More Excuses...

This weekend on Up with Chris Hayes, guest host Sam Seder made some brilliant points, along with his panel, addressing some of the "reform" points being made by the neo-liberal on the panel.  ("Neo-liberal" is a term I sometimes use on this blog, and what I basically mean by it is that it pretends that through specific, technocratic adjustments, we can transcend larger structural problems with capitalism that conspire to create fundamental problems of poverty and inequality in the first place.  For example, not every child is going to go to college because our economy relies upon a vast underclass making poverty wages).

This morning the NY Times (ever the neo-liberal paper of record)  this morning argues that reform of teacher evaluations is fundamental to helping poor kids, and assumes unions as the culprit in ultimately perpetuating failing schools.

That teachers’ unions in much of the country now agree that student achievement should count in evaluations at all reflects a major change from the past, when it was often argued that teaching was an “art” that could not be rigorously evaluated or, even more outrageously, that teachers should not be held accountable for student progress.

The problem is actually getting good data on student achievement. State tests give you terrible data for a variety of reasons, ultimately telling you very mixed stories about the actual effect of the teaching in the class. A quality administrator, given a proper amount of time, could look at what students are actually doing in the classroom and tell rather quickly how effective a teacher is. That so many teachers are given high rating by administrators says more about administration policy than teaching (except that so many teachers out there are doing a brilliant job in the face of terrible odds).

In the end, the push for data is driven by the notion that poor kids are being taught well enough by teachers. Yet this is often like squeezing blood from stone: parent background, etc. account overwhelmingly for student achievement, with good teaching making up a small portion of the margin.

Dealing with issues outside the classroom, by rearranging the classroom model itself - smaller classes, more aids, more counselors, etc. - are completely missing from the "reform" agenda, which primarily emphasizes accountability, testing, charters, union-busting and ending tenure.

But again, we aren't even begining to have that conversation.  When it is brought up, teachers are accused of making excuses.  Yet if teachers - the ones on the front lines every single day - feel this is the real need, what students need to be successful, who is really making excuses?

Distractions

Matt Welch at Reason finds a distasteful sign at the Wisconsin rally and has this to say about public sector unions in general:

I have written in the past about how libertarians are pretty lonely in the political scheme of things in terms of constantly being challenged to defend themselves against the "logical conclusion" of their philosophy. But I think it's time to amend that. We are witnessing the logical conclusion of the Democratic Party's philosophy, and it is this: Your tax dollars exist to make public sector unions happy. When we run out of other people's money to pay for those contracts and promises (most of which are negotiated outside of public view, often between union officials and the politicians that union officials helped elect), then we just need to raise taxes to cover a shortfall that is obviously Wall Street's fault. Anyone who doesn't agree is a bully, and might just bear an uncanny resemblance to Hitler.

This is an object lesson in cherry picking problematic elements of the rhetoric used by those with whom you disagree, in order to create a straw man.

That was a terrible sign.  But is there much evidence of that type of rhetoric elsewhere on the left?  With the Tea Party, as with right wing radio and television in general, there seems to be a definite trend.  What is more, there is a longstanding tradition on the right of a narrative that literally worries that liberalism is inherently fascistic and will lead to tyranny.  That said, it is an important reminder of how muddled thinking cripples debate.  More than anything, what the above sign did was to distract from real engagement.

Welch also makes some more serious points.  There are a couple of assumptions implicit in Welch's commentary.
1 - Because few private pensions exist, public pensions shouldn't either.
2 - Public workers shouldn't be allowed to unionize, because they'll end up capturing politicians and getting paid too much.

1 - Should private pensions not exist?  It would seem that pensions are a form of compensation set up in an environment of job stability.  For a number of reasons, they couldn't be maintained.  But does that necessarily apply in public sector work, which is almost by definition a very stable industry (we'll always need cops, teachers, firefighters, etc.)?

