be quick. Classwork, the bread and butter of math teachers is the other key way to see student thinking, what happens after the “release to work“, whether it be a book assignment, a worksheet, or an activity. For the first year of Zoom–from March to December 2020–I created Google Classroom assignments and students took pictures of their work to turn in.  Teachers using this method have to flip through multiple pages of student work online. This is brutal. I still have nightmares from the time spent reviewing classwork online until, thank the great math gods, a fellow teacher told me about Desmos activity builder and its integration with Google Classroom. As a former programmer, I was able to build my own custom lessons quickly, but for teachers without that skill, Desmos offers a lot of blessed options and googling finds a bunch of others. Desmos and Google Classroom combined were wonderful.  I could build my own activities, assign them to a class, and then see students work as they completed it, catching mistakes in action. If a student never logged in, I could see it. If a student logged in but did nothing, I could see it. I marked a lot of students absent on that basis,  which got them back into paying attention. Huge win.

But there’s that time factor again: either teachers could use their existing curriculum (worksheets or books) and spend hours reviewing work online (in my case, I don’t do homework normally, so this was a big chunk of added time) or they could rework all of their existing curriculum into Desmos assignments, which also took endless hours but at least had something of a payoff.

Assessment: Monitoring test integrity is relatively easy to do in person. (Relatively. And methods got much more sophisticated post-pandemic).  Rampant cheating was a huge issue during remote.  How to reduce cheating? Rewrite tests entirely.

For example, in a paper-based test you could ask a student to graph “y=2x+7” or “y=(x-3)(x+5)”. But Photomath–or, for that matter, Desmos–provides that answer in a heartbeat. Instead, I’d use a Desmos activity and ask students to graph a line with a slope of 2 and a y-intercept of 7, or a quadratic with zeros at 3 and -5. This wasn’t in any way a perfect substitute. Students wouldn’t have to know how to graph a slope of 2 or find a vertex. But at least I could ascertain a level of understanding. There were entire topics that were pointless to teach during the pandemic (exponents, factoring) because there was no way to see if the kids were doing it themselves or photomathing the work. Rewriting the tests still took hours.

Grading: Most non-teachers–hell, even teachers themselves–can’t really conceive of how hard it is to grade online. Automation takes care of the multiple choice scenarios, but Google forms allow short answers, and they don’t always exactly match. And never mind the exact matches, how about partial credit? Math teachers routinely give credit for setting up the problem correctly, deducting fewer points for minor math errors, and so on. I bought the least expensive Veikk tablet (love it, and still use it) but I could never find an easy way to mark up student work and save it for return without a lot of extra work. Leave aside that, it is still difficult to keep track of what you’re adding up. You can’t write directly on a google form or desmos, so you have to snip it and make your notes, which you then have to tally up and keep on a separate sheet….and so on. it’s a bitch.

These are essential tasks that went from 2 minutes per instance to an hour or more–each instance, with dozens of instances a week. For teachers (or me, at least), life outside of work was great. But work itself?  This article focuses on life during the early months of the shutdown, but I was able to institute more structure during summer school and by  fall 2021 my school had instituted a formal “bell schedule” with something approximating a normal school day online. It was a lot of work. Teachers coped with this in different ways. The more organized teachers who believe that coverage is the most important thing taught less time online and added far more to the students’ “asynch” hours, believing this would allow the motivated students  to learn more effectively. I did the opposite. But regardless of method, work was much longer and harder.

The only good thing about teaching during the pandemic is that I could do my bit to make life better for students after a government action I vehemently opposed from day one. Meanwhile, moving so much of school online added permanently not only to my pandemic school day, but to my day post-pandemic.

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I remember the day our school closed, asking the head custodian what he’d be doing during the shutdown. “Taking care of mom,” he said. She had cancer. Oh,  so he wouldn’t have to be on campus. He laughed. “Maybe a bit. Not much.”

Bus drivers were definitely furloughed. But in the main,  public education layoffs actually decreased during the pandemic.

Shutting down the schools in March 2020 left hundreds of thousands of people paid a full time salary to do almost nothing. Most non-teaching school lower level staff (attendance, custodial, teacher’s aides) had very little to do. We didn’t even take attendance in most schools from March to June 2020, so those clerks had nothing to do. Custodial staff had to clean if anyone came on campus, but otherwise were onsite doing nothing. Secretaries and clerks had half or less of their usual job. The more highly educated district staff, who are nice, supportive, but ultimately unnecessary staff anyway but ignore that for another time, had pandemic-related assignments, like finding online curriculum to purchase at great expense that we teachers generally ignored. I don’t blame any district or school staff for their long vacation. But they were on light duty at best.

Half of all school employees don’t teach. With the exception of school administrators, most of them had next to nothing to do during the school closures. So closing the schools meant that just under half of all public school employees had their jobs cut in half at least. Schools could have laid off millions of personnel to combine jobs. 

Just one of the many misconceptions deluding all those complaining about paying teachers to “do nothing” during remote education is the fact that teachers were one of only two employment categories whose jobs got much harder and longer during the pandemic. I’ve pointed out endlessly that school closures were primarily a function of parental preference, that teachers’ unions, no matter their pro-closure rhetoric, couldn’t do anything to affect those decisions. There’s mountains of evidence establishing this pattern. But even those who foolishly believe in the evil teachers closed the schools story should remember that if teachers closed the schools, they created more work for themselves, not less.

Meanwhile, does anyone remember the various folks howling about closed schools and lazy teachers demanding that district and support staff personnel get furloughed? Any complaints about the thousands of state government employees getting a long-term vacation at taxpayer expense? Demands that schools collapse jobs to eliminate expensive, unnecessary personnel?

Me neither.

The Push for Black Teachers, Minneapolis Style

So, the Minneapolis Public Schools hooha reminded me of the Clarence Mumford case, as the murmuration swooped in, retweeting regurgitated reprints of the same original story and then…..sharp veer. Nothing.

In a media world where every wrinkle of every navel is closely held up for inspection, no one ever wonders why,  or how,  a union and district could agree to layoff orders based on race.

Going by outraged but not terribly detailed contemporary media reports, I tried to envision one of the following cases:

Union rep: OK, one last dealbreaker: fire white teachers first.

District rep: Sounds good! Cheaper.

Or

District rep: None of this is happening unless we’re allowed to fire white teachers first.

Union rep: Sure! We’ll be the wokest.

Really? It just came up? Seems odd. So I dug into it a bit.

The first thing I noticed, in addition to the fact that this was a five month old story, was the lack of mainstream news coverage.  Apart from syndicating Steve Karnowski’s AP article, there’s little mention.

“Mainstream media ignoring unpleasant topics”–well, what else is new?

On the other hand, perhaps the mainstream media isn’t reporting it now because they considered it old news.

The layoff clause of the Minneapolis teachers’ contract was extensively reported by local news and education media both before and after the agreement back in March, specifically mentioning the racial firing factor. The NY Times mentioned it when announcing the settlement–not as clearly, perhaps:

….while some details of the deal have yet to be finalized, it involves strengthening job protections for hundreds of employees of color

but still enough information for someone to inquire what specific job protections they were talking about.

None of this was secret. It just boggles me that everyone is retweeting and broadcasting outrage now because a minor (forgive me, I speak as one much *more* minor) conservative state newssite reported what had been common knowledge for months. Education Next, a pro-school choice education reform publication, ran an article on it back in June. As usual, education-centered publications did their jobs and the  media, mainstream and conservative proved once again shockingly weak on actual reporting. They wait for a nudge to rise to their radar–and they don’t read education pubs.

Fortunately, the World Socialist Web is on it, baby. Union solidarity over all for these folks, seniority is the way of the land, color be damned. So they did some reporting. It’s an act worth considering, media folk.

This is how I learned that layoff protections began in the earlier contract cycle of 2019-21. That contract had specific  language designed in part to protect non-white teachers not by specifying their race, but by the schools they were most likely to work in:

So here’s the big reveal left unmentioned by every other news site:  the race-based protections weren’t new. After generations of LIFO, suddenly, four years ago, the district and union had agreed to protect teachers who were far more likely to be non-white.

The obvious conclusion, which took just a bit of googling, was that the law had changed. 

Sure enough: Turns out that in Minnesota, it has always been legal to lay off teachers by a factor other than seniority. However, district and union disagreed, the mandatory sequence was last in, first out. Then, in 2017, Minnesota passed a law repealing the mandatory LIFO layoff order. So before 2017, unions had no reason to negotiate, since they wanted the default. Not any more.

Almost immediately, Minneapolis district and union management agreed to protect non-white (mostly black) teachers.  I won’t bore you with all the links, but there are all sorts of district memorandums and power points and statistics on this. The 2019 contract was the first one to follow the law change, using wording clearly designed to avoid lawsuits but protect teachers who were far more likely to be nonwhite.

Alas. By creating a roundabout means of protecting non-white teachers, the district incurred the wrath of the unprotected. Say for the sake of simplicity that thirty black teachers are the least senior. The ten most junior work at the racially isolated schools; the other twenty have been teaching in the district for longer and work at non-qualifying schools. Layoffs skip the first ten and target ten of the more senior twenty. So layoff language designed to end seniority and save black teachers results in chopping off teachers who are a) more senior b) black. That is, apparently, what happened in the layoffs earlier this year).

Then consider that in reality some of the junior teachers whose jobs are saved are white, and feelings get very ugly. 

