Note: This post has been revised from the original in an effort to clarify facts about the Wisconsin budget.
If there’s one thing to understand about the Wisconsin battle, it’s that it’s not really about the budget, but a premeditated and politically-motivated attack on the teachers’ union. The teachers have already ceded to pay cuts — but now Walker is going to start firing them one by one if they don’t give up their bargaining rights forever. Never mind the fact that the Wisconsin budget was left with only a modest shortfall by Walker’s Democratic predecessor. To top it all off, Walker has added an additional $140 million projected shortfall to the next budget with his wealthy donor-friendly tax cuts.
After a commenter pointed out to me that Walker’s budget-busting measures were, according to Politifact, not part of the current shortfall, it occurred to me that the first panel of the cartoon is misleading. While I’d probably write it differently now, I still think the larger point — that he purports to care about the deficit while adding to it — is legit. And even if the current modest shortfall is not due to Walker, it’s clear that the Republicans are using the economic downturn to accomplish their long-sought political goals (union busting) even as they add to deficits themselves. [UPDATE UPDATE: some people are now saying Politifact is wrong (it’s a few paragraphs into the post). I give up. Can we just call Walker a douchenozzle and call it a day?]
If you had any lingering doubts that Wisconsin is part of a broader movement to attack workers’ rights, it’s important that Americans understand that Walker is in tight with the billionaire right-wing activists, the Koch Brothers, whose foundation Americans For Prosperity is picking ideological fights in several states:
The effort to impose limits on public labor unions has been a particular focus in Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, all states with Republican governors, Mr. Phillips said, adding that he expects new proposals to emerge soon in some of those states to limit union power.
Even if Wisconsin teachers manage to preserve their bargaining rights, my feeling is that the bigger picture does not look good. The forces aligned against what few unions remain are just too powerful. In this Gilded Age we live in, moneyed elites have managed to convince millions of ordinary, struggling Americans to reject one of the last means of recourse workers have left. It doesn’t really matter if Scott Walker goes down — they have the ideological vision, and the willingness to take the heat for it. Something weak-kneed Democrats might want learn from.
Politifact completely demolished your “must-read” editorial last week.
But you’re right about unions being doomed.
I have mixed feelings about teachers unions. I believe unions are very very important to provide a beast big enough to tangle with businesses, but I have had some terrible teachers that were utterly untouchable due to having tenure. I don’t believe that the good of unions outweighs the bad of ruining even one child’s educational experience.
Geek,
The problem with that problem with teachers unions is that many children’s education is better than it would otherwise be because of teachers unions, so the good of unions includes improving the education of millions of children’s educations, which does offset the harm of harming some children’s educations. Should we cause the best teachers to give up on teaching because of the poor working conditions and low pay and lack of tenure meaning that you have to squash your curriculum down to the point that it never risks offending anyone? Should we cause the average teachers to teach worse because of the lousy labor conditions, etc?
I do agree with Robert, WI does have a budget problem not created by Walker. However, stripping public sector workers of bargaining rights has nothing to do with solving a budget problem.
[Cross-posted with Charles.]
Geek:
The problem with that logic is that any large organization — including private corporations — will do a bad job sometimes. There is no such thing as a huge, perfect organization. (Have you really never run into an incompetent employee of a private corporation?)
So we could just as easily say “I don’t believe that the good of private schools outweighs the bad of ruining even one child’s educational experience.” Or when the best teachers leave teaching, because they have low pay and no job security without unions, what about the children whose experiences are ruined that way?
Unless you believe economics has no effect at all, it must be the case that things which make teaching jobs more valuable — such as job security — lead to better teachers being more likely to take a job and less likely to leave. I’m not saying that unions should be above reform — but entirely wiping them out, which in effect is what Walker is proposing through a back-door, is extreme and unreasonable. (Plus, you’re ignoring all the good unions have done.)
The “just one child” measure is a measure by which no possible outcome could be said to be acceptable. As such, I don’t think it’s a reasonable measure to use.
* * *
Jen, I have to say, Robert is right on this one; the first panel of your cartoon seem to be based on bad facts.
It’s true that Walker passed a bunch of stuff which costs the state a lot of money and benefits mainly rich people, which has made the long-term deficit situation in Wisconsin worse; and it’s also true that Republicans are hypocritically using not just the next year’s budget, but the long-term deficit that they’ve seemingly deliberately made worse, as an transparent excuse to bust unions that support Democrats (while leaving unions that support Republicans alone).
But panel one is referring to what’s going on in the next year, and it’s mistaken.
That said, panels 2-4 seem to be on solid ground.
Charles & Amp – thanks for acknowledging that. I wasn’t looking forward to having a boring, uphill argument about Wisconsin’s budget process.
Now we can have a tedious, circular argument about the benefits of unionization instead!
I agree that Geek’s “don’t ruin one child” standard is unworkable for the reasons you both cite.
But I also think you’re assuming/postulating that teacher’s unions have a host of positive impacts on education.
Charles:
Should we cause the best teachers to give up on teaching because of the poor working conditions and low pay and lack of tenure meaning that you have to squash your curriculum down to the point that it never risks offending anyone? Should we cause the average teachers to teach worse because of the lousy labor conditions, etc?
Is there any evidence that the presence of unionization improves the recruiting or retention of the best teachers, that unions have improved (or prevented disimprovement of) curricula, or that “lousy labor conditions” (or their opposite) have any correlation to teaching quality?
Amp:
Or when the best teachers leave teaching, because they have low pay and no job security without unions, what about the children whose experiences are ruined that way? Unless you believe economics has no effect at all, it must be the case that things which make teaching jobs more valuable — such as job security — lead to better teachers being more likely to take a job and less likely to leave.
Is there any evidence that the best teachers leave teaching when they do not have union contracts to give them job security? In my experience people who are among the best at a marketable skill do not generally worry much about job security; they are (smugly) aware that their superior skillset guarantees them work in all but the worst economic climates. Rather, it is the indifferent and mediocre (and poor) workers who seek job security, for the logical reason that they are the people most likely to fare poorly in a fair meritocracy.
Teacher unionization is a historically recent phenomenon. Is there any evidence that the rise of teacher’s unions is correlated to a rise in overall teacher quality?
ampersand and charles –
My comment wasn’t logically based or well thought out enough, it was anecdotally (my own experience) based and heavily biased based on a terrible teacher.
You’re (both) likely correct that my experience and that of many others could have been worse without teachers’ unions.