2 - Public workers have the same needs as private workers.  Aside from basic questions of labor rights, unions can be an invaluable way for an organization to get objective input from its "members on the ground" - middle managers are just as interested in preserving a status quo that makes themselves look good at the expense of larger truths.  (Our teachers union is greatly interested in best-practices and is often the only bottom-up link politicians and administrators have with what is really going on in the classroom.  To the extent that they are receiving information they otherwise could not that affects students, it is a structure that ultimately benefits student learning).  Any large organization is fooling themselves if they think that workers won't rationally choose to protect their jobs to avoid rocking the boat.  Often, the channels for constructive criticism simply don't exist.  (The popular television show Undercover Boss illustrated this point again and again).

The argument against political capture is valid as far as it goes.  But if you accept the argument that all workers ought to have organized advocacy, not only to benefit themselves, but to benefit the larger organization, this weighs against it.  And if you look at union-backed public compensation in general, it isn't terrible out-of-control at all.  Obviously there will be debate, but if you think public workers are living high on the hog you're sorely mistaken.  The compensation I see seems perfectly reasonable.

Welch is making a slippery slope argument when he says worries that the democratic position on public unions will lead to a political capture that will spiral out of control.  The problem with slippery slopes is that they aren't logically predictive.  Just because something could, in some perfect scenario, happen, it doesn't mean it will.   This is why we don't have speed limits of 150mph - or 10 mph for that matter.  Other pressures come to bear.  With public sector unions, that pressure has kept compensation pretty reasonable, and is certainly coming to bear now.

Yet what to make of Welch's claim that the current situation is proof that public workers will always require an increase in taxes - if tax rates were sufficient to cover compensation before, why are they inadequate now?  A picture is painted in which closed-door negotiations conspire to grab ever-more of public coffers.  Yet the public consistently supports services they are unwilling to pay for.  This schizophrenia pits public confusion (manipulated in no small part by ideologues and politicians) against sound fiscal policy.  What's more, the electoral reality is that this also reflects a bitter split between competing visions of what public services should exist to being with.

Furthermore, while the recession has hit all states, each fiscal situation is different.  It is simply not the case that state deficits can all be pinned on compensation negotiated by public unions.  Frequently, pension coffers are drawn from to finance other areas government.  To blame pensioners now is not only an unfair breach of contract, but it is a dishonest manipulation of fact.

Looking for Any Excuse

Brookside Mill workers in 1910, Knoxville, Tennessee, USA

An article in the New York Times describes the growing anger across the country directed at public service workers.  As state budgets face red ink, many are shifting their gaze towards one of the last seemingly stable sectors of the economy.  Unions are seen as shielding their members' exorbitant salaries, pensions and job stability itself.  As the economy continues to stumble, people are asking why they should continue to foot the bill for these seemingly recession-proof workers.  As the article puts it:

A new regime in state politics is venting frustration less at Goldman Sachs executives (Governor Christie vetoed a proposed “millionaire’s tax” this year) than at unions.

This is an interesting point.  There is a clear calculus being made here that unionized public sector workers are somehow less deserving of the need to sacrifice than millionaires.  This, despite the fact that most public workers clock in at the low end of the middle class pay scale.

The philosophical basis for this distinction is rooted in the conservative, meritocratic fallacy that millionaires not only deserve their wealth because of hard work, but are the active engines of economic growth.  Therefore, taxing their income would actually stifle growth.  The essential image of this picturesque fantasy is one of every millionaire out there starting new businesses or investing their money in growth-industries.  Of course, when speaking of tax breaks of $20-30K, none of these individuals is indulging in zero-sum consumption - in which their spending produces no net gain in growth; i.e. jewelry, fine leather goods or vacations in Aspen.  Of course not.

Yet what seems particularly more irksome than the notion that millionaires are magic growth machines, is the idea that lowly non-millionaires are of negligible worth to society.  Now, maybe I'm getting ahead of myself...  maybe these outraged Americans do actually value the public service workers who spend their days working for the very same "government" despised by those outraged, and who perform jobs they would just as soon not have them do at all.

But even supposing these workers are valued, why expend so much energy trying to cut back on their salaries and benefits while sparing the marginal rates of the very wealthy, unless you fundamentally don't believe those jobs are worth doing.  As the article notes, simply acting out of a sense of fairness would seem spiteful.

