School reformers have scored, in their view, a major victory in their efforts by winning a key court battle against teacher tenure. (Through the financial power of a Silicon Valley oligarch, naturally.) Unfortunately for the reformers, getting rid of tenure can’t fix schools– especially by their own logic.
Let’s walk through this step by step for clarity’s sake.
One major source of disagreement within educational debates is the size and scope of the problem. Among other things, I would point out that the United States has never been a leader in education or close to it, and that when our deeply econonically unequal student population is normed for economic class, our students perform quite well. But let’s focus on the very bad outcomes at the bottom of our distribution, which almost no one questions. So people like me contend that these problems are related to structural economic and sociological factors within our country. And I particularly argue that the most sensible and empirically supported position is that student-side factors are far more determinative of outcomes than teacher- or school-side factors. Who you are as an individual and who your parents are has far more to do with how you perform in educational metrics than what school you go to or teacher you have. I would argue that most people, even those who prefer ed reform policies in the abstract, assume that fact intuitively as they go about their lives. And we see this is a basic fact about education: individuals can and do move around the distribution, but for the most part, outcomes are fairly static. High kids tend to stay high. Low kids tend to stay low. Again, I think that this comports with intuitive and lived experience.
School reform types, on the other hand, ascribe very high determinative power to teachers and schools when it comes to student outcomes. They believe that student outcomes are more or less the product of teacher and school inputs. And they believe that our very poor outcomes for the bottom of the distribution are poor because of bad teaching. Further, they believe it’s hard to fix this problem because teacher unions have made it hard to fire bad teachers. Additionally, there’s the Matt Yglesias-style argument that poor parents lack the economic power to move to school districts with good teachers. I think that gets the causation precisely backwards, but it’s a coherent set of arguments. The solution, these reformers argue, is to give principals and administrators broad latitude to fire teachers, which they will take advantage of, and we will then hire more talented, more dedicated people to fill those roles.
Set aside my disagreements about where educational failure comes from and focus simply on the logic of getting rid of tenure: it’s bizarre that people who think that the problem with teaching is a talent shortage are cheering for a decision that makes teaching a less attractive profession. High school teachers make a median of about $58,000 dollars a year, elementary about $56,000 a year. Salaries top out, for the best paid in the country, at around $85,000. Meanwhile, the median salary for lawyers is about $114,000 a year. Even the lowest paid attorneys make just a little less than the median elementary school teacher. The top performers in the legal world, corporate lawyer types, can easily earn in the millions of dollars a year. And this is all true despite an enormous labor crisis for lawyers in the post-financial crisis world. Surgeons and physicians make close to $200,000 a year, with primary care physicians making close to a quarter of a million dollars a year and specialists making even more. I could go on.
Part of the deal for teachers for years has been accepting lower salary– and, increasingly, little respect, particularly from the media– in exchange for job security. With the demise of tenure, that attraction would be gone. So that’s suppose to get more talented people into the system… how, exactly? I cannot understand that logic. Teacher attrition is sky-high, with best estimates of between 40-50% leaving the profession within five years of starting. That amounts to something like a thousand teachers quitting for every school day of a given year. Anecdotally speaking, most successful, Ivy League striver-types do not consider teaching as a serious option. But why would they, when there’s so many more remunerative, less stressful, less emotionally grueling, and better respected options out there? If your argument is that a profession’s problems stems from a talent deficit, you should be doing everything to make the job more attractive, not less.
Now there’s a standard bit of argumentative kabuki that happens when this point is brought up: people announce that they would be fine with trading tenure for higher pay, a kind of more money for less job security swap. I have heard that from people all over the ideological and political map. The problem is that we’re not going to get higher pay, not on anything like a system-wide scale. Paying teachers more would require more revenues and that would mean more taxes. What’s more, American public schools are funded primarily through local and state taxes. Does anybody think that we’re going to get broad and coordinated state and local tax increases across the country to pay teachers more? Anybody? We can have a discussion about the benefits and drawbacks of this kind of a swap, but it’s irrelevant, because we’re not going to get the additional pay part and essentially nobody really thinks we are. That makes this “concession” very frustrating for me. It’s a concession that isn’t. Instead, what we’re likely to get is the demise of tenure and the same bad pay and lack of respect relative to other professions. How does that possibly jibe with an effort to hire a ton of talented and hard-working people into teaching?