There is also a question to be considered about the politicization of teaching. Although I’m sure that as good liberals you’d both prefer to have lots of liberals teaching (just as I’d love to see the schools stuffed full of conservatives), I am equally sure that as intellectually honest people you will acknowledge that political liberalism and teaching quality are not perfect equivalents.
To what extent does teacher unionization – and the concomitant direction of dues and political activism on behalf of liberal causes – discourage quality potential teachers, whether conservative or simply apolitical, from pursuing that career path? A modest plurality of Americans are simply hostile to unions qua unions, for whatever personal or ideological reasons – are those individuals likely to become teachers in a highly unionized climate?
Those costs need to be added to the negative side of the balance sheet in a sober appraisal of whether teacher’s unions are broadly a good or bad thing for the educational system.
Robert,
Is teacher quality better in states without teachers unions? Is there any evidence that teachers unions impair teaching quality?
Excellent teachers are likely to offend someone at some point (mediocre teachers can just keep their heads down), so they have good reason to value tenure.
The states that don’t have teacher’s unions are pretty terrible in education, AFAIK, but they were so before the rise of unionization.
I think the most clear connection between unions and bad quality would have to be the (infamous) problems of getting horrible teachers out of the classroom, where unions (which rightly must defend their membership, generally regardless of the facts of the individual case) intrude on that process. Google “New York City” “teachers” “rubber room” for the horror stories there.
You can have tenure without unionization.
Robert’s central question needs addressing. Amp and Charles are putting forward the proposition that the quality of public education would suffer if teachers’ unions ceased to exist. I don’t see that as established.
The problem of how to set up due process in order to remove incompetent/negligent/etc. teachers in a way that is fair to the teacher, the union and the administration that has to document the incompetence is a real one. I wish I had time to google and source this: I also think that pinning the question of a union’s value solely to the question of teacher quality is a mistake; there are always going to be a range of quality among teachers no matter what system governs their employment. Another way of looking at the value of a union is whether or not it improves the quality of teaching, or to put it more accurately, whether or not the presence of a union creates an environment in which better quality teaching is more or less likely; and here I think there is a lot to say in support of unions. Unions more than anyone else, as far as I know, argue and advocate for reduced class sizes–which research has shown has a direct effect on the quality of the teaching that takes place. Could we have reduced class size without unions? Sure. Would government and taxpayers be willing to foot the bill for that without the pressure brought to bear by the union and the work rules it negotiates for? I am not so sure, and I think the track record suggests that the actual answer would be no–but I don’t have the time to look for hard data.
I think it is a mistake to think that, absent unions, the local governments for which public school teachers work would suddenly become the kind of benevolent employers imagined, say, in Ayn Rand’s novels, where they know that if they don’t treat their workers well and fairly, they will end up with substandard results. In the real world, teaching is at one and the same time too political, too easily politicizable and too damned expensive–and good teaching is even more expensive than that. Too many people’s self interest is involved for the kind of benevolent employer employee relationship to exist–which gets to the subject of tenure, which I don’t have time to get into now–and so it seems to me that unions are, in the final analysis, necessary.
RonF,
Do you have any evidence that doing away with teachers unions would be beneficial to the education of students? I certainly don’t see that established. I think evidence of a beneficial effect is needed to make a major change to the system that will obviously be harmful to lots of people (teachers), and I don’t see any evidence of that (certainly not from you or Robert).
Robert – Thanks for the Politifact link; it answers some questions I had myself, and I will be sure to update the post soon.
While I’d probably write the first panel of my cartoon differently now, since it suggests Walker’s tax cuts are the cause of the current shortfall, I still think the broader point — that he purports to care about the deficit while adding to it — is legit. And even if the current modest shortfall is not due to Walker, it’s clear that the Republicans are using the economic downturn to accomplish their long-sought political goals (union busting) even as they add to deficits themselves. No need to distort facts to make these people look bad! And definitely not my intent.
Hmm… some people are now saying Politifact is wrong (you have to scroll down a bit):
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/20/947446/-Politifact:-Rachel-is-Wrong-about-WI-Deficit,-but-Walkers-Pants-are-on-Fire
I dunno, my head is starting to hurt.
Charles S.:
No, I do not. But then I’ve made no such assertion. The assertion has been made, however, that the creation and preservation of teachers unions has improved educational quality. I see propositions offered in argument for that position, but not evidence.
Richard:
As far as I can see, teachers’ employers are already far too benevolent.I don’t expect them to be benevolent. I don’t want them to be benevolent. My employer sure isn’t benevolent. “Benevolence” is not what I expect out of an employer, especially one spending my money.
RonF:
I’m not sure how this responds to my overall point, which is that unions, in their advocating for smaller class size, have, where they have been effective, had a demonstrably positive effect on the quality of teaching that takes place in those classrooms–if I can make the time to hunt up sources, I will do so–and that it is naive to expect the employers of public school teachers to, for example, keep class size small, when there are pretty strong financial pressures to increase class size, even in the best of economic times, because it is an educationally effective thing to do for the kids and for the teachers who have to educate.
You can have tenure without unionization.
While technically true, this is a bit like saying you can have a 40-hour work week and a two-day weekend without unionization.
A quick google suggests that union schools measurably improve the performance (as measured by standardized tests) of the majority of students, while decreasing the scores of the best performing and worst performing students.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch:
1) If the reports I’m seeing are true it turns out that if there’s no funding included in a bill you only need 50% +1 for a quorum in the Wisconsin Senate. So expect to see a lot more things like this.
2) I have no idea what the past customs or rules of the Wisconsin Senate are. But my personal opinion would be that if a Senator has removed themselves from a physical presence at the Senate to obstruct legislative action I see no reason to permit them to participate in other legislative action by phone.
Yeah, I have to say that if (for example) the Republican Congresscritters had walked out of the Capitol to avoid voting on health care reform, I’d have been appalled. Did the Wisconsin Dems learn nothing from what happened in Texas? The voters do not respond well to this kind of crap. Sometimes you lose and “run away and hide” is rarely an effective strategy.
I’m not sure how the Republicans passing shitty legislation while the Dems aren’t present to vote No is any significant enticement to the Dems to come back so that the Republicans can pass a different shitty piece of legislation as well. The Repubs have a serious majority in WI and can pass whatever crazy, horrible shit they want. In fact, it is only because Walker was trying to pass his union busting bill off as being a budget necessity that this entire situation developed. If he had just been willing to admit that he just hates unions that don’t endorse him, the legislature could have passed a union busting law with 50% +1. The only reason they haven’t switched to doing it that way yet is because it would look bad for Walker to admit that his justification for the bill was a lie. Sadly, they’ll probably do it that way soon anyway, as the current protests don’t actually look good for him either.