All of which sounds logical, except that, as Mr. Moriarty also acknowledges, such thinking also “leads to a race to the bottom.” That is, as businesses cut private sector benefits, pressure grows on government to cut pay and benefits for its employees.

An increasingly familiar complaint is that anyone should expect a pension at all.  On a recent episode of 60 minutes, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie flat out asked the question:

I think the general public thinks, 'I can't believe anybody gets a pension anymore. I've got a 401(k). It got killed in the stock market. I don't know what I'm gonna do for my retirement. I can't believe people get a pension anymore.'

Well, we know what Governor Christie thinks.  You know, maybe the minimum wage is a bad idea too.  And maybe costly workplace safety regulations.  Or overtime pay. 

I think we know where this is heading.  We've literally been there before, and conservatives are itching to take us right back.  And a recession is as good an excuse as any.

All Reform is Not Created Equal

Kevin Drum wades into the debate over the recent LA Times piece on teacher evaluation.  He quotes Democracy in America's Roger McShane at the Economist, who sees UTLA president AJ Duffy's angry reaction to the piece as symptomatic of broader union intransigence towards education-reform:

Mr Duffy's reaction fits with a broader resistance to more formal evaluation methods by teachers unions across the country. And that has coincided with extensive union efforts to defend teachers who are obviously failing our students. If the education-reform debate has come to seem like an attack on teachers, it is in large part because of the unions' misdirected passion and priorities.

This is a telling remark by McShane. He defines reform a specific way, and then argues that unions and teachers are opposed to it. Modern education-reform has essentially been based on the assumption that school failure is the fault of bad teachers. Every policy proposal has thus targeted teacher performance.

But this is completely untrue. School failure is the fault of socio-economic differences, which bad teaching only makes worse. But at failing schools, even average teachers can appear to be "bad". The idea that you can solve the achievement gap in public schools by only keeping "above-average" teachers is simply ridiculous.

What we need is education-reform that massively redistributes resources from affluent to poor schools. Every neighborhood is not equal, and thus some schools need a lot more help than others. They need extra support, smaller class sizes, longer days, after-school programs, parent counseling/classes and childcare. None of that kind of reform is happening. And that is reform that teachers will wholeheartedly embrace.

Obama vs. Teachers

Apparently the Teacher's Unions aren't too happy with the Obama administration.  For the last two years of his candidacy, Obama spoke before the NEA and the AFT.  Arne Duncan spoke before them the past two summers.  But this year

"no federal official was scheduled to speak at either convention this month, partly because union officials feared that administration speakers would face heckling"

 It's not surprising, considering how much Duncan's stated policy goals have essentially implied a form of union-busting.  It's no secret among such neo-liberal reformers that the only thing seeming to stand in the way of educational excellence is teacher's unions, which of course are "propping up bad teachers".  But this is sloppy thinking.

Davis Guggenheim, director of An Inconvenient Truth, takes aim squarely at teacher's unions in his new film Waiting for Superman on the failures of the American education system.  If reviews like this are any indication, his work will only reinforce misguided notions about what some of the real problems are. 

One interview subject, a teacher named Canada, is so effortlessly inspiring and simply noble that he may inspire your own kids to become an educator. The only place a man like this can make a difference is in a charter school, which (obviously) has a rather high enrollment list, and therefore its pupils must be chosen by lottery.

I haven't seen the film yet, but I'm assuming he's referring to Geoffrey Canada, head of the Harlem Children's Zone.  There's so much wrong with this interpretation that I'll just throw it out there as an example of the many problems union-bashing rhetoric leads to in public discourse.

Unions, as they represent teachers as a whole, have a vested interest that is going to sometimes stand in the way of dealing with poor performance.  But this is the trade-off you get for giving workers power through representation.  Any entrenched interest is going to have this problem.  This is the nature of power.  It corrupts.  If you take away unions, you have the problem of administrators abusing their power, and acting capriciously or in bad faith.  Their interest is going to be different than that of teachers, and so they're going to make calculations accordingly.