And so, the negotiators focused on wording the next contract to protect more black teachers. 

Back in August of last year–why yes, readers, a year ago–the district and union were working on a Memorandum of Agreement to protect teachers of color, finally signed in December 2021:

At this point there’s still no mention of protecting entire groups. Lawsuit avoidance is still a concern.

But this wording doesn’t resolve anything. Exempting one group of junior teachers simply puts the next-least senior group on the block, again with the double irony: black teachers with more seniority would be left unprotected. They were, understandably, very unhappy with this failure  and wanted explicit protection. So during the actual strike, the following maneuvers occurred:

Negotiations about protections for teachers of color stalled when MPS said that it legally could not use race to protect a class of employees from layoffs and excessing. ..[on] March 5, MFT removed its memorandum of agreement about teachers of color from contract negotiations.….. (emphasis mine)

On March 6, the district negotiating team resubmitted its memorandum of agreement proposal on protections for teachers of color. This resubmission was not countered by MFT…..

According to MPS School Board Chair Kim Ellison, the March 16 memorandum of agreement submission was part of the district’s suite of equity proposals and included a change in the language to use the term “underrepresented” instead of its previous language identifying specific categories of teachers, such as those participating in the district’s Grow Your Own program.

So: union added explicit protection by race. District said they’d get sued. Union dropped the language. Black teachers found out and announced their unhappiness in a public letter. District put the language back in, leaving the final contract language that has so incensed the right five months later:

The district readily admitted their concerns:

“Educators of Color Retention” …has now been changed to “Recruit and Retain Educators That Reflect Our Students.” When a union bargaining member asked why the title had been changed, claiming the new title was “whitewashed,” a district official admitted, “That was done for legal reasons. The EEOC doesn’t allow it [the MOA as it was originally written] to be based on race. So that’s really the reason; to still be inclusive but to do it with language in which we can legally defend.”

Clearly the district thought that “f)” would result in lawsuits or penalities. Nonetheless, they put the language back in anyway, hoping that using the term “underrepresented” will get them out of jail free.

Perhaps, cynically, they decided to let the courts throw the clause out and get the blame.

Or something else. Reporting is, er, thin.

Race-based layoffs weren’t the primary dispute this round, but rather increasing the pay of classroom assistants.  Which brings up the first questions I had on this topic: really? Union and district were both committed to firing white teachers first?

Moreover, apparently not one reporter wondered what those white teachers thought.  Black teachers’ fury at not getting explicit race-based protection is on full display in every story. But no white teachers are interviewed on this point.

But then that’s not a conversation that would go well.

“Kailee, you have three years with the district. Next layoff, brand new black and Hispanic and native American teachers will keep their jobs while you’ll lose yours. Tell us how that feels.”

{Kailee, not wanting to lose her job now for racist remarks, keeps her mouth shut.}

On the other other hand: union members are overwhelmingly white and they voted for the contract.

Why?

That’s where imagination fails me. The district position makes sense. Not to put too fine a point on it, junior teachers are cheaper. Older teachers cost more. Dumping expensive teachers for lower-paid teachers who also increase the districts non-white teacher ratio: win-win.   So their side is completely sensible… leaving the whole “it’s probably unconstitutional” part of it aside.

What I’m having trouble understanding is why white teachers voted  for something that seems obviously against their interests.

Wesley Yang hilariously argues that white teachers have been brainwashed. He’s not alone. The entire conservative media ecosystem is perfectly primed to believe that white teachers in Minnesota would enthusiastically vote to give up their jobs for black teachers in the name of wokeness, as suggested.  But that’s because the entire conservative media ecosystem believes,  as Yang does, that white teachers are morons.  

Reality is a bit hard to communicate in a world when the entire conservative ecosystem thinks that teachers are wildly radical progressives eager to flip the gender of every public school student in the country. Most of the right ignored Andy Smarick’s explanation that schools heeded parent wishes on pandemic education options, not to mention the Heritage Foundation’s teacher survey that found the average teacher was barely left of center. If Andy Smarick can go on Jonah Goldberg’s podcast to discuss his piece and they spent maybe three seconds on it then return to bitching about schools, nothing this little ol’ blogger can say is going to have more impact than AEI and Heritage Foundation.

Still, I try. And reality says this: Unions’ first customers, all public noise to the contrary, are the teachers. Teachers demand three things from unions: negotiate our pay, keep tenure, maintain the seniority system. After that, union leaders and the fringe can say all sorts of stupid shit because regardless of teachers’ political views, they (and by they I mean we) don’t care. Whatever, man. Most of us don’t even vote in the union elections. All the public bullshit that drives pundits crazy is white noise to most teachers.

Therefore, I don’t readily see why the majority white teachers would vote for this.

Speculation:

1. They didn’t spot the last minute addition of protecting all teachers by race. Given the long history of identifying protected classes, perhaps white teachers just assumed the protections were still Montessori, racially isolated, immersion et al schools and nothing more. When they realized the expansion….well. Speaking up would be politically dangerous.
2. There aren’t enough non-white Minneapolis teachers to make this worth bitching about. The raise is hefty.
3. Maybe the non-white teachers are primarily in schools no white teacher wants. They’d quit if transferred to fill a laid off position, and hey, the raise is hefty.

I have no idea. Perhaps some enterprising soul will ask around.

What I do know is this: the underlying drive here is not wokeness or progressiveness run amok. It’s part of the ongoing push for more black and Hispanic teachers to teach a population that research suggests do better when they have a teacher of their own race. Or, as Dan Goldhaber put it: 

assigning a Black student to a Black teacher is associated with higher learning gains than assigning the same student to a teacher with one standard deviation higher credential test scores or a teacher who is National Board certified. 

Black teachers for black kids get better outcomes than smart teachers do.

This contract language protecting teachers by race seems obviously unconstitutional. But it ain’t woke. And it ain’t entirely crazy.

Bush/Obama Ed Reform: Zenith

(This is part 2 of my brief (hahahah) history of the rise and fall of modern education reform. This part is longer because much more happened. Unlike the events in part 1, I experienced the Obama reforms as a teacher, having graduated from ed school the year of his inauguration. I began blogging the year he was re-elected.)

Bipartisan Achievements

Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008 while simultaneously blasting NCLB and praising charters and merit pay for teachers. In practice, he and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan kept giving reformers everything they wanted–although in fairness, reformers got increasingly nervous about their gifts as his presidency matured.

Ironically, given the general sympathy that the Obama administration had for education reform, a new version of the ESEA was impossible throughout most of the Obama presidency. This proves to be an extremely significant limitation.  Arne Duncan and Obama, rather than force states to live with the unpopular mandates, invited the states to submit waivers asking to be exempt from the penalties. This gave the Obama administration considerable power to force states to adopt policies the federal government wanted. Conservatives were unnerved by what most would considera a violation of Section 438 of the General Education Provisions Act banning any federal control over state educational choices.

Bribing the States, round I: Race to the Top, Waivers

First up was Race to the Top, enacted as part of the economic stimulus plan of 2009, in which over $3 billion was set aside for rewards to competitive bids. Compared to the moon shot by Arne Duncan, the competition demanded compliance with most key aspects of education reform. Of the 500 points awarded,  313 of them (63%) were for teacher effectiveness (138 points), adopting “common core” standards (70 points), supporting the growth of “high quality” charters (55 points) and intervention into low-performing schools (50 points).  Schools that didn’t promise to  fulfill ed reformers’ wildest dreams didn’t stand much of a chance. From the link above: “Between 2001 and 2008, states on average enacted about 10 percent of reform policies. Between 2009 and 2014, however, they had enacted 68 percent. And during this later period, adoption rates increased every single year.”

Around 2010, it became possible to observe two developments that were in fact completely forseeable to everyone back in 2001, when NCLB was signed.

First, NCLB allowed states to define proficiency and then penalized schools that didn’t meet that definition.  That might not have been a problem except for the second development:  no matter how easy the tests got, 100% proficiency never happened. And the gaps were the usual ones.

But now  2014 was squarely in sight and closer and schools well outside the usual urban dystopias were getting hammered into program improvement.

Since a new ESEA was still politically impossible, the Obama administration began offering “waivers” from the consequences of extended failure to meet NCLB,   in exchange for setting their own higher, more honest standards for student success:

• State must adopt college and career ready standards
• Schools must be held accountable
• Teacher and principal evaluation systems

Some education reformers (the conservatives) were concerned about the quid pro quo nature of the waiver requirements.   Other education reformers (the neoliberals) pishtoshed those concerns, saying (much as they said later about immigration) that Congressional gridlock made the waivers and demands logical and reasonable. A typical debate, in which  Andrew Rothernam, neoliberal reformer from the Clinton administration, rationalized the Obama waivers  “This dysfunction matters because when NCLB was passed in 2001, no one involved imagined the law would run for at least a decade without a congressional overhaul.” (translated, good god, no one took that nonsense about 100% proficiency, we expected to modify it before then!)

Obama announced the waivers in February, 2012, and by July of that year 26 states had waivers, with another 9 awaiting approval. A year later, all but seven states had waivers. Jerry Brown and the California team flatly refused to intervene in “failing schools” or evaluate teachers by test results and never got a waiver (although a few districts applied separately and got one).

While we refer to the testing consortiums (consortia?) as the Common Core tests, I was surprised to learn that the original competition for the grants was part of Race to the Top. Arne Duncan announced the winners, PARCC, which had 26 states signing on, and SBAC, which had 33 (some states joined both), in 2010.