And this, really, is the broader problem for ed reform types in general: they are pushing an agenda that requires them to attract and keep talented and dedicated people to teaching as a lifelong profession, and in order to create the kind of national change they want, they have to do so on a vast scale. But their preferences have the effect of making teaching a less desirable position, and more, their constant scapegoating of teachers contributes to a deep, class-ridden perception that teaching is not a profession worthy of admiration or respect. Every time reformers blame teachers for massive social and economic problem, they make the job less appealing to potential educators.
I think ed reformers have badly misidentified the source of poor performance among our poor students. But more, I think the logic of their movement just doesn’t make sense. I wish that all of these neoliberal reformers would think like neoliberals and consider the cold logic of incentives. And I would ask the big media types to be ruthlessly honest with themselves about why they didn’t go into teaching, and why so few of their elite peers did, either. They might find themselves reconsidering the value of those who go into teaching and stay there.
I would suggest that it’s misleading to describe a tentative ruling by a trial judge which 1) is not yet final, 2) does not specify any remedies or enforcement mechanism, 3) will be appealed, 4) is stayed pending appeal, 5) identifies flaws that could theoretically be fixed by the Legislature, 6) is based solely in the California State Constitution and not any federally applicable law, and 7) was issued by a California Superior Court judge (of which there are 1,500+ who say all kinds of things every day, and whose opinions are not precedential or binding on any other court or even on other California Superior Court judges), as a “victory” (much less “a major victory”). Essentially what happened is an organization convinced one elected local trial court judge of their argument. Which is not nothing, but also not “the end of tenure.”
Given all of this, the fact that, as you note, the press is indeed reporting it as such, and that pundits are now discussing it as such, is telling of the media’s capture by both this issue generally and perhaps by specific sources involved in this litigation. But this is of course a time-tested use of reform litigation of this type, as media/PR theater. And it is perfectly fine to use litigation in that way, but it’d perhaps be nice if the media were a little more aware and forthright when it is covering such litigation.
That’s a fair point. I guess I’m just reacting to it in the same spirit as the media broadly is, but you certainly aren’t wrong.
Thanks. And just to clarify, I don’t mean to criticize posts such as this one that debate the merits of tenure — precisely because this issue has gained a lot of political traction and I’m sure will move into legislatures soon, it’s certainly a useful and important debate to have. (Perhaps also of interest is this interview with Bill Koski at Stanford, which does a good job of teasing out the likely practical vs symbolic effects of the ruling: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/june/vergara-ruling-qna-061114.html
Meanwhile though, this case has raised for me a separate set of concerns about the media’s apparent inability either to understand or to communicate how the legal system works, some of which I ranted about here:
http://www.saramayeux.org/?p=821
A lot of the coverage I have seen either misunderstood or (worse?) understood but misrepresented the basis of the decision, implying that the case implicated the federal Constitution or Brown v. Board, which the opinion quotes for basically rhetorical effect (which is all you *can* really do with Brown v. Board these days, even in federal cases, but I digress).
“I think the logic of their movement just doesn’t make sense. I wish that all of these neoliberal reformers would think like neoliberals and consider the cold logic of incentives.”
It beggars belief to think that they don’t realize this, so maybe we should consider the possibility that they are operating under other than the assumed motivations.
I think your last sentence is important. I don’t believe in overarching and coordinated “conspiracies” per se, but the neoliberal attack on teachers IS part of an ideological framework that posits that ANYTHING that threatens plutocratic control of politics and society must be “crushed”. Teachers’ unions have been one of the biggest sources of funding and manpower for “liberal” causes and politicians. Thus, they must be demonized and disempowered.
And when you look at neoliberalism, I’ll believe that you’ll find the same people and organizations popping up again and again, with the same money sources.
Heck, consider ALEC alone, which has had a lot of success getting virtually identical bills passed in many states.
you are right. you can attack these ed reformer arguments on so many different fronts and they really do break down.
how about all the talk of ed reform being a civil rights issue? yesterday Chait is crowing that ed reformers have longed used the rhetoric of civil rights but now they have won a civil rights case.
how does this make any kind of sense? if eliminating teacher tenure is a civil rights issue, wouldn’t there be something resembling a popular movement behind it. am i missing some groundswell of parents demanding that teachers lose due process protections? are people just too dumb to realize that their civil rights are being trampled by teachers’ unions?