Both teachers and administrators (or politicians, or parents for that matter), can all claim to want "what's best for kids".  While that sounds nice, each has their own special structural dynamics based on how much particular authority and experience they have.  I'm reminded of an interview with Michelle Rhee, the controversial Washington D.C. superintendent who has raised much ire among teachers by pursuing an agenda of "reform" that many feel is unduly harsh and burdensome.  She essentially claimed to be "on the side of children", setting herself against the unions who presumably are not.  The statement was illustrative of why many describe her tactics as unsympathetic or "bullying".

There is some truth to the sentiment.  But being on "the side of children" can take many different forms.  An administrator could ostensibly require teachers to work an extra 10 hours a week, or do home-visits on weekends.  It might be good for children, but it would be unfair to teachers (it may end up harming children as overburdened teachers have less time for planning, etc.). 

So the framing is misleading.  An administrator has a lot of rhetorical sway in this department.  Because children are not cogs, the idea that teachers should be able to stand up for themselves - especially when it means making sacrifices that might take away from student education, seems to set them against the very students they are supposed to be educating.  But where does this end?  How many hours in the day are fair?  How much preparatory time?  How many subjects?  How many struggling learners vs. eager ones?  It's almost as if there ought to be some way for teachers to come together collectively and "bargain" with school officials...

So it's the classic story of worker organization vs. management, free labor markets vs. unions.  The trouble is that the unit of production is children - something everyone has a vested interested in.  And while society is finally waking up to the fact that not only do great achievement gaps exist in America along socio-economic and racial lines, and that their resolution is crucial to giving children their constitutionally guaranteed rights to equal citizenship, it is still having trouble understanding that the problem is simply too great to deal with effectively under current our educational regime. 

The common sense analysis would be to say that if children are failing, then the teacher is not doing their job.  But if teachers were the only issue, we would likely see student failure in relatively equal measure across districts and cities.  Yet like race and socio-economic background, student performance is highly correlated with geography.  Efforts at reform that do not take this structural inequality will only ever be looking at part of the picture.  And to the extent that current reform efforts are seeking to solve the education problem on the backs of teacher's unions, they are not only doomed to fail, but are dismissing the serious concerns of the very people who made the sacrifice to teach in the first place.

Stood-up and Undelivered

Andrew Klavan sings the praises of "teacher heroes" like Jaime Escalante, and lambastes unions, which he feels are the only thing keeping the Escalantes of the teaching profession from dominating .

The National Education Association is the largest labor union in the US, and its sister union, the American Federation of Teachers, is also huge.  With their Democratic allies, they make the firing of bad teachers almost impossible and the work of good teachers heartbreakingly difficult.  Then, ironically, they trade on the good will generated by men like Jamie Escalante and by movies like Stand and Deliver, knowing that, in Democratic Hollywood, the anti-union sequel will never be made.

I'm sorry Mr. Klavan but this post is ridiculous.  Have you spent much time in different schools, watching actual teachers and administrators work?  Escalante was an amazing teacher.  There are many amazing teachers.  There are many terrible teachers.

But teacher's unions have little to do with this.  Most teachers I know do what they do more out of a passion for their job - to help children succeed - then any monetary reward.  No one goes into teaching for the paycheck.  To the extent that they are good or bad at what they do is nothing more than a reflection of their passion for the work, and unions are largely irrelevant.

Unions do give more protection for failing teachers than they ought to.  But they also give protection to the best teachers.  It's a bargain that, in my opinion, as a teacher who has worked in environments without union representation, ultimately serves children.

At the end of the day, the problem with "teacher hero" movies is that they give a false impression of the job.   Almost by definition, they portray "good" teachers as those who will sacrifice everything in their lives for their students.  Like other real people,  most of us have families and lives outside of work.  I have daughters and a wife that need my love and attention.  I have hobbies that I enjoy and that provide me fulfillment.  Working 9-10 hour days, plus weekend grading and planning already takes up plenty of that.  It is absurd for society to expect that its teaching workforce of over 3 million make such compromises.