The tests, almost more than the standards, excited education reformers. No more would individual states be able to dumb down their tests to reach NCLB standards. All the states would be held to the same standard.

But it wasn’t federal mandates, of course. No, no. This was all voluntary!

Bribing the States, round II: Common Core

The Common Core initiative was originally the brainchild of Janet Napolitano when she heading up the National Governor’s conference, documented in 2007’s Benchmarking for Success: Ensuring US Students Receive a World-Class Education (note: it’s kind of amazing how hard this document is to find. All the links to it reference the NGA doc, but that’s been deleted. I think this is the only existing online copy). She convened a group, and they came up with a set of five action items, three of which you can see reiterated above in the Obama waiver, because they were basically copied.

But it would never have gone anywhere had not Gene Wilhoit (head of school superintendant organization) and David Coleman, described in the link ahead as “emerging evangelical of standards” but actually little more than an ex-McKinsey guy with an assessment display (display. not design) startup  went to see Bill Gates, whose enthusiasm should have been a big neon light of warning, given his track record. Gates funded the development of standards. Coleman used the money to start “found” Student Achievement Partners and hire Jason Zimba, an ex-business partner who now worked for Coleman’s mothert(or, was a professorat Bennington College, where Coleman’s mom was president). Zimba, Phil Daro, and William McCallum wrote the math standards. Coleman and Susan Pimental wrote the ELA standards. The original Benchmarking report stated that the standards would be based on the American Diploma Project, but for reasons I don’t understand and might be interesting for someone else to explore, Coleman and crew rewrote a lot of it.

As the history shows, education reformer groups–those involved with accountability and choice–weren’t directly involved in the birth of Common Core, although it’s also clear from the verbiage in the Benchmarking report that education reform initiatives like teacher value-added measurement, charters, and school takeovers were very much in political parlance at that time, and very much bipartisan.

But education reformer groups loved the Common Core because they saw it as a way to bail them out of the two serious failures of NCLB described above. As Rick Hess observed in a five-year retrospective of Common Core, “The problem with that is if you had hard tests or hard standards you made your schools look bad. So there was a real, kind of perverse incentive baked into NCLB [to make the tests easier]“.  Hilariously, Michael Petrilli, who was in the Bush administration and was a key bureaucrat in the passage, has often said he disagreed that the 100% proficiency goal but “his boss” forced it on him. So now that NCLB was in a bind, the ed reformers were all for Common Core bailing them out.

The waiver process is often blamed for the rapid adoption, but in fact every state but Alaska, Texas, Nebraska, and Virginia had adopted Common Core standards by  2012, and all of those but Wyoming had done so long before Obama announced the waivers. Apart from the conservatives “in principle” objections, the original hullaballoo over heavy-handed federal interference was teachers’ outrage at a president–a Democrat, no less–using money to bribe states into evaluating teachers by their students’ test scores.

Regardless, states eagerly adopted the Common Core standards and in 2012, all seemed right in the world of education reform.

Governance

Technically, all of the above was the Obama Administration’s bribes to the states to change their governance.  These are just some specific cases or other items of interest.

Tennessee won the Race to the Top, getting $500 million to enact First to the Top. Initiated by Governor Phil Bredesen, a Democrat, carried through by Bill Haslam, Republican. Tennessee’s application promised two things of note, First, it would use its existing, longstanding teacher evaluation system (TVAAS) and use it as a formal evaluation tool, responsible for 35% of teacher evaluations. Then, in order to invervene in “failing” schools,  it set up a state-run district, the Achievement School District, creating a  as opposed to a state taking over a district. The lowest performing schools were simply placed in that district. The stated goal of the ASD was to take schools from the bottom 5% and “vault” them to the top 25%.  In 2011, Haslam appointed Kevin Huffman, ex-TFA teacher and executive, as well as Michelle Rhee’s ex-husband,  as Commissioner of Education.  The first ASD superintendent was Chris Barbic, former TFA teacher and founder of Yes Prep, another charter system in Houston.

Mark Zuckerberg went on Oprah in 2010 and, with great fanfare, donated $100 million to Newark, New Jersey schools.  Chris Christie appointed Cami Anderson, alumni of TFA management,  as superintendent of the district in May 2011. A year later, Anderson signed a contract with the Newark Teachers Union giving bonus pay for higher test scores or teaching math and science (although teachers could choose to be paid traditionally). The pot was sweetened with a lot of back pay which, to put it mildly, was not what Zuckerberg wanted the money to be spent on.

Michelle Rhee got a lot of attention, bragging of giving DC schools a “clean sweep”, dumping all the “bad” teachers and administrators who didn’t get test scores up. Eva Moskowitz was dumping students who didn’t get test scores up. Joel Klein left his NYC post in 2011; Bloomberg’s pick of Cathy Black, a woman with no teaching or administrative experience, was extremely unpopular. Bloomberg gave up on Black after four months and appointed Dennis Walcott, who was accepted at face value as an improvement. School turnaround consultant Paul Vallas ran the Louisiana Recovery District (mostly New Orleans Schools) for 4 years.

Education reform generally became more popular in Democratic circles, given Obama’s strong support.  Steven Brill’s article The Rubber Room called attention to NYC’s practice of housing teachers who’d been removed from the classroom but couldn’t actually be fired.  Waiting for Superman, a documentary promoting choice and blasing unions and tenure, opened to universal praise by media, politicians, and other thought leaders. In 2010, Obama openly supported the dismissalof a Rhode Island high school’s entire staff, saying, “our kids get only one chance at an education, and we need to get it right.”

All this criticism kept building. 2012 was a nadir year terms of establishment discourse about public school teachers, although their reputation among the public seemed largely unchanged. It became increasingly popular to attack teacher tenure, again by both Democrats and Republicans, and certainly in the generally left of center media. Many states had agreed to evaluate teachers by test scores and both major unions had signed onto the Common Core standards, although teachers themselves were very doubtful.  A preponderance of politicians and academics were more than willing to agree that teacher quality needed to improve, that tenure might be problematic, and that teachers should be judged at least in part on test scores.  The Chicago Teachers Union went on strike, pitting union president Karen Lewis against Rahm Emmanuel, and media sympathies were entirely with Rahm. Governor Scott Walker ended collective bargaining for public workers (except cops and firefighters!).

One major setback: DC’s 2010 election, in which black voters booted Adrian Fenty, the media-popular mayor, largely because they wanted to get rid of Michelle Rhee, who stepped down the day after the election. Her successor, Kaya Henderson, kept firing teachers, but she’s black, which might have made a difference. Rhee immediately announced a new organization, Students First, and let Richard Whitmire write an admiring biography.

Standards

In 2008, California made algebra I the “test of record” for eight graders, meaning that 8th graders would take an algebra end of course test or the schools would receive a penalty towards average yearly progress.

High school exit exams mostly held constant; this 2008 Edweek article actually says that fewer than half of the states required exams, but that may be because of lawsuits. California, for example, was sued constantly about the use of the CAHSEE in the early 2002.

Charter Growth, Choice, TFA

Just one state, Washington, authorized charters during the Obama administration. Absolute growth was still slow through  2011,  but then recovered from 2012 to 2017. As a percentage, though, the decline from 2001 to 2011 was steep, slowed slightly but still declined through 2017.  By 2012, charter advocates began pushing the suburban progressive charter, realizing that growth would continue to slow if they couldn’t disengage white folks from their beloved public schools. Suburban charters were (and are) popular with whites in racially diverse areas, particularly in the south; for example, Wake County charter schools were 62% white in 2012.

When the 2007-2008 meltdown hit, TFA recruitment soared ever higher as elite grads sought shelter from a horrible job market. Relay Graduate School began in 2011, basically providing a teaching credential for new hires of inner city charters.

In 2010, Douglas County (major Colorado suburb) began a highly contested investigation into a voucher program, one that would give public money for all private schools, including religious ones. The school board ultimately supported a move forward, despite a split community.

And that’s the end of the very nearly straightforward rise of education reform. It’s impossible to cover every major development, but I really tried to look at advances in every major area.

I’m going to call 2012 as the peak of the era, for reasons I’ll go through in the next post. It’s not that all progress stopped. It took four more years before education reformers even began to consider how badly they’d been beaten. But most of them would realize that they were now fighting significant opposition that they couldn’t easily dismiss.

Something I’ve mentioned before: it’s amazing that Republican media folk, as opposed to education reformers and even politicians, still talk like it’s 2008-2012. There’s really no understanding in the pundit world how badly they’ve been beaten.

Next Up: Bush/Obama Ed Reform: Core Meltdown Came

A Few Words on Janus

I’ve always thought the free speech aspect of the Janus case was purely nonsense. Eugene Volokh argued that Abood was wrongly decided in granting that free speech objection in the first place, observing that “compelled subsidy of others’ speech happens all the time”.   How many state-  or CDC-funded ads do we have to sit through, watching people smoke through their breathing tubes?  Or the various “join the military” ads?

I’m not a big fan of unions,although teachers unions come in for a lot of undeserved criticism. But my dislike of unions is professional–totally unrelated to the bizarro conservative hate-on which, I guess, has to do with the unions shoveling millions of easily collected dollars straight into Democrat coffers.