Seriously, where is the popular support for any of the ed reformer ideas? check out the story of the charter schools in newark, nj in last month’s new yorker. aside from the obscene amount of money pulled in by various consultants, the main take away from the story is that the PEOPLE of newark rejected ed reform. it became one of the main issues of the mayoral campaign & the opponent of ed reform won.
Look at Philadelphia, the school district wants to get out of the whole teaching kids business. they have been turning district-run public schools over to charter operators for years. this year,at 2 schools, they allowed the parents to vote on whether they wanted to remain a district-run public school or become a charter. the parents voted overwhelming in favor of remaining a district school despite the fact that the charter operator was promised more money than the district school. in districts all around the country, parents are standing with teachers’ unions.
it really does take a lot of gall to label your elitist nonsense ed reform ideas a civil rights issue when the vast majority of people don’t support them.
Freddie,
Why do you think elite college graduate types don’t go into teaching? Do they think it’s beneath them, that it’s for losers? Do they see teachers kind of like how middle class types view their high school classmates form working class backgrounds who went into the military or became cops?
I think Corey Robin wrote a blog post about how the affluent and highly educated people he grew up around viewed teachers as chickening out by choosing teaching to avoid the competitive and rough and tumble capitalist career tracks. That would partly explain the hostility to teacher tenure. Interestingly his peers gave him a pass because he is prof at an elite school.
Brooklyn College is an elite school?
I actually linked to that piece above. It should be perfectly clear– Corey is a great defender and friend to teachers and their unions.
I’m of a bunch of minds here. I generally agree that eliminating tenure makes the job less attractive.
But I generally disagree with this notion that getting better things to kids starting out behind just isn’t really worth it because it’s likely they will never catch up. There’s a deterministic element to this that I think is really horrible. i don’t know that we’ve ever consistently given poor kids. black kids. brown kids. kids with disabilities anywhere near what they need LONG ENOUGH to know definitively that some percentage of them might grow faster than we’ve seen to date.
In other words, until we actually invest massive amounts of money in these kids, I don’t think we can say anything about what they can and cannot achieve with any real certainty.
That said, I agree that the things we need to do are hard to do (largely because we’re a deeply racist, classist society that is actually fine with the way education works because the kids we most care about do well, as you point out).
A school can’t make up for the fact that kids don’t have good permanent housing, access to enough food, that their parents don’t have time to spend with them. It certainly can’t compensate for those kids who are homeless. For violence in their lives. The insecurity. Even a lack of sleep. Not to mention all the physical issues caused by deprivation and pollution.
Nor can it make up for the fact that middle class kids have direction, role models and a sense of why they might want to go to school (it’s not if you go to college, it’s when and which one).
Yes more resources are good (currently poor kids get less resources, and it’s interesting none of the school reformers want to address that). But to expect schools to overcome problems of material and social deprivation is insane.
What this is I think this is is what it has always been. A way for middle class/upper class people to feel better about their unearned advantages. That they earned it, without looking too closely at the structural inequalities and viciousness that make their lifestyles possible. If you want to understand the school reform movement read Dickens. Because that’s where we are now.
Finally, thank you for posting this. I came across it on andrew sullivan’s blog. I don’t understand why people think basic, capitalistic, economic principles don’t apply to education. teachers are not nuns – its not a calling, its a job.
