dagblog - Comments for "In Defense of Teacher's Unions"

Peter, I think I agree with

Bruce Levine — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 05:49:08 +0000

Peter, I think I agree with everything you've written. And I'm really not opposed to the concept of recognizing quality, and I understand that there can be tension between such recognition and union rules, but these are the types of tensions that we need to deal with without throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Excellent post, Destor. And

Doctor Cleveland — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 05:01:45 +0000

In reply to In Defense of Teacher's Unions

Excellent post, Destor. And I'm coming late to a long thread, but I'd like to add something different to the conversation:

Almost everyone involved, and the self-described reformers most of all agree that teachers are the most important variable in student success. (This is quite likely not true, but everyone agrees that it is.) Therefore, the proposal is always:

to reduce the rewards for professional teachers.

That's it. Getting caught up in this or that detail or proposal misses the big point. It is always an attempt to get better quality work from skilled workers by reducing their autonomy and cutting their compensation. Always.

Is there any reason to believe that you can get better or more inspired results from skilled workers in this way?

You make excellent points

Peter Schwartz — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 15:51:56 +0000

In reply to Thanks for your good wishes

You make excellent points that I don't think have been studied.

Is seniority really dragging down teacher, school, and student performance?

Are union rules and activity really responsible for poor performance?

The assumption seems to be that union rules have allowed an overwhelming number of bad teachers to stay in their jobs and kept out an overwhelming number of good teachers out of the industry.

I use "overwhelming" to mean capable of dragging down American education as a whole to the depths where it is or where people claim it is.

Doesn't make sense to me. First, as you point out, the right to work states don't seem to be doing all that well in the education department.

Second, there are bad apples in every profession and most of them don't have unions. Do we have more bad teachers than poor performing lawyers, doctors, or accountants? Do all the bad lawyers, doctors, and accountants cause us to decry the poor state of lawyering, doctoring, and accounting in this country?

Or are other factors at work? Like the fact that teachers, to be successful themselves, have to inspire 25 immature human beings to "learn." Lawyers don't have it easy, but at least they don't have numbers like that to deal with.

Lawyers get paid even when they lose the case. Doctors get paid even when the patient doesn't get better. Shouldn't teachers get paid even when kids don't learn?

Ha! Stats is a big problem

Michael Maiello — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 04:39:22 +0000

In reply to You've touched on several

Ha! Stats is a big problem for me. Also, symbolic logic. I have managed to poet my way through life, but it's not enough anymore, not with Lil Destor around. If I can't succeed in my current attempts, asking one of the many community colleges in NYC for help is my next step.

I want to save this comment because I know it has a lot of useful advice for when Lil Destor gets older.

Man, that kid is going to smack me for calling him "Lil Destor" some day...

.

Resistance — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 02:15:34 +0000

In reply to You're not twisting the

Hey Bruce, my knowledge of

Michael Wolraich — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 01:48:55 +0000

In reply to Thanks for your good wishes

Hey Bruce, my knowledge of the empirical situation is admittedly quite limited and anecdotal. If tenure does not create a significant burden for administrators, then I will allow that it's a red herring. I do note, however, that while the physical rubber rooms may be gone, there is apparently still a backlog of teacher termination cases in NYC, and the defendants are still assigned non-teaching duties while they wait: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/08/nyregion/08schools.html. Keep in mind that these only include the teachers whose alleged infractions are so egregious that they're not permitted to teach while they await arbitration.

And that's really the nub of the issue. If you require arbitration--with lawyers--to terminate someone, that seems to me like an undue burden. It would seem on its face to make it very difficult to administrators to improve school performance, and I don't understand why teachers are afforded the luxury of such protection when so many other professions do not have it.

As for the movie, I may disapprove of teacher tenure, but I don't support exploiting it to demonize unions.

You've touched on several

tmccarthy0 — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 01:42:11 +0000

In reply to In Defense of Teacher's Unions

You've touched on several issues Des, two of our children went to public school, eldest to a private Irish Christian Brothers HS, each have great advantages each have drawbacks.

The one and only time I had to deal with a teacher who had overstepped their boundaries, happened during a parent-teacher conference, where our daughters math teacher in Jr. High, actually said to my husband during her conference, that she would never make it to college, she couldn't do math, he just went over-the-deep end. Our daughter was in 7th grade, so I think she was 13 or around there. It was all my husband could do to remain calm. Everyone in this house is pretty good at math, and my husband is an Engineer, he lives and breathes math. He was pissed though, and had a few words with the teacher, but when I got home from work, well I am the trouble maker, so I crafted my letter to the Superintendent of school, the Principal of the Jr High, the School board, the Union head, I made sure to be heard, we had a huge meeting and we worked stuff out in that meeting. We got a letter of apology an assurance he wasn't going to scar another child with that type of behavior. I even suggested he might have been in the field too long and that while I was sympathetic to that, once it happens it's best to move on, rather than try to destroy a kids self esteem. And that teacher got clobbered, by everyone, immediately, so I don't believe that the system just supports every ass-wipe out there. Oh and later on when our daughter was in high school of course she took pre-calc and ap calc, but was a math tutor as all our children were while they were in high school. You definitely have to be a squeaky wheel to be heard though.

As a former community college educator, I'll say this, and this goes for the public school system, when you are dealing with people who don't get a good meal before they arrive at school, their chances of learning greatly deteriorate. Our problems are much more complex, in that we lack a basic social system where we make sure all children eat and are housed and are clothed. When your kid gets to school you'll see two things taking place, you have parents who are very involved, they take time off work to come to school, they volunteer, they support every effort their child ever makes to do anything. Well you have varying degrees of parents as well, all the way to the child who from the time they are in first grade, they get themselves up, dressed, and somehow to school. You see them as teenagers in the dead of winter, with a light jacket and shorts and old shoes with holes in them, and they are just trying to get that diploma, but they are also trying to get to the one meal guaranteed they get a day, and teachers have to deal with all of that, every single level. We will never be Finland. Sorry.