Still, I’m amazed, as always, at the utter cluelessness of the post-Janus gloating–which, typically, focuses almost exclusively on teacher employment, as if there’s no other public employee. I don’t think anyone’s focused on Janus’s impact on cops, for example–unsurprising, really, since the GOP likes cops and doesn’t want to fuss them.

But I’ll go with the flow and talk teachers, since that’s what I know.

First, left or right,  anyone who thinks education reform’s failure has anything to do with unions is kidding themselves. As I’ve written many times, education reform got everything it wanted for sixteen years–and as a result support for charters has plummeted,  support for unions and tenure has increased, and the ESSA deliberately and specifically targeted all the reform “advances” and ripped them into shreds.

So whatever changes Janus brings, I’d bet against Bill Bennett and Fordham Foundation.

We are in the middle of a teacher shortage, so good luck with cutting salaries, raising credential cut scores, or ending tenure. And has often been noted, the recent teacher walkouts have been in weak union states: Oklahoma, West Virginia, Kentucky. Colorado’s governor refused to sign a law that would fire striking teachers.

You know how conservatives and others say look, we don’t hate teachers, we just hate unions. Well, specific union objectives, unlike their political spending, are pretty much in line with what teachers want. In a scarce labor market, killing unions won’t make it any easier to push teachers around.

I’m likewise unconvinced that the billions of dollars the unions send to the Dems has anything to do with Democrat political success. Lordy, did you all learn nothing from Trump? Dave Brat? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

So sure, Janus will lead to less money for unions. But dream on if you think Dems are crippled or the public will suddenly sign on for teacher merit pay.

Moreover, the idea that “millions of public employees” are being forced–yea, forced!–into paying to receive union-negotiated salaries just strikes me as bogus. I don’t like my dollars going to progressive causes, and as an immigration restrictionist, I get really annoyed at union shills wailing about family separations or the travel ban. But when Republican-leaning public employees growl about unions, they are, like me, unhappy about the waste of dollars sent to left-leaning organizations. How many public workers are actively opposed to the fundamentals of public employment? I’m skeptical. If  millions of public employees were outraged by job protections and pensions, conservatives wouldn’t have had to wait so long for the odd ball public employee to hang their case on. It took them years to find Friedrichs and then Janus out on the fringes to make the case.

But why should unions be required to negotiate contracts and protect employees who don’t pay for their services? The Supreme Court waved off the “free rider” problem, but who’s to say there will be paying riders? What’s stopping all teachers from saving hundreds of dollars a year, if the unions will work the contracts no matter what?

Considering that the state laws requiring unions to represent non-members have just been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, the unions have a logical next step.

Unions should refuse to work for free. They won’t  provide any service to non-members.

Some services can be easily split between members and non-members. Job protections and other benefits, for example, are easily managed. Non-members who oppose job protections can just live with a greater risk of termination, while members can still ask for union representation.

But contract and salary negotiations apply to all employees, members or not. So unions should refuse to engage in these activities for any salary schedule that has less than 100% membership. Neither members nor non-members will get new salary schedules until someone else steps up to that task–and that someone else will want to be paid.

I can envision many ways out of the chaos that ensues, but certain truths seem obvious. Salary negotiation for millions of teachers, firefighters, police officers, DMV workers, prison guards and the rest is a labor (heh) intensive task. Right now, public employees pay for that task through their union representation. If unions refuse to do this, then how will public employees get raises? Fond fantasies aside, at some point the government is going to have to figure out how to replace that service.

While conservatives dream of a world in which government employees negotiate their salaries individually, absorbing the cost at a unit level, their dreams probably don’t include the onslaught of lawsuits that would follow in a world where local government officials decided salaries on merit. That’s why most charter and private schools use salary schedules, despite their ostensible freedom from these one-size-fits-all charts.

If unions just flatly ended all contract negotiations, the pressure for a Janus-fix would be immediate, particularly for teachers and cops. But wait! unions say–at least, this is what I think they should say. We’re not here to be obstructionist.  We’ll offer membership “tiers”.

Tier 1: Contract and salary negotiations only. Price: a couple hundred at most.
Tier 2: Tier 1 plus performance issues representation. Price: five hundred at most.
Tier 3: Tier 2 plus the cool bennies, political spending, other perks. Price: one thousand at most.

All employees on a given salary schedule must be at least a Tier 1 union member. No 100% membership, no contract and salary negotiations.

Some districts might not be able to get 100% membership. They could then contract to bring the union in for salary negotiations. Still other district employees might decide to do without unions entirely. Maybe they’ll figure out another means of negotiating salaries. Or maybe they’ll realize that union salaries are higher than non-union salaries for a reason.

Unions should not put the cost of their contract negotiations solely on their members. They should demand compensation for the services they perform that benefit all employees. If the employees don’t pay, then no union negotiations.

At the same time, unions could stop charging so much money, accept that they can’t use all teachers’ dues as a piggy bank for their political spending, and be more focused on offering services that all members can benefit from.

Those states with laws requiring unions to represent non-members are welcome to take them to court. However, I like to think that the same conservative jurists who hate unions also think it reasonable that unions get paid if they provide a service.

I’d be shocked, although pleased, if unions took this approach–with adjustments, of course, because I have no idea how much unions costs in other parts of the country, much less all of their many activities.  If they don’t, though, I’m ending my membership entirely. I’ve always refused to do the paperwork for agency fees–too much work for too little money. But I’ve paid nine years of union dues that went to political goals I not only don’t share but actively opposed. That’s enough to cover my next six years to retirement.

 

 

What Teachers are Worth

I enjoy reading both Jason Richwine, who I’ve defended before, and Andrew Biggs, who I follow on Twitter. But they don’t strike me as persuasive when discussing teacher salaries, which they do often, most recently No, Teachers Aren’t Underpaid , and also the first time they came to my attention, having written Public School Teachers Aren’t Underpaid (do you sense a trend?).

I made an extensive comment one time on Richwine’s blog that I’m still quite fond of, so I’ll try not to repeat myself. Before I begin, let me point out for the umpteenth time that I like my salary just fine.

I differ with Richwine/Biggs as follows:

• They keep going on about teacher GPAs and SAT scores as indicators without mentioning credential tests. They’ve been doing this for six (nay, seven!) years. Credential tests are kind of a thing of mine, as you may have noticed, so I’ll just refer you to my previous work. But it’s simply untrue that teacher standards are low, particularly in high school. Grades and SAT scores are irrelevant. Passing scores aren’t amenable to affirmative action.
• They sugggest (sigh) differential pay for math teachers, special ed teachers, and “language teachers”. (Surely there’s no shortage of Spanish speakers nationwide?) Left unmentioned:  the thus far anemic evidence for other pay reforms, which are significant only occasionally, and only statistically.
• They point out–actually, this is a Richwine thing–that teachers who leave the field usually end up with lower pay. But they never seem to mull what that means.
• They point out that teachers get lucrative pensions and benefits. That’s the Biggs thing. They accuse the public and teachers of failing to understand the severity of the pension crisis. Naturally, if the public understood how bad things were, the public would instantly put itself on an austerity program, just as it’s done with the federal deficit. Oh. Wait.

At least they didn’t bring up the old chestnut, merit pay.

Like I said, I’m generally fans of both scholars. But the past two years have seen a complete earthquake in the education reform movement, so why is everyone still pushing the same old ideas that were roundly rejected?

Wages are not determined by years of schooling but by the supply and demand for skills. These skills vary by field of study.

The first, sure. The second? If Christina Comerford left the chef’s life to be a secretary, a reasonable job for a woman with a few years of college and no degree, she’d take a big paycut. So is the  Executive Chef overpaid at a hundred grand a year?

But Ed, she’s a chef! An artist!

Sure. An artist who acquired skills outside any academic field of study.

Wages are not purely determined by field of study. Librarians require much more education than teachers for far less pay. College teaching adjuncts work like dogs for peanuts after graduating from a selective PhD program. And raise your hand if you think archaeologists would get higher pay if they had a union and a pay scale.

To quote myself twice:

Teaching, like math, isn’t aspirin. It’s not medicine. It’s not a cure. It is an art enhanced by skills appropriate to the situation and medium, that will achieve all outcomes including success and failure based on complex interactions between the teachers and their audience.

Segue to

And like any art, teaching is not a profession that yields to market justice. Van Gogh died penniless. Bruces Dern and Davison are better actors than Chrisses Hemsworth and Evans, although their paychecks would never know it. …Unlike art and acting, teaching is a government job. So while actors will get paid lots of money to pretend to be teachers, the job itself will never lead to the upside achieved by the private sector, despite the many stories about famous Korean tutors. On the other hand, practicing our craft won’t usually lead to poverty, except perhaps in North Carolina.

Don’t think of this as a plea for respect. I’m untroubled by their contempt. I just thought I’d explain why their arguments keep failing.

Besides, they mention wages are determined by supply and demand without mentioning that teachers supply’s kind of a problem at the moment, as most school districts are neverendingly short of teachers.

Despite what reformers constantly bewail as teaching’s low standards and excessive pay, all sorts of college graduates who, on paper, have “fields of study” that would allow them to teach, don’t teach. They’d rather work as, well, bus drivers. Or horribly paid college adjuncts. From 2009-2013, 45% of college graduates worked in non-college jobs, at the same time ed school enrollment plummeted.  Notice that those who pishtosh the shortage aren’t the folks trying to fill the jobs.