1. teachers are better educated than the general population yet earn less money than their education-level equivalents (I have a Ph.D and make 55K, in international consulting – a job I have been offered – I could start at 175K. I choose teaching because of the job security and the time benefits and intellectual freedom – its a choice, but one I can always choose to leave as well)
2. talented ppl cost more money to hire and retain because they have options (i am stunned by anti-tenure advocates who seem to think teachers are losers unable to find any other job. A guy has a masters in chemistry – you don’t think some corporation would hire him? A 27 year old woman with a BA in Math and an MFA is getting hired by a design firm or programming company about 6 minutes after leaving teaching – yes its hyperbole, but young, talented, highly educated people are always in demand. why would they accept peonage and public insult only to have to deal with 200 13 year olds in the morning – a good percentage have learning difficulties, are on drugs (legal and not), have not eaten or bathed, have crumbling families, homes and communities. unfortunatley, social problems don’t stop at the school door. what 24 year old wants to deal with it when they could move to NY and work for google or Ogilvy. (answer – 50% don’t within 5 years)
3. No one HAS to educate your kid. they have to be convinced to do so. which means you have to pay them – you want better ppl you have to pay them more just like every other business in the world. you can’t pay them more you have to give them something they want. job security goes a long way. I had a student who tried to get me fired for giving him a B. I personally know a kindergarten teacher in Texas who was fired so the school could give a job to the wife of the new football coach. People who don’t think teachers get fired for silly, personal, vindictive reasons forgot about the Atlanta teacher fired for having a facebook picture of her holding a glass of wine.
(http://on-ajc.com/1pPNzTL)
if ppl think your going to get a Ph.D in physics with 100K student loan debt to work in a HS for 29K (starting salary in S.Dakota), mediocre health coverage, and no job security for the privileged of teaching your kid fractions you live in a fantasy land of economics – make it a poor inner city with no infrastructure (detroit) or rural country (frozen S.D.) – and you have essentially wiped out your applicant pool.
4. every teacher I know approves of getting rid of bad teachers. do it. tenure means a hearing, have it, if the faults are egregious enough to get to the point then there’s plenty of evidence. if a school is keeping a terrible teacher they are doing so for reasons other than tenure – its probably they can’t get anyone else to do the job for the money. the California ruling stated that the worst teachers were in the poorest communities – while anecdotal it makes sense to me. why would the best teachers work at the worst schools, with the least benefits, for the lowest wages? why is no one thinking of that? the worst ppl at a job will naturally collect at the worst places to work because that is where they have the most security because no one wants to replace them (and the kids need some teacher).
5. why don’t we want the best and brightest teaching? 50% quit rate means even with tenure, ppl are not staying. the loss of that much experienced talent would be a frontpage crisis at Apple, Exxon, or Goldman Sachs. Remember in 2009 when we HAD to pay bonuses to wall street traders “to keep the best and brightest” from leaving. why does it apply to wall street but not teaching?
(Answer seems to be no one cares about OTHER ppls teachers just their own kids – its why richer communities in NJ continuously voted to raise their school taxes while voting for lower state taxes). education has been and will always be expensive. its why less than 10% of americans went to college before ww2 and the gi bill. to say “we want great education” but not being willing to pay the talent seems silly and disingenuous. to say “lets get rid of incentives” but expect the costs to stay the same and the talent level to increase is simply lying. no industry works that way.
(sorry for the length, thanks for the comment space. it took several attempts and more than an hour to compose. sorry if it rambles.)
Freddie, what do you think about the critique of the way teacher compensation is extremely back-loaded, mainly due to pensions? I think this is bad for the system, and even bad for teachers, since they effectively can’t move out of state or change professions without losing out on a chance for the big back-loaded pension. I can’t see any reason to compensate a 55 year old teacher at nearly twice the level of a 40 year old teacher, but I do see a lot of problems this could cause. This is related to the tenure debate as well, but I think it’s even more important.
http://educationnext.org/golden-handcuffs/
Also see here:
http://educationnext.org/the-case-for-paying-most-teachers-the-same/
Enjoyed the post; thanks, Fredrik!
As I’m sure we all know, the attack on tenure is just one among many in the “reform” movement which has zero to do with children and learning and everything to do with ideologies and politics (and really, money). It’s not hard to be dispirited by the continuing assault upon and the continuing defense of “the teacher.”
I wrote a series of pieces on tenure two years ago. Here’s the longest of these: http://btownerrant.com/2012/03/02/tenure-perches-in-the-soul/
There is nothing to argue about here really is there? You can’t argue with a guy writing for Forbes. He’s factionally biased (and paid to be so and if he has ambitions, motivated to impress those who read Forbes).
How we answer certain questions perhaps will tell us how we understand social systems of education, how we understand a reinforced idea of success, how we understand “reform.”