Good luck in your pursuit of mathematics, calculus is not nearly as important as understanding basic statistics!!! Hahaha. One of the best ways to study math is to head to your local community college, and let them test you to assess your skill level, knowing where you have holes in your knowledge is important to improving.

I've argued endlessly with

Peter Schwartz — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 22:19:21 +0000

In reply to In Defense of Teacher's Unions

I've argued endlessly with friends and foes alike about teachers' unions and teachers' pay and all the surrounding issues. The argument seems to boil down to two points:

• Teachers unions protect bad teachers and kick out good teachers.

• As a result, education in America is bad and our children isn't learning despite all the money we is spending.

Sometimes, the argument is elided to say: Unions have ruined American education.

What I've yet to read (and I may just have missed it) is any reason to believe that these two, intuitively plausible statements are true.

• First, there are good people and bad in ANY profession. Are there more bad teachers than, say, bad lawyers? If not, then the union hypothesis would need some tweaking.

• However many bad teachers there are--and critics are quick to say that they aren't piling on teachers, but only the unions--does it make sense to think that these bad apples have single-handedly ruined all of American education? Are responsible for our bad test scores vis a vis other countries?

• You rightly touch on the difficulty of ACCURATELY assessing a teacher's ability, especially by reference to his students' scores. How much of a student's scores are due to his previous teachers? Should we measure absolute attainment or percentage improvement? Could ANY teacher have turned a young Destor (or Peter) into a math hound...or at least someone who got As?

So many factors would seem to enter into how well a student performs and how much he improves. Teachers who teach AP classes would seem to have it easy. Those kids teach themselves. Teachers with kids who dislike or are indifferent to school have a much tougher job.

In fact, I would venture that a different skill set is required for the former than the latter? It's almost like they are doing different jobs.

• My wife, who is a newly minted teacher and a second career switcher pointed out to me that one reason bad teachers don't get fired is...there aren't a whole lot of people clamoring to take their places. Why is this?

Yes, the pay can be decent (though not so much at the beginning) depending on where you teach--but is often not very good. And you do have your summers off-- though these are often taken up with getting higher degrees and further training.

But I suspect that the ultimate obstacle for many people is...the kids. Having to deal with 100-125 kids every day...get them interested...get them to do things...many of whom may well have no interest in what you're saying or trying to do.

In most jobs, you have to work and get along with at least a few people. These people tend to be adults whose remuneration also depends on their getting along well with you.

But when you're a teacher, you may be facing 100-125 different kids a day who are going through a more or less rocky maturation process and who couldn't care less whether YOU do well or not. Some will be motivated, but many will not be. And some number of them will be disruptive and make your job that much harder.

Some folks LOVE this. But many can't handle it or don't want to handle it. So when you fire a poor performing teacher, you may not be able to him so easily, especially if his job is going to be getting young Destors and Peters interested in math.

When I look at all these other issues, the role of teachers unions in the success of the overall educational project strikes me as quite small.

Thanks for your good wishes

Bruce Levine — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 21:47:17 +0000

In reply to Bruce, tenure is more

Thanks for your good wishes Genghis. I've got a couple of comments. First, seniority when rigidly applied can be a problem in teaching as well as in other professions or crafts. But I'm just not sure how rigidly seniority really is applied in the teaching profession and how less rigid such application is than say 20 years ago. And I'm not saying that seniority cannot be better refined so as to favor quality (assuming that it can really be defined and identified). But seniority, I submit respectfully, is not something that was won for American workers without reason. Longevity for an employer, even a school district, should mean something, and hopefully you can agree with that fundamental premise.

Second, as to "for cause" terminations, I don't understand that you believe this to be a problem per se, but rather in how "for cause" has been determined in places like NYC. But the rubber rooms are gone now and their existence was the fault of all sides in what should not be such a complex situation, i.e. you want to fire a teacher, you have a hearing before an arbitrator, and the decision of the arbitrator is final and binding. I'm not sure Randi Weingarten, who is quoted in the Bruni piece destor discusses, disagrees. In short, my question is whether and to what extent the tenure issue has become a "red herring" basis to attack teacher's unions. I think, if Weingarten is to be believed, the AFT wants to be part of the solution and not just stick it's head in the sand.

Which brings me to my main point, and that is to what extent is there any empirical evidence, real evidence, that strong teacher's unions have impeded reform and ultimately improvements in education. All one need do is look to the myriad states and localities around the country where there are no unions, or where there are at best weak unions. Taking into account the relative income levels of school districts across the country, are the schools with no unions or weak unions really performing better than the unionized schools? I don't know the answer to that question.

I am certainly not sticking up for everything teacher's unions do. I have first-hand knowledge of many things I disagree with, such as resistance to non-profit involvement in certain needy districts. But I do believe we need to be exceedingly careful in this climate, this macro climate, to not simply point to teacher's union as the principal source of problems in the American educational system. And the reality is, I submit, that this movie that destor is writing about appears to be, all things equal, something other than flattering to teacher's unions, will be construed I submit sans the nuance and will only reinforce that unions are ruining education. And I'm not sure that that is at all fair; in fact I don't believe that it is fair at all.

I concur that Precalculus

moat — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 21:06:16 +0000

In reply to If you're looking for a

I concur that Precalculus Mathematics in a Nutshell is excellent. The exercises are interesting and build skills quickly.