No blaming unions, either. West Virginia’s unions are basically social clubs. The teachers aren’t even allowed to strike.  (With teacher’s unions suing Trump over DACA and wasting my fees in various pointless efforts, I’ll cry less about Janus.) Kentucky’s Matt Bevin got whomped and was forced to apologize for insulting teachers in yet another state with weak unions. Is it likely that Colorado’s school districts will fire striking teachers when  ed schools face declining enrollment and thousands of jobs  go unfilled each year?

I’m not gloating. I don’t know where this ends. I understand pensions are a problem. But federal policy and court decisions, to say nothing of political realities, have put tremendous pressure on teacher supply. Perhaps Biggs and Richwine should consider attacking teacher pay from the demand side for a while. Richwine, at least, should find that appealing.

Under 1000!

The Shibboleths of Tenure Haters

Checker Finn gives the “ending teacher tenure” argument the old college try:

Tenure arrived in K–12 education as a trickle-down from higher ed. Will the demise of tenure follow a similar sequence? Let us earnestly pray for it—for tenure’s negatives today outweigh its positives—but let us not count on it.

Yeah, let’s not.

I wish all these tenure-haters would at least acknowledge that teachers can be easily dismissed in some circumstances. Teachers are fired for crossing clear, bright lines is done every day. Having sex with students? Gone.  Proven violence against students? Buh-bye.

Even fuzzy lines lead to firing if the circumstances allow it. Have a past or a present that’s simply….distracting? Easy.  Have an unpopular opinion? Game over. 

Firing teachers simply because the boss just doesn’t think they’re very good? Book some time, start a file, document madly, hit every deadline, give them a lousy schedule and hope they get the hint and leave.

We teachers don’t really have free speech or a right to privacy in any meaningful way, if the students know about it. But we also don’t have any agreement on what makes a bad teacher, which turns out to be our secret weapon. It’s much easier to fire an exemplary teacher who strips (or, gulp, blogs) in private than it is to fire a mediocre one whose students are bored. A new principal who really wants to ‘clean house’ and bring in a bunch of bright shiny new cheap teachers to do her bidding is doomed to disappointment.

You’d think by now that any article pushing to “fire bad teachers” would start by making that distinction, but here I’m the one likely to be disappointed.

Checker’s a bright guy, capable of thoughtful discussion. But here he brings up a goofy red herring, arguing public school teachers don’t deserve the same protections that university professors do.

I’m not convinced by the analogy. K-12 tenure is “trickle down” from university tenure? Eh, maybe. While many journalists give Massachusetts credit for instituting teacher tenure in 1886,  the text of the law doesn’t suggest any such thing. More accurately, I think, New Jersey first passed teacher protection laws in 1910. By 1930, tenure had come to most states, and by the 1950s, some 80% of teachers had tenure.  The push for women’s suffrage, the ridiculous controls schools boards put on teachers’ private lives, nepotism, and a desire for good governance were all involved in granting K-12 tenure (Dana Goldstein agrees, a tad repetitively.)

Ultimately,  university tenure became much more about lifelong employment and academic freedom–similar to judicial appointments. Teacher tenure, on the other hand, began as and remains an offering of job security, more akin to my favorite parallel for the teaching profession: police. So the four or five paragraphs Checker devotes to arguing that K-12 teachers don’t really need academic freedom is pointless.

I agree, we don’t need academic freedom. Which is good, because we don’t have it and have never had it. That’s why I’m anonymous.

Checker asks:

How valuable is job security to the employee….Would you rather earn $50,000 a year in a job that you know will continue indefinitely and does not depend on performance, or $75,000 in a job that is assured only for a several-year term and where renewal of the position hinges on your performance in it?

But Checker’s own organization surveys teachers on this very issue every year. Did he forget? Why not cite his own data? Probably because it shoots his case down cold. Teachers are quite consistent: less than 1 in 5 wants merit pay.   3 in 5 teachers in EdNext’s survey think tenure’s a good idea.

Checker again:

It’s no secret that the HR practices of private and charter schools—neither of which typically practices tenure—work far better than those of district schools from the standpoint of both school leaders and their students.

This, too, is a curious argument to make. First,  given the fact that neither private nor charter schools have managed to post extraordinary gains over publics, Checker’s claim that tenure is better for students is a bit shaky. At best, all the selection bias and skimming has gotten Checker’s preferred options are a few fractions of a standard deviation, if that.

As for flexibility working better for school leaders–well, immediately before Checker’s article is this piece by Kirsten Schmitz: Why do Private School Teachers Have Such High Turnover Rates? Bad timing, that. Charter turnover is so high we have a term for it.

So Checker’s got some chutzpah in asserting that privates and charters get a big win out of flexibility.

(Notice whose standpoint isn’t mentioned, of course, when discussing hiring flexibility. Notice, too, that Checker argued for decreasing job security as a tradeoff for improving teacher pay but neglects to mention that private schools pay far less than public schools.)

A while back, Paul Bruno argued that teacher tenure is a perk, since the reality is that our chances of being fired are quite low. Bruno’s logic here has never, to my knowledge, been engaged and it’s inescapable:

One of the central tensions for reformers when it comes to improving teacher quality is that on the one hand they believe teachers are fighting desperately for excessive job security but also, on the other hand, that you can substantially reduce that job security without making teaching significantly less attractive.

In theory this is not impossible. Making it work, however, requires admitting that job security is a benefit for teachers and that taking it away will – all else equal – make being a teacher less appealing.

Bruno believes (or believed, he hasn’t been writing for a while) that teacher valuation of tenure is overrated, since we’re not really at risk of being fired, anyway.  I agree we’re not at risk of being fired, and tenure vs untenured doesn’t seem related. Compare terminations per district (per teachers per district) in tenured or non-tenured states. My rough take is that terminations has as much to do with size of the district as it does tenure policy (the smaller the average district size, the more firings, particularly in rural areas or charter districts).

But  freedom from random firing because a new boss has a new agenda is of considerable value–Paul cites 10% of salary, I’d guess more. Moreover, bosses get extremely tempted to cut payroll by canning older employees. Freedom from that fear is worth a few ducats, too.

Meanwhile, as Checker advocates for easier teacher dismissals, Idaho and South Dakotas legislatures’ attempt to end tenure was  rejected by voters.  In California, Minnesota, and North Carolina , the courts did the rejecting. Kansas, which did successfully end tenure, is now working to enact legislation to bring it back. Wisconsin’s rollback of tenure and union protections may have led to the state’s teacher shortage, but it’s definitely increased district hopping as teachers negotiate better salaries–not, perhaps, the ideal outcome for anyone but those teachers. Yet Checker acts as if schools are groaning under the weight of unwelcome pension-pathers.

Supply’s the problem, Checker. Firing teachers, ending tenure, pay for performance–those are the choices available in a teacher glut. No one has really pinned down the nature of the current teacher shortage–I wasn’t terribly impressed with this recent study, although I quite like Goldhaber usually–but  state behavior of late is pretty consistently taking actions to increase supply. New York’s much derided decision to end the literacy credential test, Illinois similar decision to reduce the testing requirements for  teacher credentials, large California districts aggressively recruiting senior teachers from smaller districts with moving bonuses and removing the work years cap for salary calculation(a big disincentive for switching districts)–that’s just a small sample. Most states are making decisions that suggest they’re worried about getting and keeping teachers.

Checker knows better. But his audience–and his funders–don’t. So he keeps spinning the same old line.

Random but not unrelated: My administrator just emailed me my review, with an  “outstanding” rating,  I am convinced administrators meet up and decide which handful of teachers are going to get singled out for top marks while the rest (usually including me) get lumped into “satisfactory”.  Administrators, like bosses everywhere, are restricted on how many top marks they can give out. Most teachers I know realize the box checked isn’t as important as the review text–is it anemic, or strong? Complimentary or critical? The box, eh.  But if you think I shrugged off this rating, ask yourself why I mentioned it.

End of Education Reform?

Four years ago, I first described the parallels between cops and teachers. A year after the election, I wrote about unions and asked, again, why the GOP was so intent on attacking teacher protections when cops and other government workers get the same advantages. I mean, even the bitching about gender imbalance is ridiculous, since law ennforcement is far more male than teaching is female.

Then came Ferguson and the start of a bizarre microtrend. Conservatives began this absurd habit of blaming teachers and crappy schools for black kids getting shot by white police officers and ensuing riots. “Choice would end this chaos!” they’d thunder. I’m paraphrasing, but as the sources  show, I’m not exaggerating.

So I’ve been writing about the parallels* between these two jobs since the early days of this blog. But I also—rather presciently, I must say—observed that “acceptable targets change over time” and that maybe we teachers should hunker down and wait for cops to take their turn in the hot seat again.

Lately, I’ve been wondering if the pendulum has swung back, if teachers are getting a breather while the cops take the bulk of the scrutiny.

Just four years ago when I wrote my first essay, cops were politically beyond reproach by either party. Since Ferguson, our police forces are increasingly under rhetorical attack, and the Democrats are “balancing” their comments less often. Those on the right are starting to make noises about police unions. Moreover, while the  attempts to prosecute the police officers for high profile shootings have failed, the pressure to bring these efforts has increased.The brutal murders in Dallas, Baton Rouge of course add to this horrible climate.

Meanwhile, the new K-12 education law replacing the reform-designed No Child Left Behind, has utterly dismayed reformers on both right and left by stripping away a lot of federal control and leaving education back to the states. Conservatives, who gave birth to the reform movement, are now unhappy because social-justice warriors have taken over education reform.