What’s the difference between exploiting the filibuster rule to turn what was designed to be a routine majority Senate into a routine super-majority Senate, and exploiting the quorum rule to create a supermajority requirement for a single budget bill?
It seems to me that actually the latter is a great deal more defensible. It’s making a big stink and forcing a lot of discussion of the issue — exactly what the filibuster is supposed to do, in fact. And the Democrats risk paying a very high political price for bringing things to a standstill that way, as opposed to Republicans, who use the filibuster as a way to avoid taking public responsibility for opposing bills.
Finally, the Wisconsin Democrats are making an extreme stand on a single bill, not making a stand against the majority being able to govern at all. In other words, their goal is to stop a bill, not to sabotage government as a whole because they’d rather have partisan gain than a functioning government.
Do you distinguish between public and private unions? You should.
It’s relatively simple (though not obvious) to conclude that workers’ interests are more important than a rich corporate employer. It’s much less simple–and far from obvious–to conclude that workers’ interests are more important than the interests of the remaining populace.
I’m pro-student. And I think that the teachers unions are getting in the way of spending my taxes, on my children, in the manner that will get them the best education. Am I anti-teacher-union in general? Nope. Am I opposed to the actions of the teachers union in my town? You betcha.
Calling that stance “anti-worker” is bullshit. I work. My kids will work. My wife works. Everyone I know works their ass off these days. I’ve got a perfect right to go after a union of people if I don’t think they’re pulling their comparable weight.
This is an important point. My understanding is that what is going on in Wisconsin is solely about public sector unions. It is not about private sector unions.
In the private sector, the employer wants to make as much money as possible and the employees, through the union, want to make as much money as possible.
The government, on the other hand, is not in the business of making a profit. They are also less focused on their bottom line, because they have a monopoly. They are less concerned about putting out a good “product,” because its “customers” are relatively captive (although there is always concerns that people can move if the tax burden becomes too high). So, the government just has to tax people enough to cover expenses; there is no real incentive to keep those expenses low.
On the other hand, public sector employees, through the unions, want to make as much money as possible, just like those employers and employees in the private sector. As a result of these differing motives, the public sector unions can take advantage of the government more so than in the private sector, where the employer and employee have competing motives that are more likely to balance out.
-Jut
Having worked in a variety of “up or out” fields, and knowing many who do–finance, law, science–I find the statement that teachers unions INCREASE the likelihood of excellent hires to be absolutely ludicrous.
People who want to excel tend to select an environment in which they can excel. They also want an environment which rewards them for excellence.
If they’re in an environment in which the interests of others more senior are prioritized by union ties or years in service (and not by skill) then they can’t excel. And if their pay is limited–either by contract or by the apportionment of pay to other less-excellent folks–then the rewards are lacking.
So people who are truly driven to be outstanding at their jobs have a tendency to select jobs with a high promotion rate and/or a high payoff for excellence (two things which often but not always go hand in hand.) People of more mediocre abilities tend to select jobs with a high security rate and/or a low penalty for mediocrity, i.e. government work. Or teaching.
Sure, there are always a few who do it because they love it, and would excel anywhere else. I’m lucky to be related to some. But on average, that’s a losing gamble.
Also, there’s no real input from the customer. Who knows better than I do whether my kid is learning, and/or how much? Not the teacher, to be sure: She’s in class with 25 kids. I spend hours a week with her one on one, doing homework and tests. But do I have a say about which teacher she gets? Do I have a say about whether that teacher needs to train more, or get promoted, or get fired? No, I do not. So what financial incentive does the teacher have to give a shit about my desires for my kid? (none.)
And yes, it shows.
God, I hate the teacher’s union.
Maybe the solution is more unionization, not less.
If teachers feel they need a union, OK.
Maybe parents need to have a union as well. When parents in a class are unhappy with the teacher of that class, the PU can call a job action and pull their kids out. The PU can maintain a small transient school where job-action kids can go to continue their education while they’re conducting the action against the bad teacher.
We can have an affiliated Taxpayer’s Union that can certify PU job actions, and withhold tax funds from schools that are facing such actions. Sorry, teachers, you guys don’t get paid until the parents are satisfied with the work being done. If this is a problem for you, maybe you’ll have to fire Mr. McSucksatteaching and replace him. Then the kids will come back, and the money with them.
That’s a lot more cumbersome than the ideal system, which would be to just directly attach funding to students rather than to institutions. But it could work.
(In Colorado, funding is attached to students, albeit not directly controllably by parents. It is interesting that in this system, statements along the lines of “well, if my kid can’t get what they need, maybe we need to pull them out and homeschool” are generally met with increased attempts to help.)
When my son was in kindergarten, in public school, we had to have his class changed because he had, to put it mildly, the kindergarten teacher from hell. The details of the story would provide for an interesting discussion on public schools and gender socialization that is not really relevant here, so suffice it to say that this teacher decided it was her job to make a man out of my four year old boy. She had him so terrorized that he began crying before going to school and things got so bad that he actually had “a plan;” he wanted to get everyone out of the school, including all the books and things that he liked, except this teacher, and then he wanted the school to catch fire–he didn’t say he would set it, just that it should happen–and he wanted her to be injured sufficiently that she would eventually recover fully but would be unable to teach for the rest of that year. (He was that specific.)
Once we realized there was a problem, we took immediate action and I went to speak to the assistant principal about getting my son’s class changed. This experience too would provide for an interesting discussion–this time in just how profoundly and condescendingly dismissive public schools can be of parents–but what I want to focus on for the purposes of this thread is that the AP essentially gave me a choice: as long as I did not file a formal complaint, which would force her to have to deal with the union, she would move my son. Now, the AP also let me know that she was well aware of how problematic this teacher was and that she and her principal were simply unwilling (though she did not put it this way of course) to do the work that would be required of them to get this teacher out of the classroom. (My sense is that she had been a good teacher, but that she should have retired around 10 years before we met her.) Obviously, faced with the choice of keeping my son in that class where he was so miserable while due process took its course and getting him out as soon as possible, we chose to get him out as soon as possible.