For example ask, “What generally does public education seek to do?” My answer: enforce social organization–“reflect” and enforce social roles/hierarchies.
Tenure as a method of compensation DOES NOT reflect or enforce our governing social, economic and political ideas. (What is the percentage of incumbency in national politics–something like 97%? Is this not a designed bit of tenure?)
That is to say, tenure is socialist. Hell, teaching in a public institution is “socialist.” Any number of “Tea Party” believers will tell you that schools are for government propaganda. (And they’ll label these “government” schools instead of public education.) Oddly, while this is a bit of brainwashing sloganeering, it is true, right? Public Education exist to maintain the way we are ordered to the benefit of those who maintain the control of that ordering. Oligarchs love reform, they want to undercut all social stability and any chance of common “clubbing” against the outrageous theft and fraud we capitalist economics.
Note too that the more we (that is, the “we” in charge, not the commoner) invest in technology in the classroom (Khan Academy and iPads, etc.) in order to “flip it” the more we remove people from the process.
Not only does this remove a cost (personnel is expensive!) it removes the “wild card” of subversion. A teacher with tenure can offer this: the poor are kept poor, the rich are kept rich, by law; the President is a liar and a killer; the city council supports only measures that benefit the wealthy land/business owners and this does not float all boats. Etc. That is, the teacher can be open subversive.
But relational humanity–flesh to flesh, eye to eye, hand in hand–is anathema to the future for technocrats and billionaires.
I knew I’d be all over the map here. Let me end with Kenneth Burke from 1935:
If all the world were crooks, and the ideal of crookedness were enshrined in all its institutions, would you prepare a youth for citizenship by condemning thievery or by teaching him to steal? Would you ask him to work for a better world, or to get ahead by the standards of this one? There are many scrupulous people who might choose the more Machiavellian course as regards the individual. But the cooperative virtues form an important aspect of our equipment for survival as a race. And since “goodness” is fundamentally so close to social utility, when considering youth as a group (as educational theory must) even the toughest Realpolitik can lead to the conclusion that the young must be taught to reject the status quo. for in the end, a considerable percentage of “civic virtue” must be embodied in a society’s methods of production and distribution if that society is to be workable–and there are times when people must endanger themselves as individuals to benefit themselves as members of a group.
Hence the predicament in which the proponents of the “new” education have always found themselves. They begin by noting that the economic system under which we live comes pretty close to organized crookedness–i.e., the systematic effort of individuals to draw more from the communal pile than they put into it. Yet educators are by trade a peaceful lot–and here enters Anomaly One: That even in a world highly militant, the educator may most easily set himself at peace with his fellows by subscribing to the rapacious values in authority and training his students to accept things as they are. To be sure, he need not deny the evidences of trouble all about him. He may parade some modicum of discontent with the present. It is even advisable that he call for a better future, if only his pleas do not imply a basic attack upon current institutions which, if preserved, would make this better future possible. “Futurism” of this sort may be in exceptionally good repute, if the several complimentary tributes to the forward-looking uttered by the authors of Redirecting Education are evidence.
Unfortunately, it is quite reasonable that an educator’s attempts to alter the social framework in any serious respect should be resisted. A society which believes in itself and its values will insist that its schools be used to perpetuate these values. A society of crooks which firmly believed in crookedness as a “way of life” would probably insist that its children be taught how to steal. And similarly a society built around the expropriative devices of capitalism will insist that the fundamentals of expropriation be taught and hallowed. In the natural order of events, education is a function of society. If we imagine an ideal world, for instance, we think of a just and stable economic structure, with a system of education designed for teaching youth how to maintain this justice and stability.
But insofar as society is in disorder, and a group arises which questions the set of values in authority, we may expect at tendency to reverse the relationship between education and society. The dissident group wants to make education an instrument of social change. Or, in Dewey’s terminology…it wants to make society a function of education. It would make education evangelical or reformative, rather than conservative. To educate for socialism in a capitalist country, for instance, would be a schismatic, evolutionary, or revolutionary act, designed to make society a function of education. But to educate for socialism in a socialist country would be a conformist and conservative act, designed to make education a function of society.