Let’s take a look at the three legs of education reform:

Accountability:
Testing? Extremely unpopular, particularly with suburban whites–and if suburban whites aren’t testing, then there’s no benchmark to beat teachers up for when the black and Hispanic students don’t meet it. Kidding. Kind of.

Teacher value add measurements? Reformers are forced to argue that the American Statisticians Association supported VAM because it says that “teachers account for about 1 percent to 14 percent of the variability in test scores”. As I wrote earlier, I don’t think VAM will last much longer. Teachers are being judged by test scores in some states, but the energy is on rolling back those laws, not adding more states to the list.

Student achievement gap? Jerry Brown actually said hey, someone’s got to be a waiter. Stop waiting for me to close the achievement gap. Ain’t going to happen. The man went unscathed after this heresy. I’m still shocked. But the thing is, once people start rejecting standardized tests, demanding other solutions to “the gap” is sure to follow.

Or, as this paper asked: Can High Standards and Accountability Exist? Their answer: Not easily. My answer: No.

Curriculum:

I’m not rehashing the Common Core wars. I will remind you, however, that the governors and education reformers never really cared about the curriculum unless it would drive accountability. As of today, just 20 states are using the Common Core tests. The rest have opted for less stringent metrics.

Choice

Choice lives! Well, kind of. Barack to Hillary is a huge step back for reformers. Barack, Arne, and John King were all “neo-Democrats” on education, which means teachers didn’t like them much. Hillary is very popular with teacher’s unions, even if the teachers themselves wanted Bernie. But neither Bernie nor Hillary are big on choice.

The Donald? The most attention an education policy got at the RNC convention was Donald Trump Jr’s line comparing teacher tenure to Soviet-era stores and then only because his speechwriter had used it in an earlier column. Kind of like Carol Burnett: “Don’t pollute, folks!” Puppy chow for conservatives. It’s not a random happenstance that the presidential candidate most dedicated to traditional education reform barely finishied in the top five and is   back pitching the same old ideas that the GOP voters didn’t even bother to consider before rejecting.

Choice will stay around, but I don’t see it having a strong supporter in the White House.

The philanthropy may be shifting, too. Bill Gates admits he’s spent millions on schools to little effect. Mark Zuckerberg wants to convince us that his $100 million in Newark wasn’t wasted, but most of the world thinks he got schooled. So the “billionaire philanthropists” are backing off of education.

But Michael Jordan has just donated $2 million to non-profits in what is clearly a thoughtful and hopeful effort to support community policing.  Perhaps his act is a one-off–or perhaps we’ll see more wealthy African Americans funding ideas and programs that benefit both urban youth and the police serving their communities. I wish them more success than the billionaires had with schools.

Education reform, the era that began with Nation at Risk and traveled through the explosion of choice, the testing era of No Child Left Behind, the imposition of Common Core–well, it may be over. We’ll still have choice in urban areas where many desperate parents are willing to submit to absurd behavior standards in order to get some semblance of peer selection. Voucher programs will have periodic disruptions. I suspect, though, that ongoing regional teacher shortages  will limit charter expansion (same amount of kids, more teachers). I wonder if the public will ever notice that private schools get created simply to grab the voucher money, and whether they will find it unseemly. Or maybe vouchers will continue to exist as a way for parents who can afford tuition to get a discount. Ed tech will continue to disappoint. But I see more of a whimpering out over years, not a sudden bang, if I’m not nuts about this.

And if I’m nuts, well, at least one of the granddaddies of education reform, Checker Finn, agrees with me.

I’m not gloating, not about the potential end of reform and certainly not about the increased scrutiny and pressure that’s being placed on our police forces. I just sense a shift. We’ll see.

*****************************************************

*I don’t overstate the parallels.The police are tasked with public safety with all the demands that entails.  We teachers are charged with education and student safety while they’re in our purview. Those are non-trivial differences; the police are compensated with higher pay, overtime, easier access to disability, and better pensions. I’m not complaining.

 

**I’m in a new phase, apparently, where my new essay ideas come from my tweet storms.

Older Teachers

So I’m the opposite of “blocked”, lately. Lots of ideas and a laptop that’s annoying me. I had two, gave one away and the one I kept hangs so often (memory problems) that I get distracted waiting and watching Broadchurch (not too happy with who the murderer is obviously going to end up being on that one) or not watching Breaking Bad (me and four other people, apparently). Then I fall asleep because hey, it’s the first month of school and that’s how it rolls. So now I have four different ideas, plus two or three straightforward teaching writeups to do, and that’s not good because then I feel overwhelmed and start watching TV shows I’ve already seen 50 times (hello to the mother ship, L&O). I don’t know how actual bloggers do this. Fortunately, I’m just an essayist.

Then a friend who relocated for her job mentions that her husband, a 42 year old teacher, hasn’t yet found a job. I remember telling her when she first got the job to assume that he wouldn’t get hired (she makes enough for that not to be a problem), and she said that I wasn’t the only one to warn her. He has a lot of experience and two master’s, but in most inter-district (much less state) transfers, teachers lose next to all their seniority, so it’s not just about money. It’s a lot about money, but not all.

So I thought I’d talk about older teachers. This is purely an opinion piece; I’m not even sure how much of it I’ll think in a year.

If you know any successful 40-something idealists who dream of “giving back to the community” by becoming teachers, ask if they have jobs lined up. If they don’t, ask them if they are spending a lot of money on their teaching credentials. If they are, tell them to go to a state school. It’s well documented that ed school selectivity is irrelevant in hiring decisions, and they’re going to have enough trouble finding jobs without worrying about loan forgiveness. I can’t really say I’m sorry I went to an elite ed school, but I never fail to consider it an example of luxury spending, as opposed to an educational investment.

Research on this subject is thin, but I did find one study on CPS principal hire/fire decisions on new teachers:

and

(Note: I suspect the bias against male teachers is at the elementary school level. At the high school level, I see a huge preference for male teachers that I’ve mentioned time and again.)

Anything else I say would be anecdotal. Check any teacher training cohort and see who’s last to sign with a school—assuming they have any candidates over 40, they’ll be the last hired, if they are so lucky. Read any story about “firing ineffective teachers” with deep skepticism. And giving administrators full hire/fire over all teachers would lead to a lot of forty-plus teachers losing their jobs. I saw three teachers, two of them in math, targeted and forced into retirement because the principal wanted “new blood” (the principal said as much, often, to anyone who would listen). All teachers have stories like that. All teachers know that the reason job applications ask about education credits is to weed out older applicants. And some teachers think it’s a great idea.

Lately, there’s been a push to reform pensions, push more money to teachers up front. After all, the thinking goes, it will be fairer to teachers who leave the profession:

First, districts should jettison their current approach to retirement benefits, in which teachers accrue relatively meager benefits through much of their careers, and then abruptly become eligible for much more as they near retirement age. In its place, districts should adopt retirement systems where benefits accrue smoothly, year after year, without sudden, arbitrary jumps late in a teacher’s working life. This would allow talented people to teach for part of their career, or teach in more than one district, without harming their retirement security. It would also end an unfair practice that places the majority of teachers on an insecure retirement savings path in order to support more generous pensions for the minority who work a full career in one system.

So we’ll make it easier for teachers to quit and get a little bit of money, and not have to pay as much in pensions. Saves money, right? Fine. Stop talking about fairness to new teachers, then, and focus on cost-savings.

Education reformers are profoundly clueless about what really drives teacher benefits and, I think, genuinely clueless about what really drives administrators. Paul Bruno has an interesting idea that teacher tenure is a perk. Bruno cites Mathew DiCarlo, who reviews the same study I linked in above from a different perspective (although he agrees that the discrimination against men and older teachers is troubling):

…there is little support for the idea that principals are just dying to fire at will – or that, once dismissed, teachers can easily be replaced by “better” alternatives – despite sometimes being taken for granted in our education debates. Although they are far from conclusive, and pertain only to probationary teachers, the descriptive results discussed above tentatively suggest that the supply of appropriate replacements may not always be quite as robust as is often assumed – and/or that there may be some other reasons for low dismissal rates that are not entirely a function of the difficulty of doing so.

What I take away from all this is complicated, but I think relevant. First, coupling the study with my own anecdata and that of many years in the workforce: principals, like all management, exercise their biases. Given the peculiar nature of teaching and its employment structure, I can build a good case that principals be prevented from doing this more than managers in the private sector. Managers pay a price in productivity if they fire good people purely because of their biases. Principals don’t, in the main. Productivity in schools is a complicated issue.

At the same time, most principals don’t fire teachers often because it’s incredibly hard to find new ones. Better the teacher who shows up on time and gets the job done than too many unknown quantities in any given year.

So a principal who is allowed to exercise biases could always defer to his or her particular preferences on a one-off basis, firing probationary or even tenured teachers for age, gender, race, or teaching philosophy, while in the main keeping teachers when in doubt because of the pain of hiring new teachers. Even more unnerving, that principal could keep genuinely weak teachers while firing/dumping good teachers that just happen to activate a bias. For example, keeping an ineffective new young teacher completely intimidated by her students, while dumping or threatening to dump a new older teacher who does a good job. (Not anything I’d have any experience with, nope.)