I tell this story here for a couple of reasons:
1. Obviously, there is something wrong with a tenure/due process system that creates disincentives for a school’s administration to go after teachers like this; but the important thing to keep in mind here is that we were not the first parents to make this request. The problem predated us. In other words, our complaint should have been one added to many, perhaps the one that finally meant the teacher had to go, but the fact was that the school’s administration had done none of the work necessary to build a case against her. To the degree that this is because of a system that the union clings to, the union is behaving shamefully.
2. That said, no due process system will work perfectly and even in the best of systems it is likely that situations analogous to the one I found myself in would still exist. Tenure protections are important, both for the teachers to be able to do their jobs with integrity and for students who ultimately benefit from that kind of teaching.
3. That said, I agree fully with something that NYC’s new chancellor said: that it is absurd to give someone who is only three years out of college–which was how long it used to take for public school teachers to get tenure–a guaranteed job for life just for doing the minimum required of them to show competence. I should add that I do not mean that this minimum is therefore bad or substandard, but to grant tenure on teaching evaluations alone (which it is my understanding was how it used to be done in NYC) to someone is in their mid-twenties ultimately devalues the professional growth necessary to remain a good teacher throughout one’s career. (So does linking that professional development solely to the earning of an MA, which teachers must get in NY to become fully licensed.) Making tenure contingent on a demonstrated commitment to professional development and school service at the very least creates an environment in which faculty are more likely to remain actively engaged in those activities throughout their careers. (Of course, there are always going to be those who don’t; this is not about creating a perfect system.)
A couple more things that are not necessarily related to the story about my son:
1. G&W’s claim that he knows better than his daughter’s teacher whether or not his daughter is learning is not as straightforward an assertion as it first appears. First, most obviously, even assuming that he really does, that is not going to be true of all parents across all school districts and so I am not so sure how helpful it is as an assertion in trying to think through what to do about teachers unions. Second, even if he is aware that his daughter is not learning, that does not mean he knows better than her teacher why this is so. (I am assuming here a caring and competent teacher who really does keep track of the 25 students in his or her classroom in the way he or she is supposed to–at least in NYC public schools that kind of tracking is mandated by the government; in a class where tracking is not done or has fallen short or in which G&W’s daughter has somehow fallen through the cracks, that is an issue with the teacher that needs to be addressed.) There was a third point I wanted to make, but I lost it.
2. I am still interested to here what people have to say about what I said above, i.e., that it is probably more useful to talk about unions creating an environment where better teaching is likely to occur, not they necessarily result in the hiring of a higher percentage of better quality teachers than would occur under a non-union system.
What does tenure have to do with teacher union integrity? As far as I and many people I know can tell, it reduces a lot of incentives to do an outstanding job and therefore reduces integrity*. If you think there’s a strong link, where are you getting that? Does it apply both generally and also in the specific cases of elementary (k-6), middle (6-8), and high school (9-12) public education?
I understand that tenure may sometimes be relevant in the issues of higher education, but that’s a very, very, different animal. Higher ed teachers have a lot more flexibility in what they teach. Preserving that flexibility can also require tenure–though even there, the current tenure system is very poor. I’m more of a fan of the long term renewable approach, which offers many of the same benefits of tenure and gets rid of many of the problems. It’s not perfect, either, but it’s better.**
* IMO, “doing one’s job with integrity” does not require being a job slave. But it is not compatible with “slacking,” “doing the minimum,” “avoiding the wishes of your employer,” “avoiding the wishes of your supervisor,” and “staying in the job even if you know you’re not really performing.” All of those issues are endemic to people who can’t easily be fired, whether it’s due to union membership, being a political appointee, or the fact that their mom is the CEO.
** An example: Jane is hired for a 5 year term. Starting at year 3 and at appropriate periods thereafter, the employer may offer to extend the contract, or not. If Jane keeps performing (and/or if nobody better comes along,) she’ll get a series of contract offers and can stay for life. Otherwise she’ll still have job security for a couple of years; she can choose to leave, or she can to try to raise her performance and get extended.
What does tenure have to do with teacher union integrity?
shoudl be
What does tenure have to do with teacher integrity?
G&W:
This is not an answer to your question, and I am sure the story is more complex and nuanced than this makes it, but Time published A Brief History of Tenure and it’s at least a place to start getting some of the facts.
Another piece that contains some interesting facts.
A quote from this interview with Diane Ravitch:
These are some of the things I could come up with after a quick google search. I agree with some of what is said in these articles and disagree with others. I do think there is something wrong with the way tenure is awarded now, and I do think–especially having seen what my wife goes through teaching K-2 in NYC–that the protections tenure offers are still necessary, both in terms of what teachers teach in the classroom and in terms of keeping administrative and parental pressure off a teacher’s back in evaluating students.
I haven’t been following the events in Wisconsin nearly as closely as I should be, but yesterday I read this over at Andrew Sullivan’s place. (Andrew started out fairly negative toward the teachers, but seems to be changing his mind somewhat). Apparently the unions were willing to discuss merit pay and more ways to get rid of teachers who aren’t good at their job. I thought merit pay and being able to fire ineffective teachers were what conservatives (and some liberals) have been wanting for years. Seems like Walker would rather try to completely eviscerate the union than work with the union to get something that would benefit everyone.
There are problems with teacher’s unions. But overall, I agree with just about everything that Richard has said, and I, too, would like to see someone address his main point – that certain policies pushed for by the unions, particularly lower class size, help improve teaching.
People that hate the teacher’s unions already think teachers earn too much money. I always wonder where, when we live in their utopian union-free future, will we get the awesome, dedicated, gifted teachers that will replace all the supposedly crappy teachers they’ll fire.
That’s a fair point, Chingona.
I find that all sides of the teacher-pay argument generally want things without really understanding what getting what they want would entail.
On the teacher’s side, there’s a desire for much much higher pay. Quite understandable! What those teachers don’t generally grok is that if there were higher pay, they would likely be out of a job over time, because much, much higher pay would attract people more qualified than the current incumbents.
True, Robert, except that maybe the incumbents are the most qualified teachers. If they are then shouldn’t they deserve much higher pay? Not only that but the threat of losing your job to better qualified applicants could have the effect of inspiring bad or lackluster teachers to up their game. So ultimately much higher pay might end up being win-win for everyone concerned.
I don’t have statistics or anything to cite, but as for the last question, I teach (college level), and I can definitely say that I am a better teacher when I have better working conditions. The semesters that I’ve had more prep time, I’ve been able to put more thought into my lessons. If I have an hour to write a quiz, then I can pick out questions that complement each other, that each test different things, that are at the right level to allow students to demonstrate what they know, and so on. If I have 15 minutes to write a quiz, I need to just pick the first few questions that seem reasonable. Same for putting together notes for my lectures — with more prep time, I can prepare better lectures, and my students will learn better. When I have fewer students per class, I can pay much more attention to the way each one learns and structure the classes accordingly.