Freddie, I’ve been reading you forever but this is the first time I’ve posted (also, I find your discussions with Michael Dougherty strangely compelling – I really appreciated your brilliant case against the emerging culture of grievance, but I’m not writing to stroke your ego). I’d like to address both your case against Ed Reformers, and your arguments against Ed Reform.
First, your case against Ed Reformers is flawed by but understable. In much (though not all and I’ll get to the other parts) of your argument against Ed Reform, you engage in a small amount ad hominem, making the case against ed reform rather than against ed reformers. And it’s understandable, as they can be annoying! Education is not a panacea, and ending poverty in the US would lift ed outcomes (and social mobility and many other things) more than would challenging tenure. A hand up, not a hand out, is a great way to spread the common cold but not the ideal way to address deep-seated social, racial, and economic disparities.
But we live in a country that spends very little on the poor, especially poor kids, and also does very little for the rougher sections of the middle class, especially lower-middle class kids. But one thing everybody gets is education! Moreover, we can actually improve schools now, because we control cities and many states, whereas the large federal anti-poverty campaigns are probably out of our control for another six years, until another census occurs and we can ungerrymander these districts and fully dismantle the institution full of crazies that is the GOP. So, until then, education, though an imperfect tool to achieve upward mobility and combat poverty, is probably the best we can do (just because a silicon billionaire supports something doesn’t make it wrong, even if he supports it for the wrong reasons!) Further, there’s no disparity between advocating for higher wages/greater social justice/better anti-poverty programs and advocating for ed reform; indeed, Whitney Tilson, just the type of hedge fund guy you plausibly would disdain, advocates for both -we can walk and chew gum at the same time (Whitney Tilson has a very honest email list on this that is very informative and might be an interesting perspective for you). As you say, ‘student-side’ factors are far more determinative of outcomes than ‘teacher- or school-side’ factors. But there is nothing preventing us from fighting for solutions to address both student-side factors and teacher-or school-side factors simultaneously. Even further than that, there are a myriad of malevolent actors (the GOP, kludginess of American national political institutions, a culture that would rather “teach a man to fish than give him a fish”) that are restricting our ability to address ‘student-side’ factors (although I honestly believe that America’s demographic trajectory and the increasing information isolation of the GOP will soon change this picture – give it 6 years). Meanwhile, there is a broad consensus around providing and significant assets put towards public education. In my hometown, DC, during the 2010-2011 school year, public schools spent $29,349 per pupil. That kind of investment should be enough to achieve results even in the face of many ‘student-side’ factors. I’m sure that I don’t have to tell you the state of DC public school students. So, even though many Ed Reformers may (DO) overstate the case that societal problems are caused by bad schools, in the specific context of the US in the next 6 years, improving schools may be the best way to address many of these societal problems.
Now, to your arguments against Ed Reform. You argue that Ed Reform makes is premised on a shortage of talented teachers, but actually makes teaching less appealing and thereby exacerbates the problem it purports to solve. It makes being a teacher a less attractive position in 3 ways that you mention; 1)Getting rid of Tenure; 2) the rhetoric of Ed Reform lowers the esteem of the profession of teaching. To start with 2), I cannot emphasize how much I disagree. You say “constant scapegoating of teachers contributes to a deep, class-ridden perception that teaching is not a profession worthy of admiration or respect. Every time reformers blame teachers for massive social and economic problem, they make the job less appealing to potential educators.” I hate hate hate this line of argument and you see it in a variety of subjects. People like you and I are different from other people. People that aggressively follow politics and public policy discussions are an extremely tiny percentage of the United States with essentially no large social or cultural influence. The idea that people arguing about tenure or standardized testing sends out this psychic vibe that makes teaching less appealing, even to engaged elites, is absurd. Nobody cares what we say. There is a similar habit on the right; saying that talking about institutional discrimination, for instance, creates a victim culture that disengages people from society, as if inner-city kids find their way to lives of crime by reading Atlantic Articles and getting mad at society. It’s just absurd to ascribe that level of cultural power to any political or policy discussion.
Now to 1). California’s tenure system awarded tenure to teachers in the spring semester of their second year of teaching. I would say that’s absurd on its face. There is no way to know if somebody is a good teacher after a year and half. Getting rid of tenure, or delaying tenure, would put us in line with other countries with superior educations systems, in which the difficulty of becoming a teacher ads to the prestige of the profession (as well as allowing for spreading best practices and removing bad teachers).