But wait, say reformers. Principals are constrained by productivity just as private sector management is! Yeah, this is me laughing at them: ha, ha. Of course, private sector management can exercise bias around the edges, and do. But in the case of older teachers, there’s that pesky money problem, too. Older workers in the private sector can adjust their salary if need be, if their value to the company isn’t as great as it once was. Teachers can’t. So take an existing bias against older teachers and toss in the added expense they usually represent, and the whole situation gets worse.

Ah, says the eduformers. That’s why we should revamp teaching entirely! Change the salary structure, don’t reward older teachers as much, and there’ll be less of a bias against them. Let teachers change districts! Let them move to different states! Let districts shift teachers around where they are most needed! (Hey, one of these things is not like the others.)

To which I say, again, eduformers, you aren’t reading the tea leaves. Finding teachers is the holy grail, not firing them. Most people don’t really have a clue about the enormous scale required to maintain millions of people in a job that has quite a few constraints on it—from regimented potty breaks to fingerprint checks to college degrees and competency tests.

So suppose we create the freedom to hire and fire at will, and we give teachers the same ability.

Let’s imagine some possibilities: A teacher can contract with three different districts to teach a popular AP US History course. Or maybe he’s just really good teaching math to low ability kids, and works three classes at two schools. Still other 50 year old teachers kick back and decide they have enough money. They want to teach three classes and then consult as a master coach in another district. Still others teach a couple classes and then go work in ed schools.

Not just 50-somethings, either. A lot of 5-year veterans decide they want to take off and raise their kids for a while, but are happy to put in a few classes here or there.

Meanwhile, very few teachers with any seniority or any talent are ever found at low income schools. No reason. Nothing to keep them there. In fact, any teachers with any talent have realized they have an easier life contracting out a couple classes a year part-time to a suburban district than teaching full-time in a low income district. Once districts are allowed to actually compete on salary, paying by negotiation instead of salary schedules, rich districts will compete heavily for desirable new teachers. Schools with undesirable kids, not matter how much money they have, will be forced to rely on teachers who view the work as a calling, not being able to count on seniority-bound teachers who probably would have switched elsewhere if they weren’t financially precluded from doing so.

In other words, if teachers are allowed to compete on skill and salary, the results might not exactly be what eduformers imagine. They appear to envision a world in which teachers are still committed to a district, with just a few more options on each side. I very much doubt that’s what will happen.

I do know that if districts and administrators were asked to consider a world in which everyone had more freedoms, they would almost certainly reject it out of hand. Charter schools operate on a very small level. That's part of the problem.

All of this goes back to older teachers. They’re a straw that almost everyone—principals, districts, reformers, well-meaning liberals who think they understand education, even a lot of genuine progressives—would like to remove, or redirect to some other area. But I'm not sure that one straw leaves without a bunch of others coming along. And very few people seem to understand what that could mean.

This is my fifth year of teaching, a job I love with a passion that surprises me. Yet I'm relieved that I qualify for both a pension and a lot of loan forgiveness at the end of this year because it's entirely possible I won't ever get tenure. I love my current school; it's the only one of my three that I say that about. I think they like me, but I'm expensive. I'm also old, and this district can keep teachers as temporary or probationary for a very, very long time (some teachers here have been temporary for seven years; in elementary school it's worse). Since I'm in math, it should move more quickly for me. But I'd be a liar and a fool if I didn't fear the possibility that right around the time I should be qualifying for tenure, the administration team will find some fault with my teaching, after x years of thinking I'm just fine, and blammo, I'm gone. I would never voluntarily leave this school, even if I didn't love it, because finding another job has routinely been a crapshoot that goes until less than a month before school starts. My usual line is "I've gotten this far because I look young for my age, but around the time I'm fifty-five I'm going to look forty-five and then it's game over."

And what, specifically, led to this maundering post, Ed? It's eval time, baby. And the principal who reviewed me last year took a new job. Keep your fingers crossed.

What Can We Blame Teacher Unions For?

My dad, a blue-collar Dem, is a die-hard union man and I grew up in a pro-union household. But I was a temp worker most of my working life until becoming a teacher, and prefer to set my own rate and negotiate my own terms, even though I’m probably not very good at it. Consequently, I was not ever a big fan of unions, and until three or four years ago, agreed with the classic reform positions on teacher unions: they were responsible for keeping smart people out of teaching, they were responsible for ballooning education costs, they stood in the way of good teachers getting the job done with ridiculous rules and regulations, they protected bad teachers.

My views have changed, and the change began even before I became a teacher.

Do Unions Keep Smart People Out of the Profession?

If I could beat one new reality into the nation’s head, I would choose teacher cognitive ability, and that beating would take four parts. First, that high school teachers have always been pretty smart, and drawn from the top half of the college grad pool. Second, that testing and knowledge standards for elementary teachers was once low, is now much higher and more than reasonable since the states dramatically increased the credentialing test difficulty as part of their adherence to NCLB. (see table). Third, that this dramatic increase did not result in either improved outcomes or evidence that new teachers who qualified with tougher tests were superior to teachers who didn’t. (Cite: This is the dog that didn’t bark. All research since 2001 still shows that new teachers aren’t as effective as experienced teachers until they’ve taught for a couple years. Ergo, harder tests to find smarter teachers didn’t make a huge difference.)

2007 ETS Teacher Quality report, page 23

Fourth, that the research at best shows that smarter teachers give a teeny tiny boost to outcomes, and if we’re just being reasonable instead of squinting hard, shows no real relationship at all between teacher cognitive ability and outcomes. Both progressive and reformer discussion of teacher quality begins with the premise that mouth-breathing morons predominate. Yet the data clearly shows we are not.

Besides, unions have next to nothing to do with teacher credentialing, which is where content knowledge requirements are set. That’s a state function. The states have, as I mentioned, dramatically raised content knowledge for elementary school teachers at least once (twice if you count the original institution of Praxis I and variations). I assume unions protested, although I’m not sure why. But the states have a much bigger problem than unions—namely, disparate impact. Set credentialing standards high, and you lose your black and Hispanic teachers, something I’ve documented at length here, here, and here, and that Stephen Sawchuk has been covering vis a vis the CAEP push to raise standards.

So unions aren’t responsible for stupid teachers, both because there really aren’t that many, and because that’s the state’s job.

But that’s not all, reformers say. Unions promote pay scales that give all teachers the same raise, regardless of quality. They pay old teachers more than young teachers and protect the first at the expense of the second. They oppose merit or performance pay. The best teachers, the really smart ones, the ones who could be hedge fund managers or financial analysts, the ones we’d like to have instead of these dreary wage slaves we’ve got now—well, those sorts of people want competitive salary structures and the knowledge that they’ll be rewarded for their excellence. Otherwise, they’ll sneer at teaching and take jobs that pay them millions to obliterate the country’s financial stability.

Okay. So the very notion of a union is antithetical to getting competitive, performance-driven people who want rewards for their hard work. I’ll pretty much agree with that. But in blaming teacher’s unions, I thought—perhaps wrongly—that the gravamen of the charge was that unions weren’t in and of themselves the problem, they just needed to improve. However, this charge can only genuinely be resolved by killing teachers unions entirely. Good luck with that.

Sure, there are efforts to come up with merit pay or other pay for performance plans. Most of the research shows they don’t work. I have written up my results for algebra I growth in my students, both in algebra I and in algebra II and geometry. I subtitled one of these “Why Merit Pay Won’t Work”, even though I didn’t mention the subject directly.

I realize I am offering anecdata, but I assert here and now that my anecdata is supported nationwide, that the bulk of high school students who enter a math class will leave it scoring at roughly the same percentile of ability. Performance pay of any sort will not alter this fundamental reality. And once everyone else realizes this, no one’s going to pay big bucks to move kids taking algebra I for the third time from Far Below Basic to Below Basic. I suspect that reading ability suffers from the same constraints.

So I’ll agree that the union compensation structure keeps competitive, high-performance people from even thinking about teaching. However, were such people to enter teaching, the realization that the nation’s stated goals for educational outcomes are utterly disconnected from reality would drive them right out again. No point in performance pay if the objectives are delusions.

Do Unions Increase Costs of Education?

Are unions responsible for the ballooning costs of education? Not on a day to day basis. The bulk of increased costs is due to special ed, and we can blame politicians for that one. I agree that unions and politicians are responsible for pension costs, although teacher unions aren’t any worse than any other government union on that count. In fact, given that teachers can’t work overtime per se and retire at an average age of 59 (cops work 20 years and out, and while I can’t find average national data, California cops and firefighters have an average age of 54), teachers are probably among the least offenders. Less likely to get disability, too.

Districts are far more interested in figuring out how to keep teachers than fire them. Teacher turnover is a huge issue and major expense, and one that can’t really be laid at the union’s door.

So I would argue that unions own responsibility for the huge pensions, but day to day costs, I’d want to see more evidence. And where’s the evidence that teacher unions are worse than other government unions?

Do Union Rules and Regulations Prohibit Productivity?

Yeah, this is nuts. What are you all talking about? I assumed, before becoming a teacher, that there’d be union reps all over the place telling me what I can and can’t do, that teachers were busy bitching out other teachers who worked harder and made them look bad. Where is this happening, and is Nick Nolte on the staff?