It’s not just a question of some teachers being good teachers and other teachers being bad teachers. The same teacher can be a much better teacher with better working conditions.
A piece in Salon by a Wisconsin teacher.
Quick question from a different industrial relations environment. Do most workers in the US not have rights to due process when they’re dismissed from their job?
The material I read from the US make the right to due process sound like this special privilege that is only granted to a few employees. Rather than a matter of course. Are teachers harder to fire than other employees because the standards are so high, or the standards for other workers are non-existent?
I ask because this doesn’t seem to be an issue in the same way in New Zealand where all workers have the rights to due process (actually it’s had – new legislation in the last few years limits your right to due process in the first three months of employment, but you have the right to due process after three months).
You sometimes get employers complaining about it being ‘too hard’ to dismiss a worker, but what that basically amounts to is total incompetence on their behalf, as following due process is hardly the highest standard in the world.
It varies by state, but in general, in the US you can fire a private-sector employee for any non-excluded cause, or no cause at all. (Excluded causes are things like sexual harassment, racial discrimination, etc.)
Public sector employees generally have significantly greater job protections.
As an employer, I wouldn’t put up with a “due process” standard. The due process is that I no longer want to associate with this person; their due process for quitting is the same. Jobs are transactions, not relationships.
Maia, I don’t know all the legal details, but this wikipedia page looks like a decent summary. link
Robert:
I would assume that this line becomes a little more blurry depending on the kind of employer and the kind of job. Someone who hires only or primarily independent contractors would see things this way absolutely, I would think. A company or institution looking to invest in an employee for the long term or to invest substantially enough in the employee for whatever reason would probably see things a little differently. This company/institution would want, I would think, to develop a relationship with the employee such that the employee cares beyond the mere details of the job he or she was hired to do.
A company or institution looking to invest in an employee for the long term or to invest substantially enough in the employee for whatever reason would probably see things a little differently.
I suppose that’s theoretically possible. Such a mutual hippie love-fest ought to be protected by private contract, then.
Teachers are hard to fire because their union contracts define the process by which they can be terminated and it’s generally a very lengthy and resource consuming process and can bring the focus of the ire of the teachers union on the administrator who attempts to use it. Since the school administrators can blame the union contract for not firing teachers that should be fired they are to that extent insulated from being accountable for the quality of instruction in their schools. And the politicians sign the contracts (they sign them, not the administrators) because the penalty for having some poor instructors in their schools is generally less than the penalty resulting from facing the organized opposition of the teachers union in their next election. Politicians and (reputedly in a recent study I saw cited but did not read) teachers tend to have their kids in private schools in a much higher percentage than the general public.
In most states, outside of a contractural relationship with the employer, an employee can be fired for any reason. I could come to work tomorrow and be told that “We need to reduce expenses, so we’re letting a bunch of people go and you are one of them.” There are some regulations regarding being paid for unused vacation time, continuance of health insurance, etc., but you’re still laid off. Trust me, I know, it happened to me after working 12.25 years for a Fortune 500 company.
BTW, in the U.S. the term “fired” has the context of “they got rid of you because you were incompetent or did something wrong” and “laid off” tends to have the context of “we had to get rid of 10% of the workforce to fix budget problems and you lost the coin flip.” “Fired” has a much more personally negative connotation than “laid off”.
Richard and Robert, my company has recently gone through a period where great demands were placed on the employees (working numerous weekends in a row, working 12 and 14 hour days, etc.). A not-inconsiderable number of employees with many years of service and a lot of technical knowledge decided, successfully, to find employment elsewhere. As is common in my field the company pays for training courses for us. Management is panicking because they’re watching a lot of knowledge and training they paid for walk out the door. Even though there’s no contract, there’s definitely a relationship, and management is trying to take steps to improve the relationship they have with those of us who are still here.
Yeah, that’s one example of why a relational model just doesn’t work, in my view. Management that tries to use a relational model is always, in my experience, trying to get something for nothing. They want you to be smart and well-trained, but they don’t want you to be aware that you then own that training and can deploy it to your satisfaction and ends, not theirs. So they try to make you like them, to feel emotionally committed to the enterprise, so that they can extract rent on your human capital without paying you what it’s worth.
Bluntly, hourly and salaried employees are thieves trying to get paid for their time while doing as little work as possible. (“Ha ha, they pay me for showing up whether I do any real work or not!”)
Hourly and salaried employers are thieves trying to get work out of people that they haven’t paid for. (“Ha ha, we can pay them $20 per hour but if they meet the production quotas we set, they’re contributing $50 per hour to our bottom line!”)
Then both parties try to wrap their mutual attempted theft in emotive language about trust and family.
Not that I’m cynical.
RJN,
Many of those tenure issues were perhaps more historically appropriate than they are now. They’re also things which can–in most cases–be changed through other means than tenure.
For example: local schoolteachers in the 1900s were often much more educated than the population they served. Very few people went to college back then; education was a rarity. And the higher classes often sent their children to private schools or used private tutors.
When you’re the most educated person in the room, or even the town, it makes sense to insist that you have some protection against being overruled in educational goals.
But that was then. These days, an elementary schoolteacher isn’t likely to be significantly more educated and knowledgeable than even the parents of the students in the class. They are probably less educated than their principal, and almost certainly less educated than their superintendent (though not always).
Why, then, should we suggest that they are more worthy and able of making decisions than their boss(es) or the parents in the community around them? Why should we grant them special protections to go their own way, when there’s no evidence that their way is better than ours?
I don’t want a teacher following their gut. I want them to do what their bosses tell them to do or get fired. That way I (and the rest of the population) have incentive to work on hiring extremely smart, well educated, bosses. What’s the point of hiring a PhD in education to run things, if the B.A. employees are able to ignore her decisions?
Can you explain why you think otherwise?
As for Ravich’s quote… well, I’ll open by noting that she doesn’t actually answer the question. But still.
Yeah, yeah. She know what people mean.
Ooooh, slippery. And untrue.
Firing people JUST because they cost more is a bad idea in many professions (though not all.) Expertise costs money. But people whose skills do not equate to their cost are–and should be–fired in almost every non-union profession. If everyone is of similar skill, firing the costlier ones is perfectly sensible.