As for the charge that greater pay and less tenure is ‘kabuki’, I don’t know that that is true. After all, that notorious Michelle Rhee managed to raise teacher pay substantially in DC. Moreover, Democrats control cities and many states, we could raise taxes to pay more to teachers if we so choose. Even further, teachers unions often fight for smaller classrooms, while ed reformers don’t mind larger classrooms, so less teachers could free up funds for better pay. There’s a million ways to get better teacher pay – I’m with Matt Damon on this one; they should all be making six figures.
I honestly feel like I have unique insight into this because I was a soldier for four years. Contrary to popular perception, the military has extremely low standards and essentially guaranteed employment. As long as you show up to work in the right uniform, you will have a job, and be promoted when attaining the proper time in service. Even rapists get promoted! This level of job security did nothing to improve the prestige of the profession, with talented people leaving in disgust and the unemployable elsewhere staying in and moving up to leadership positions. Low standards, low pay, high job security, and high retirement security do no make an effective institution. High pay, high standards, the possibility of losing ones job, and employees working because they love their field not because they need another year to grab a pension – those qualities make effective institutions. And much like the unaccountable teachers unions (who at the union gets in trouble of 83 percent of DC 8th graders can’t read?), the unaccountable US military has not performed particularly well. 30K per pupil might be a lot of money for DC students, but I did the math the other day and the direct costs of the Iraq War add up to over $121K per Iraqi – and we couldn’t even rid the country of Al Qaeda!
On a brighter note, high of Harvard’s ed lab economist Roland Fryer has identified five practices that good charter schools use (and bad charter schools fail to use) and is advocating spreading them to public schools. These could really help a lot of people. You can youtube Dr. Fryer’s speeches, but here’s a paper on his work.
http://www.hamiltonproject.org/files/downloads_and_links/THP_Fryer_Charters_Brief.pdf
To be sincerely interested in the discussion and honest in your contribution you might consider identifying yourself by name.
I don’t think anyone would point to DC as a representative example of the national situation. The military and teaching are not comparable (though Teach for America would suggest the parallel–or KIPP schools might be closer in how they regard the lowly grunt teacher, and student for that matter).
I believe tenure is necessary in work that is so variable and volatile in the ways “outcomes” (i.e., human learning, intellectual growth, emotional growth, etc.) are influenced by myriad factors that cannot be adequately controlled in order to make claims of whether teachers “cause” any of them.
Statements like this make it hard to think you have much understanding of the situation: Even further, teachers unions often fight for smaller classrooms, while ed reformers don’t mind larger classrooms, so less teachers could free up funds for better pay.
Teachers are not 1) a panacea: the institution cannot have every member just like that “one great teacher I had that really changed my life”–that is narrative, or myth-making, not fact. Teachers are one part of an institutional system and arguably the “least broken” aspect of it; 2) a destroyer of hopes: ditto above.
What teachers can be to a single student is one part of a relationship that requires care and comfort and enthusiasm and for this to be plausible in a “workplace” (that is very much not the rosiest and happiest) environment many institutional factors would have to change. That is a great teacher/student experience is a one-to-one experience so increasing class size absolutely negates this “superman” opportunity for even the most upbeat and relentlessly happy person.
Any profession that requires “mutual aid” has to be given a different consideration than US style competitive consumerism. I want a teacher to be many things but to me the first thing I want is for a teacher to care about my child, your child, any child. To care. “Motivating for excellence” is an empty business speak “threat” more than anything else (not quite so bad as the Charles Tindley (Indianapolis) Charter motto, “College or Die”).
But a person charged with educating, with caring, with keeping safe, with making life good, as many as 150 kids a day is operating on a “keep your head above water” level at the best of times.
Tenure levels the “crazy-making” factor of being around so much that is unpredictable. Tenure protects the teacher and in so doing allows her to be experimental, expansive, unafraid…to put herself out into relations with children who are all so different due to social, familial, and economic considerations.
Undeniably the tenure process can be improved.