But beyond the sacrifices, teaching is as much an art as a science.  Escalante and the best teachers are able to get so much out of their students because they happen to possess an ability to gain rapport and respect from their students.  This isn't something that you can just show up and follow procedurally.  Teachers are all effective and ineffective in their own ways.  They have different personalities which fit with different students, and styles of learning.  An excellent teacher in a suburban school might fail miserably at a poor school, where students generally lack preparedness and social skills to succeed at adequate levels.  It takes  a special type of person to reach these kids. 

The sad fact is that these schools the work is much more difficult (imagine the difference between trying to win a race with a lamborghini vs. a yugo!); there are fewer resources, and the stress levels are vastly higher.  This creates a market force that pushes more qualified teachers out of these schools, who end up being disproportionately staffed by younger, less experienced teachers who tend to struggle even more.  The environment at these schools is often a pressure cooker in which many complicated issues arise and unions can provide protection for teachers who are facing an environment ripe for abuse.

Just to give my own example, I worked at a charter school under no contract, with no union support and situations arose which were very harmful to the students and teachers, but there was no recourse because the teachers had no power to stand up to the corrupt and incompetent administration.  Redundant and pointless meetings would be scheduled at the last minute and take up valuable planning time.  Prep periods were canceled and classes were reorganized in haphazard ways.   Facilities were left in disrepair.  Crucial student services weren't provided and behavioral consequences were left unattended to.  The community was poor and had little knowledge of what to expect from a properly run school, and so there was no pressure on the administration from parents.  The school was receiving Title I federal funding because of the low SES status of the students, yet basic services such as free and reduced lunches weren't provided.  Afters-school tutoring or money for extra-curricular programs was never provided.  Teacher evaluations on 12 different grades  were performed by a single principle who spent barely more than 30 minutes in the classroom yearly.  There was almost no leadership to speak of.  Everything was top-down and teachers were rarely asked for input on basic programmatic decisions.  Firings were often seen as capricious and arbitrary when excellent teachers were removed while incompetent teachers remained.  Yet the principle wasn't even responsible for many basic decisions either: these came from out-of-touch administrators in corporate offices 2 hours away.

So would a union have made things at our school better or worse?  I think they would have been better.  Employees would have felt protected and thus had the courage to stand up for what we felt was actively harming the students.  The administration would have been held accountable.  Would any of us had worked any less hard?  That's literally laughable.  All of us could have worked much less than we did - we are professionals after all.  Because of the administration's reckless incompetence we simply had to work harder.  I know that if I had been given a prep period (instead of being forced to do yard duty) my instruction would have been improved dramatically.

But all of this is coming from an actual teacher.  I can sit down with you and tell you in detail about my job requirements and what I think is best.  The vast majority of people commenting on education are not, or have ever been teachers.  This doesn't mean they are necessarily wrong at all.  But it does mean that they need to be very wary about judging issues in a profession that they they know little about.

The Road to King's "Other" Dream

On March 18, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a speech to striking sanitation workers in Memphis, TN. He emphasized the importance of low-skilled labor. Famous for his "I Have A Dream" speech, King was no less passionate about economic justice.

So often we overlook the worth and significance of those who are not in professional jobs, or those who are not in the so-called big jobs. But let me say to you tonight, that whenever you are engaged in work that serves humanity, and is for the building of humanity, it has dignity, and it has worth. One day our society must come to see this. One day our society will come to respect the sanitation worker if it is to survive. For the person who picks up our garbage, in the final analysis, is as significant as the physician. All labor has worth.

At the time, these were the only jobs blacks could get. Times have changed, and as racism has become an unacceptable attitude among all but the most embittered populace, opportunities have opened up for blacks in every economic sector. Yet large gaps in achievement continue to haunt us, breaking down as they do along familiar racial lines. Simply removing racism is not enough when generational poverty provides a structural barrier to equal opportunity.

King spoke of a future in which the least-valued jobs are recognized as worthy of dignified pay. And yet today, in 2010, that future still seems a long way off. Union membership is at an all-time low, but even then there are broad segments of the workforce that will always be difficult to unionize.

Many people are finally realizing that education is the key to social justice. However many still don't realize how the structural issues involved in poverty undermine our best efforts at creating quality schools.