I want an good surgeon. I can use experience as a proxy only because it works: in the medical field, incompetent surgeons tend not to get into medical school, or tend not to get residencies in surgery, or tend to get steered out of completing them, or tend not to pass the boards, or tend to get pulled out of the surgical rotation, or tend not to get enough cases and then leave the profession, or tend to get sued and retire.
If teaching worked like that I’d be thrilled. As it stands, her comparison is BS; equating experience to quality requires a set of assumptions that don’t exist in teaching, and which are, often, caused by tenure.
Sure…if they are competent. Incompetent teachers are not a valuable part of the school staff irrespective of experience. Those who meet only the minimum standards are more valuable than an incompetent, but they can still get in the way of obtaining excellence.
Sure, with those same caveats. New teachers benefit from exposure to competent experienced teachers.
We seem to agree. But given her bollocks comparison to doctors above, I suspect that this is a concession without meaning, i.e. that she defines “incompetence” in such a way as to make it very very difficult to get rid of deadwood.
I also note that there is a HUGE gap between “not incompetent” and “excellent,” or even between “not incompetent” and “well qualified.” May I assume, given her dodging and weaving, that she thinks that gap is A-OK?
Quick! New goalpost!
First of all: Attrition is not per se negative. I have hired for jobs. I often prefer kickass employees who I know are going to move on to bigger and better things. They are usually far better than a relatively mediocre employee who would like to hold the position forever.
It’s usually true that experience helps. Yet there’s no reason at all to assume that an experienced mediocre teacher is better than an inexperienced but excellent teacher. It’s also possible to set up structures to support one or the other type of hiring.
Also, the union system deters high performers from staying for long. If there’s no benefit to high performance, and if you want to work somewhere that links performance to benefits, then you’ll leave.
Would those “poor working conditions” have anything to do with, say, the relatively low pay, lack of merit-based promotion opportunities, perceived incompetence and poor performance of tenured fellow teachers, or the like?
Attitudes like this are probably a large part of the reason why most people with advanced education don’t go into teaching. I know that, in my graduate school math department, anyone who was thinking about teaching high school was told by practically everyone, “You’ll hate it. You’ll have to do things the way the principal and the school board say, even though they probably know nothing about math.” I know a few people teaching elementary math who were told to teach multiplication and fractions in a certain way, even though that way made very little mathematical or educational sense. (And, for the fractions, I showed the method to a few of my colleagues, and the response from almost everybody was, “So THAT’S why none of my students understand fractions.”)
g&w … you describe teaching as if it is a rote activity – just follow x, y, z steps and you get an educated child.
I’m not a teacher, but I’ve spent plenty of time as a student, and none of the really good teachers I remember had that kind of approach. I have a really hard time believing that the difference between a good teacher and a bad one is that the good ones obediently do what the principal tells them to do, while the bad ones are following their gut. And I get the feeling that there’s a certain hard-to-define intuition in most good teachers. I suspect it’s like writing, in that you can be taught a lot of techniques to improve your teaching/writing, but at the end of the day, some people have it and some people don’t. Which is one reason why the fact that I have as much education as a grade school teacher doesn’t make me think I know as much about teaching as he or she does, anymore than the fact that someone else has as much education as I do means they could do my job.
Sure they do. But they’re the principals, superintendents, and other people who the (less educated) teachers want to ignore.
My school superintendent has a PhD in education. Why shouldn’t he be telling people what to do?
Well, that’s a bit of a stretch. Most folks don’t know much about calculus, but bsomeone who doesn’t know “anything” about math AND who also has decision making powers regarding math AND who uses those powers absent expert consultation, is pretty rare.
There are good curricula and bad curricula, but all of them will be tradeoffs.
Someone’s got to design them. Someone’s got to enforce them. Why should it be the teachers who happen to be left over from last decade, and not someone who is selected to excel at the task?
In my dream world, not only wouldn’t the teachers have tenure, but the principals and admins and superintendents wouldn’t either. Those advanced math folks you talked about might be a heck of a lot more interested then.
On average, yes. We can waste a lot of time on anecdotes if you’d like, but “everyone is unique, let their light shine through” is an unusually poor choice of ways to analyze policy for an enormous system.
I’ve head great teachers, too. You know why I remember them so well? You know why they stand out so much? They were rare.
Interestingly enough, i went to an unusual high school which was packed with extraordinary teachers–far better than my previous ones, and better than many of my college profs. I don’t remember them well; they all blur together.
So do I. Fortunately, that’s not what I said.
Just out of curiosity: When’s the last time you met a career teacher who told you “I’m not a great teacher. I need someone to tell me to shape up, and how. And my curriculum choices are poor.”
Ever? Have you EVER met a teacher who plans to keep teaching, but self-evaluates honestly?
Seriously. teachers are human, and humans don’t self regulate worth shit. Why are folks wearing blinders when it come sto the teaching profession?
Educational BS.
Because actually, it turns out that while you can’t make everyone a genious writer by any means, you can actually do a huge amount to improve their writing, sentence structure, and style. You can even make it easier for them to be creative.
Now, there’s a lot to be said for hte “some people have it” method, which is motly that it removes any responsibility for failing to make people better writers. Which the educational establishment loves. Everyday Math is sort of the equivalent BS in the math arena.
Hey, wait a minute. What’s your argument here?
First you noted that the (never taught before) math geeks didn’t want to teach because a principal might tell them what to do. Now you’re saying that teaching is a skill, so that even if I’m way more educated and knowledgeable than a teacher, I’ve got no business butting in.
Which is it?
The first statement was me, and most of the people that I was talking about had taught before, just not as a full-time high school teacher. The second statement was chingona.
Oh, and there have been plenty of times that I’ve walked out of a classroom thinking, “Wow, that lesson was crap. I need to figure out how to improve it before I try to teach that again.” And the supervisor of undergrad education at my department is usually really good at listening to me tell what happened and why and giving good suggestions for making it better. At a summer program where I taught for a few years, where the supervisors had a general education background but no math background, going to them with questions like that was useless, even though what I was teaching was middle school math. They didn’t get the nuances of what I wanted to say well enough to help me figure out how to say it. Those supervisors were fabulous for helping out when I was dealing with kids with behavioral or psychological issues, but could offer nothing mathematical.
g&w … You have business butting in because you’re a parent who doesn’t think the schools in your community are doing right by your kid. But you don’t know more about teaching just because you have a higher degree than the classroom teacher.
Right. Who would you rather have design your bridge, the person with the PhD in Philosophy, or the masters in engineering?