Undeniably teachers should be a very learned profession–a caregiver, an educator, a mentor, a “master” of a discipline, etc. All things that require deep and sustained learning on their part. (NOT “in-service” “methods-training” from the for-profit edupreneur idea of the moment.)
Undeniably teachers should be empathetic and should understand the fragility of the child and fragility inherent in all social situations in which there is human interaction where we are vulnerable.
Yes, teachers should come to the profession MORE and better prepared than they have been allowed to be. This is not the teacher’s fault. This is due in part to the constant state-by-state change to the institutional accrediting requirements which more often simply serve political ends.
If we cared about “our future” these ideological arguments would not be the focus (the distraction). Hell, if we cared about each other at all we would not be arguing about ways to subject students and schools to “market fundamentalism.” Real learning is “self-motivated”–that is, one has a desire to know more, to ask questions, and feel that it’s safe to be wrong when involved in those discovery investigations. A teacher needs to create an environment that fosters this.
At present, a teacher is tasked to maintain classroom discipline and get a certain number of (statistically predetermined) kids to score X on a Pearson Education exam (the US Department of Education is actually a shared fiefdom of Gates and Pearson). This fosters anxiety and “empty learning.” Yay America!
I’ve always thought that many people hate tenure because they want tenure too and our culture stands against it in its obeisance to “capitalist” management of “resources.” Like the jealous boy who wants to ruin the reputation of the woman who spurned him–if he can’t have her no one else will (want her)–that is how so many people react to tenure.
Tenure and Unions–the knee jerk response in our neoliberal moment is that “those lazy bums” want money for nothing.
And Roland Fryer is the dog and pony show for the saber metrics of education–he is a cruel joke. Besides, look at who you’re supporting. Not kids, “owners.” Just look at that advisory council on the “hamilton project” (bankers bankers everywhere!) you linked to.
Here’s one take on Fryer’s “work”: http://btownerrant.com/2012/01/24/jay-greene-and-roland-fryer-clearing-a-path-for-liberal-eugenics/
Note in the link provided below about a Roland Fryer EdLabs experiment–the one key to success is actually increasing human contact with students–not iPads or khan academy videos.)
I failed to make clear (unconscionable in such a long comment) that the Fryer push on offer by the neoliberal no-name is to undermine “professional” educators and replace them with “aids” or what Fryer calls “tutors” (i.e., wage labor, removable, movable, cogs).
One more thing to note here (though by this point this post is electronic bird cage lining):
Superintendent and principal salaries. For example, Judy DeMuth, Superintendent of the Monroe County Community School Corporation makes over 200k.
It is always frustrating to interpret education reform since one must know the true state of education to reform it and few do. I wrote a book that details what education actually is: White Chalk Crime: The REAL Reason Schools Fail. It explains just how corrupt education is. Getting rid of teacher tenure is simply one more tool for the power brokers who need absolute power over teachers. The problem is people thing our schools are focused on educating children when they are mostly focused on how much money and power they can put in their own pockets. Tenure does make sense to attract quality teachers who otherwise would not agree to work for such low pay. It also makes sense to protect good teachers from parents wanting what they want when it comes to grades etc. But when making teachers powerless is the ultimate need for the power brokers who take advantage of this system, then tenure is too much “power” to give a teacher. They must be easily purged from the system if they dare care too much about their students and refuse to go along with harmful agendas. One must understand what is to understand how to change it. Education reform is lost because it does not understand what is.
Freddie: “I think ed reformers have badly misidentified the source of poor performance among our poor students. But more, I think the logic of their movement just doesn’t make sense. I wish that all of these neoliberal reformers would think like neoliberals and consider the cold logic of incentives. And I would ask the big media types to be ruthlessly honest with themselves about why they didn’t go into teaching, and why so few of their elite peers did, either. They might find themselves reconsidering the value of those who go into teaching and stay there.”
The *stated* reasons don’t make sense, but what they do has massive internal consistency, and also has massive convergent consistency with the rest of the neoliberal movement, and the entire right.
Somebody put it this way ‘the right thinks that America’s problem is that the rich are too poor and that everybody else is too rich’. Almost every single time these guys see a non-rich person making a decent living, they hunger to see that person get taken down a notch. And that’s as much true as the base as of the elites on the right.