As an education graduate student, the mantra was always - "every child can learn", with the ultimate goal of "every child going to college". But this is somewhat of an absurd proposition. One only has to ask: "Who will clean the toilets? Who will operate the registers? Who will pump the gas?"

There are just too many areas of our economy that require relatively low-skilled service. And in a market system, where wages are relative, devalued labor results in low pay. Thus an underclass is born. Housing concentrates by income and ghettos appear, society stratifies. Wealth becomes cyclical as generations conglomerate around habits of position, influenced by family and peer group behavior.

Education can break this cycle, essentially by implanting the child into an artificially designed and coordinated environment conducive to success. The fact that this so rarely actually accomplished is testament to the enormity of the task, given its myriad components that all must be coordinated with perfect and sustained simultaneity in cities and states across the nation.

Of course one of the main barriers to this endeavor is finding the political will among the populace. This is what King was up against. Because it is fundamentally a narrative of inequality, it will always be an asymmetrical proposition: the haves must sacrifice for the have-nots.

And yet this concept is in direct opposition to the classic American narrative of individualist opportunity. Even as we know that children who grow up in poverty - more specifically, with a sufficiently harmful set of risk-factors - are categorically at a disadvantage and will reliably be much less successful, we still promote the idea that they are just as able as their advantaged peers to be successful. Our policies reflect this incongruity in thinking.

And so the ball is well towards the bottom of the hill. I suppose that the problem of who to clean the floors is a "good" problem to have if every child has the option to go to college. But we certainly aren't there yet. Until then, King's words on economic justice seem as distantly in the past as they do the future. Yet through his memory we continue the conversation.

Real Education Reform

There's a lot of talk about education reform these days. Many on the left are accused of making excuses for teachers, opposing reform and doing nothing but complain about poor teacher salaries.

I'm on the left and I think teachers are underpaid, but would like to see reform. Just not in the form of union busting and straw charter schools. The bottom line is what we're all talking about are crappy student populations where the state is trying to make up for every conceivable social ill that comes to bear on each individual student.

There will be crap administrators. There will be crap teachers. But there will be great ones. No one complains about the high-scoring suburban schools, even though their structure is mostly no different than ghetto schools. In fact, I'll bet if you took the entire staff of a suburban school and swapped it with a ghetto school, your results wouldn't be that different.

We need to get out of the blame-the-schools model and focus on instituting neighborhood intervention, starting with pregnancy and continuing with early childhood home-visits, highly qualified pre-school, health services, parent support classes and incentives. Kids are entering the system 2-3 years behind, and then getting cobbled-together classroom interventions - basically requiring the teacher to single-handedly make up for a tidal wave of social capital-destruction happening outside school.

We set teachers up to fail. The amazing ones manage to achieve great things, and we then base our expectations off of them. We stick to our expensive, bloated and ineffective model - but when the vast number of teachers - as in any profession - are simply not in the 95%, we blame all teachers. Especially the ones who happen to teach in the most difficult environments, and getting the worst test scores. This is insane.

What we need will be expensive. But it will be effective. It won't require extraordinary sacrifice by teachers (whose sacrifice now is only "ordinary"). It will be scaleable nationally. It will be targeted and take into account demographic need. Suburbs won't be compared with ghettos. Parents will get the support they need. Difficult classrooms will be smaller. Poor schools will be smaller. Teachers and administrators in such schools will receive extra support. Social services personal will be on hand to intervene early and quickly.

While this may be expensive in the short term, it will pay out many times over in long-term dividends - not only in decreased late-childhood intervention, but also in social costs such as criminal justice and health services which end up costing much more. Not to mention the lack of a productive member of the workforce. Of course, those are only the practical benefits. The moral imperative is even stronger.

Which is what the real burden in all of this is: moral clarity. We need to acknowledge that poverty is being perpetuated by our current system. We need to take responsibility for those least among us and come to their aid in a real and urgent way. When a teen mother gives birth and brings her child in to school 5 years later, we cannot expect the teacher to be the only capable person in that child's life, one of 30 others, for a handful of hours a day. We can't wait that long. We can't do that little.

Before we expect more from the situation, we need to begin to expect more from ourselves.