Wouldn’t it piss you off if the philosopher was supervising the engineer and kept butting in to make him use the wrong materials and shit?
—Myca
I had plenty of teachers with PhD’s in the public school system I attended. Funny thing about that school system, teaching salaries were really, really high and it’s been one of the highest rated systems in the country for decades.
Of course, my neighbor, the superintendent of the schools, also had a PhD.
Zuh? Young teachers ask older teachers for advice on improving their weaknesses all the time? Have you ever been a teacher and sat in a room of teachers talking to other teachers?
Yeah, but those are the GOOD teachers. Bad teachers are the ones who DON’T seek that kind of help.
Well, they’re the eventually good teachers. In their first few years, they do often seem to need assistance.
The idea that fire at will is the only way that you can have professional standards is ludicrous. And this whole discussion seems to ignore that in the rest of the world there are other ways of organising both employment and teaching.
For example, I would agree that reflective practice is really important for a teacher. In NZ one of the requirements to maintain registration as a teacher is to keep a reflective journal about your teaching. Teacher registration has many other requirements as well, and you can’t be a teacher without your registration. Teachers do have the rights of due process from being de-registered (and also rights of due process in their employment), but it is still a process that helps maintain professional standards, and all the teachers I’ve known take it seriously.
I don’t believe that the problems people are describing are actually about due process rights in employment making it impossible to fire people (and NZ isn’t hte only place where due process rights exist). Whatever the due process procedures are if they remain the same you shouldn’t need to hire expensive lawyers every time, just train people in what those processes are, and have resources and procedures for the different steps (I know that a lot of employers in NZ don’t do this either, but that’s because they’re incompetent, not because the processes are difficult)
RonF – In New Zealand the same distinction is made. You can be made redundant, and basically that’s about them letting the position go rather than you go. You can also be fired, but in that case you have rights of due process (sometimes not during the first ninety days).
Many of those tenure issues were perhaps more historically appropriate than they are now. They’re also things which can–in most cases–be changed through other means than tenure.
For example: local schoolteachers in the 1900s were often much more educated than the population they served. Very few people went to college back then; education was a rarity. And the higher classes often sent their children to private schools or used private tutors.
When you’re the most educated person in the room, or even the town, it makes sense to insist that you have some protection against being overruled in educational goals.
You fundamentally misunderstand what tenure is about.
Tenure is so that when you have the superintendent of schools’ kid in your reading class, and the kid is illiterate, you don’t have to pass him anyway or spend hours after school tutoring him to make sure you still have a job.
Tenure is so that when you tell your principal that you’re already exceeding the state limits on number of students who can safely be in a single period of your home economics class without having a teacher’s aid, so no you will not take three more kids all of whom have behavioral and cognitive disabilities unless you get that aid for the entire period, not just for the first 10 minutes because you are teaching in a food lab with stoves, knives, and other dangerous equipment, you still have a job.
Tenure is so that when you whistleblow on unsafe conditions in your wood shop which the administrator in charge of vocational education has consistently refused to remediate because you don’t want a student to wind up injured, you still have a job.
Tenure is so that when the assistant coach of the basketball team goes in and changes the F you gave one of his players for rarely showing up to class, plagiarizing the work he bothered to turn in, and ditching the final, you can inform the administration and the newspaper about this interesting turn of events, and still have a job.
Tenure is so that when you refuse to pass a student who consistently submits work that does not fulfill the assignments you give, and that student goes and complains to a staff member about you when the staff member already dislikes you because you have advocated for curriculum changes that would force the staff member to change how they do their job, and the staff member encourages the student in their grievance against you, and eventually the student complains to your university president over something unrelated to your job, which conveniently gives the president an opportunity to eliminate someone who consistently gives him a hard time via participation in faculty governance of the university, you still have a job.
All things that have happened to teachers in my family, or to me, except that I didn’t work in a tenured system, and thus did not have its protection for the repercussions of doing my job to excellent standards.
And I am an excellent teacher in my subject but I get thrown into new areas of teaching all the time and regularly consult with more experienced colleagues for feedback on how to do a better job. While in the meantime, I was struck once again today while watching a film on child development that although I have a PhD and teach at the highest level of formal education, I would never in a million years try telling even a kindergarten teacher with only a BA how to do their job because I know absolutely nothing whatsoever about how to teach small children.
But I know very well how many parents suddenly think they’re an expert on education, wherein “expert” is defined as “someone who knows that little Johnny or Suzie shouldn’t be corrected, criticized, marked down, or sent for remediation because s/he is a perfect special snowflake and is excellent at all things, particularly if basketball practice is at stake, and who by the way should never have to hear anything that I disagree with or fail to understand based on my limited knowledge of the world” and who will stop at nothing to press their beliefs about how teachers should teach, and who would dearly love to see the end of tenure.
G&W:
I was preparing a long post in response to what you had to say about tenure, but Elusis posted first, so I will simply second everything she has said so well in her post and then add this:
Tenure is also not about teachers being able to follow their guts in terms of what gets done in the classroom. Tenure is also about protecting teachers who use in their classrooms the training and methodologies they were trained to use–by the PhDs you value so highly who teach in the BA and MA programs teachers go through to become teachers–even when their principal and/or colleagues and/or immediate supervisors (in my wife’s case, the so-called “master teacher” for her grade) pressure them not to because it makes them uncomfortable or because it will make them look bad, or whatever. (Just because a principal was once a teacher does not mean he or she was a good teacher or that he or she values good teaching.)
Tenure is also about protecting teachers–and this happens in public schools too, not just at the college level–who, in the process of teaching well, bring into their classrooms ideas that are unpopular or in some way threatening to the parents of the children they teach when those parents complain and try to have that teacher dismissed. (I am not talking here about teachers who preach about their God or in some other way violate the principles of education, separation of church and state or whatever. I am talking about teachers who, for example, bring into their classrooms material about both sides of the creationism vs. evolution debate or about marriage equality or about what really happened when Columbus “discovered” America and one side of that debate–left or right, conservative or progressive, doesn’t matter–offends people with power in that teacher’s school and those people with power–parents or faculty or administration–try to shut that teacher up.