Just one example: class assignment often results in English and history teachers getting classes bigger than the contract stipulates (usually 34 or 35). I know teachers who have had 40 kids in a class. They complain. Let me be clear: the teachers complain. The teacher union rep (who also has overlimit classes), in response to the complaints, fills out forms and encourages everyone else to do the paperwork. Some do, some don’t. In this last year, the issue was never resolved. The union didn’t attack the school. They get the difficulty of assigning classes. But at the same time, they continue to work the problem—and will probably escalate it. The union is not enforcing rules and regulations that the teachers are fine with, insisting on arcane objectives that no one gives a crap about any more, but rather responding to teacher complaints about onerous work conditions. How is that not its job?

As a math teacher, I’ve been over the limit a couple times, and I didn’t much care—it’s a whole different issue in math than English and history, with grading time being the chief determinant. However, I didn’t have enough desks. So after a union meeting, I went to the rep and mentioned that I had 35 students but only 32 desks.

“You are overlimit! You should grieve it,” she said, instantly.

“Yeah, it’s just not a big deal. But I need more desks.”

Did she insist that I grieve? Look at me with disapproval? She did not. She just gave me the bad news: other teachers had an even higher ratio of missing desks to students, and short of going out and buying my own desks, I was screwed. She didn’t deliver the news with snark, but with understanding sympathy, since her missing desk to student ratio was 6:1. We commiserated, agreed that attrition would probably fix most of the problem, but wasn’t it annoying that we had to wait? For desks, even!!

It was a nice conversation.

Again, I don’t get this complaint at all. I try to think what else it could be, what case it is that unions, as opposed to teachers, insist on silly rules that stop “progress”—which is, of course, whatever the complainer thinks would be a rilly cool idea. Examples?

Do Unions Protect Bad Teachers?

Ah, the big Kahuna of teacher union beefs. It’s hard to fire bad teachers, because unions make administrators lives living hell in order to discourage them from even trying.

There’s an easy out on this one, though. If government unions ceased to exist tomorrow, teachers would still have Loudermill, the relatively recent Supreme Court decision that says that employment is a property right, and states can’t deprive their employees of property rights without due process. And most states have tenure written into their laws, independent of union contracts. So the changes necessary to undo teacher rights are far more than just dumping unions. Moreover, even the states that have eliminated tenure, like Oregon, seem to hold onto most of their teachers. Oregon dropped tenure for 2-year teaching contracts; a story just two years later reported that nothing had changed. This CAP report report on teacher tenure shows that Oregon is below average in teacher dismissal rates. While some states without tenure laws have high dismissal rates for that year (Alabama, Alaska), others have low ones (Mississippi, Texas).

In fact, as this second CAP report on state tenure laws spells out, the bulk of the apparently onerous dismissal laws are encoded in state law. So how is that the unions’ fault?

Naturally, there’s state laws, and then there’s enforcing state laws. Once, I noticed that one of my employers (a large national corporation) wasn’t paying me overtime. I thought that odd. I emailed someone in HR, and was ignored. I emailed again, no response. I emailed a third time, was told that I misunderstood the law. This annoyed me. It wasn’t the money. In fact, I knew that the employer would simply stop me from working overtime, if they took the law seriously. But they didn’t. So I reported them to the state, who eventually subjected the company to a regional audit, and months later I got a nice check. The company had to revamp its time sheets, at considerable expense, and educate managers on overtime laws by state. (To the company’s credit, I wasn’t fired. A senior HR person called me, I told him I don’t like it when companies ignore the law, he observed that I’d probably saved them a class action suit years down the line.)

This took upwards of a year to resolve, and this was on an issue that I had the corporation dead to rights–around 9 separate incidents of submitted timesheets showing overtime, and paychecks showing no overtime. And yet the corporation ignored me, figuring what the hell, it could break the law. Had my case not been so easy to prove and I been less adept at documentation, I’m sure the corporation’s strategy would have proved out.

It will not shock anyone to learn that private corporations routinely ignore state employment law.

So unions merely force their employers to follow state law. Down to the letter. They do it so effectively that districts are loathe to incur the costs of dismissal.

The CAP report I linked in makes a good case for changing state laws. I suspect that unions will fight any attempt to change, but so what? The “onerous” process required for firing government employees involves state law and federal case law. That unionized government employees simply have the means of forcing their employers to follow the law whereas employees of private corporations are screwed unless the violations reach the level of class action suit says more about the state of employment in America than it does about unions. We shouldn’t need unions to ensure the law is followed. Clearly, we do.

Of course, your average eduformer doesn’t want a state law change. Reformers want to abolish all protection for state employees, barring the usual ones, and give principals a free hand. They are okay with competent teachers being fired simply because the principal wants a younger teacher, a different style, or simply a different teacher (which of course means a cheaper teacher). Checker Finn: “The single most important form of freedom for charter schools is to hire and fire employees as they like and pay them as they see fit.” Whitney Tilson: ” Ending LIFO is a critical first step to getting to what’s really necessary: that every principal has the full power to hire and fire every adult (not just teachers) in the school and he/she sees fit..”. Rick Hess, whose new book Cagebusting might be subtitled “How to Fire Teachers Quickly and a Few Other Administrative Tips I Threw In So No One Can Say This is Just a Book about Firing Teachers”, encourages administrators to use private philanthropy to get the equivalent legal power on their side, but at least he’s working within the system instead of ignoring its realities.

So should unions eat the blame for denying reformers their holy grail of hire and fire power? I think not. Go change the state laws and get back to me.

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So in the end, what are teacher unions to blame for? Big pensions—and even then, they were just doing their job with politicians who didn’t want to do theirs. A compensation structure that repels competitive, performance-driven workers. Many of the teacher protections and all of the standards lie at the state level, entirely out of the union’s purview. But there’s another point to consider.

It can’t have escaped notice that most of the beefs against teacher unions are, in fact, true for all unions. So I repeat a question I’ve written about before: why the big push against teacher unions? Cops and firefighters are just as hard to fire. DMV employees harder still, no doubt. As Richard Posner points out, judges also get paid whether they are any good or not, and without a union, even (I have other good things to say about that Posner essay). So do politicians, who get paid with taxpayer dollars if they’re elected, even if they’re horrible, also without a union.

Education is big business and education reformers are often, but not always, Republicans, a group who—totally coincidentally, I’m sure—favors an outcome that weakens or obliterates a big pile of Democrat money. Neither of those facts, however, explain why it’s apparently okay to single out teachers, castigating them for “privileges” that are de rigueur for all government employees. I just cited two separate Center for American Progress reports calling for a weakening of teacher tenure, and unless I’m mistaken CAP is one of the few pro-union organizations left. I’ll leave that question unanswered save for my previous wonderings, but it is something that nags at me.

I am no more in favor of unions for myself than I ever was. I was just reading Andrew Old’s diatribe about scabs—in fact, I think that essay was the cause of this one, because I realized again that I just couldn’t see myself going out on strike. My view of unions have undergone a profound change, but I don’t think of myself as a union member. I get paid, I go to work. I would probably strike if I voted to strike, but there’s the rub, since I can’t see voting to strike. This is visceral. I’m not sure if I can even explain it. (Note: Andrew Old’s views have changed, but I think he’d still call me a scab for not striking.)

But the past decade has made me much more sympathetic to unions in general. I was just rereading this piece by Kevin Drum on the death of unions, realizing that I would have scoffed at it back in the 90s. I still believe that America is largely antithetical to true union thinking, that union acceptance in the post-war period was a fluke due to our economic dominance in the global market. But the disappearance of work will undoubtedly travel up the pay scale, and I’m much more open to the idea that we need to constrain businesses from putting profit before everything, that stockholders don’t really matter more than workers, and that Amazon’s work practices are obscene.

Is my sympathy caused by my job change? Perhaps, but remember that I am not protected by tenure and may never attain it. Speedy termination until I’m too old to hire is a high-probability outcome for me, which is depressing, but at least suggests my opinions aren’t of the “I got mine, Jack” category.

I will grant anyone that unions make education more expensive, both by scaring politicians and, importantly, by holding onto some of the compensation value the private sector has lost because it doesn’t have the same protections that government employees have —unionized or not.

But are unions responsible in any way for our failure to achieve our educational goals, those lofty objectives that declare all high school graduates will be ready for college or career training?

No. Put another way: Pretty much everything Terry Moe says is wrong.

Those who think that teachers, or unions, or poverty causes our educational outcomes are kidding themselves. Our expectations are absurd. Criminal. The cruelest thing our education system does to our kids is not give them terrible teachers protected by thuggish unions, but ignore the role that cognitive ability plays in their ability to learn the material. Our system punishes bright kids, makes life too easy for middling ability kids, and as for the lowest ability kids, disproportionately poor, we give them all sorts of attention coupled with all sorts of absurd expectations, and leave them feeling hopeless and disconnected.

No one is comfortable admitting that. Reformers tried blaming parents, but they just got tagged as racists. Teachers are the only people left to blame. Unions are just a convenient proxy, a way for reformers to try to avoid alienating the largest profession in the country while still gutting its wages and protections—let’s assume, generously, in the genuine belief that teachers are genuinely responsible for student outcomes in an educational world with absurd and cruel expectations.

In fact, I believe teachers could make more of a difference in educational outcomes if we educated by cognitive ability and set goals accordingly. I believe we should spend more time teaching content to low-mid ability kids, and critical thinking and analysis to mid-high ability kids. But all of this starts by accepting the role that cognitive ability plays in outcomes, and coming to terms with the fact that unions have nothing to do with them.