A couple of other things:
I’m not going to respond to your taking apart of Ravitch’s answer mostly because I don’t think what you did was unreasonable. She didn’t answer the question directly; but what her answer and your response to it illustrate for me the differences in perspective that people bring to the question of teacher quality, teacher tenure, the role of unions and etc. Talk to people outside education and most of them, in my experience anyway, will focus on tenure as being the problem, or at least a very, very big part of the problem, as if tenure has resulted in school systems all over the country being overrun with incompetent, negligent teachers who need to be gotten rid of–which means undoing many of the union protections that have been won for teachers over the years. Talk to people in the system and almost all of them, again, at least in my experience, will agree that there needs to be a better way to get rid of incompetent, negligent, delinquent or plain old not doing their job teachers; but they will also point out that the problem of teacher quality is a far more nuanced one than that, and they will talk about things like attrition and working conditions. Salary, of course, is one of the complaints, but so is class size–and in my experience class size trumps salary when you talk to teachers about working conditions that need to improve–and they will talk about onerous reporting/assessment requirements, which are state not union mandated, and which, if my wife’s experience is anything to judge by, are totally ridiculous and ineffective, and they will talk about a lot of other things that fall under the control of the state and/or local governments, not the unions. My point is not, therefore, that talking about tenure reform is a bad thing, but rather that perspective matters when talking about how to improve our educational system, and to focus solely on tenure, or to make tenure the poster child for what is wrong with teacher unions, is to argue from a very, very limited perspective.
I also have to say that your characterizations of teachers, with or without tenure, betray a very limited range of experience with actual teachers engaged in actual practice–which is separate and distinct from the ideological underpinnings of your argument, which I disagree with profoundly. I am not suggesting that you have not experienced what you have experienced, just that–as in my experience with my son’s kindergarten teacher–it is limited, and it is wrong to argue from it in the way that you are.
Finally, I want to say this: show me a system that will offer teachers the kinds of protections Elusis talked about, that will guarantee reasonable due process for teachers an administration wants to fire (including but not limited to opportunities for training, etc. that will correct deficiencies in teaching practice before a teacher becomes eligible for dismissal), that evaluates teachers in a way that reflects the nature of the profession (not primarily based on test scores), that is not solely under the control of management and that state and local governments and the local communities that fund schools would be willing to pay for and I will happily discuss using it to replace the current system of tenure.
Maia’s point about reflective practice is also a tremendously important one. Such practice is, as far as I can tell, practically non-existent in the evaluation of public school teachers in the system where my wife teachers. NYC has just changed the rules to require teachers to do professional development–i.e., take courses, etc.–throughout their careers in order to maintain their license. This is a good thing, but everything I know about the system in which she teachers says that it is organized in a way that discourages, if not outright excludes, the kind of reflective practice that Maia describes. We have a version of that practice at the college where I teach, and it is extremely helpful both to faculty and the people who have to evaluate them.
This, perhaps, sums up the fundamental disagreement in our argument.
RJN and Elusis,
You both seem to be making an argument from exceptionalism. Teachers are one career among many, yet they have managed to capture a system which provides them relatively unusual benefits. You’ve done a very poor job justifying the various exceptions to the rule–whether it’s “do what a boss says” or “get fired if you don’t do a good job”–and I find that circular and frustrating.
But more to the point, you appear to be primarily concerned with protecting teachers, and you appear to believe that fulfilling your goals will benefit students.
I am primarily concerned with the students, not the teachers. A system which makes things better for students (but worse for teachers) is fine with me. A system which makes things worse for teachers with no change to the student body is not good, but–given my general concerns about US education and my selective focus on students–is not something that I am concerned about. (I am concerned with teacher benefits to a certain degree: they have relevance as a means of obtaining my primary goal, which are student benefits.)
Also, you seem to be basing your stance on some degree of belief that teachers are–alone among professions?–immune to acting out of self-interest. Again, it’s hard not to snort at the level of exceptionalism here. That physician example (which you declined to address) was in a sense an excellent one, insofar as it served to illustrate the radical disconnect from reality that tends to accompany education discussions.
g&w … your physician example was ludicrous. I guess you never heard the one about what you call the guy who graduated last in his class from medical school. (The answer: “Doctor.”)
There are incompetents and even sadists sprinkled throughout the medical profession, and they do a very poor job of self-policing. Every medical professional I know has stories of messed up things they saw some doctor do, but they didn’t report him or her because it would just make problems and nothing would happen anyway. It often takes a criminal level of misbehavior before someone loses their medical license.
G&W:
I think you’re right that this discussion is essentially over, though I want to respond to a couple of things:
1. Every example that Elusis and I gave of why tenure is necessary is one which benefits students by protecting teachers, either by making it possible for teachers to maintain standards or helping to guarantee that classroom content is as diverse as possible or giving teachers protections when they stand up for student safety, for example, against administrators.
2. I, at least, have said that I agree we need to find a better way to fire teachers who don’t do a good job. Leaving that decision solely up to principals, however–the bosses to whom teachers answer–is not a smart way of doing that for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with an unfounded exceptionalism. Teaching is different from an awful lot of other professions. This does not mean that tenure should be essentially a guarantee of a job for life, but the method of evaluating teachers ought to be fair and commensurate with the job they do, not something that happens at the whim–or that can be easily manipulated at the whim–of their employers. And I agree that the system of evaluating whether or not a teacher does a good job should not be at the whim–or that can easily be manipulated at the whim–of the teacher’s union.
3. To say that we are primarily concerned with protecting teachers is an accusation that actually clouds the issue and is also quite insulting. I also have a child who is in public schools and if you think that I hold the teacher’s union contract more highly than I do the quality of his education, then you are sadly mistaken. But I also know that the problem of the relationship between and among the teachers unions, teaching quality, the department of education, parental and societal expectations, etc. is far more complex than you have made it in your argument.
4. Of course teachers are human and act out of self-interest, but so are administrators and principals and given the fact that my son’s teacher has a whole hell of a lot more direct impact on his education than do any of those other people, I sure as hell want in place both a system that protects that teacher and allows her or him to the job of teaching, which I know quite well, thank you very much, as well as he or she possibly can and a system that fairly evaluates job performance so that he or she can be fired if appropriate. And I mean that last sentence quite seriously.
5. Saying that you care primarily about the students fogs the issue in another way in that the emotional impact of the statement obscures the details: What is good for the students, specifically, in detail? What makes for good, sound, productive classrooms? Define what you mean by productivity? What gets measured in deciding these things? How do you know those measures are valid? Each of these questions requires a consideration of what it means for a teacher to her or his job most effectively and that requires a consideration of things like work rules, work conditions, job protections and so on.
Or they get banned and practice anyway.
Pingback: What Are You Actually Paying for When You Pay for an Education? – Richard Jeffrey Newman