GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Ken,

How many teachers union contracts have you read, and what provisions have been incompatible with high performing charter schools? (Obviously, longer required hours at school and more work days require modification of the contract, but I presume that you are referring to something else.)

Ken,

If you’re right — and I don’t think that you are — then at least one of the following must be true.

* The “high-performing charter[s] schools that [you] have visited” are better than EVERY public school with teachers union contracts. (And I think that you mean every charter school that you have visited, right?)

* Despite serious problems that would handicap even the highest performing charter schools, some public schools are able to overcome their teachers union contacts. Some just have paths or avenues to excellence that charter schools cannot access.

* These charter schools are run in ways that turn these provisions in to barriers to excellence, whereas some public schools are run in ways that do not turn them into barrier to excellence.

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

On to the provisions your cite:

1) There are many people in many fields with employment contracts that require cause for termination of employment. This is quite common in the financial industry, for example. Heck, there are even whole state that are “right to work.”

2) I don’t like the salary schedule, and it far predates teacher union contacts. But it is not at all clear to me that they are a barrier to excellence. Research has shown over and over again that teachers generally are not responsive to financial incentives, even those who work in private schools that do not have salary schedules.

3) We’ve addressed certification before. I don’t want an uncertified doctor working on my child. I don’t want an unlicesned driver to to drive my kids school bus. I don’t want a lawyer who has not be admitted to the bar to represent me in my child custody hearing. I don’t want a unlicensed architect to design my kid’s school. And I don’t want an uncertified teacher to be responsible for my kid’s education.

4) I don’t know what you are talking about. Schools can hire part time and temporary people. But when they are not temporary, they cannot be called temporary. Can you explain this some more?

5) I’ve never seen a single teachers union contract that limits the days or hours that a teacher may work. Not one, not ever. Can you actually cite one?

6) I’m not sure that class assignment is usually in a contract, and if it is I would agree with you. This is usually more of a “past practice,” that was enacted to make management decisions easier — again, predating teacher union contracts.

Hmmm….”excessively control”? What does that mean? Look, untenured teachers have to be formally observed more often than the more experienced tenured teachers. All teachers have to be evaluated every year — according to the contracts. And yet, this is often not done. That seems to fail both of your conditions (i.e. “excessively” and “control”). What counts as “excessively control.” I mean, surely there not an “excessively control” provision, is there?

9) You would be amazed at how fast a teacher can be removed, if s/he has been honestly evaluated every year. The problems that bother so many of us come in only after years of BS evalautions that wrongly gave good ratings to teachers who didn’t deserve them. But similar things happen in other fields, just in court. Document performance accurately, in any field, or you’ll be stuck with the employees — or astronomical legal bills. (The difference in union situations, generally, is that employees are fully informed of their rights. I hardly think that the solution here should be to deny people access to their rights or knowledge of their rights. Rather, the answer here is high quality supervision.)

7) Teacher evalaution is an important and worthy issue. We don’t talk about it on a serious level very often, and we certainly don’t talk about the importance of training supervisors to do it well. Sure, we talking about factoring test scores, but we know the tests are poor, especially because they don’t actually measure most of what we want teachers to important to the children. Furthermore, there is no evidence that they are instructionally sensitive — hardly a surprise, given the fact that they were not designed to be so.

I am with you that performance should be the criteria for layoffs. However, in order for that to happen, we need to be sure that we can fairly and accurately judge perfomance. And not in the general way of recognize the great teachers, the medium teacher thand poor teachers. We’d have to be able to rank them, if we were to do layoffs based on that — or at least rank the ones at the low end. Now, I actually feel that supervisors (i.e. principals) can be trained to do this, can be given criteria to look for — both in actions of the teachers and in the impacts that they have on teachers. Or, I think that they can do a better job than any of the standardized tests we yet know how to make. But unless we actually committ to that, we at least need a workable system for layoffs.

And because we know that teacher experience is positively correlated — at least up to 5 years — with all kinds of positive outcomes, why not use that? I’d rather we committed to serious performance appraisals, of course.

The time it takes to remove a teacher generally depends on what point in the year the teacher does something to tick off the principal. In my experience, most principals are content to harass teachers through the spring and let them transfer at the end of the year. I’ve seen it happen faster, but not often.

Ken,

On to the provisions!

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

2) I think that you changed your argument. First, it was flexibility, and then second it was cost. I understand that management always wants to reduce labor costs, just as unions generally want to increase compensation for labor. There’s a huge social justice argument there about what kind of compensation public servant should get. I am all for an open discussion of the level of teacher salaries, and the demands made on teachers.

Here’s a though experiment for you:if the scales were flattened how would you feel about them? That is, what if degrees obtained was not part of the equation, and the annual step for experience was just $100 dollars (keeping the same overall average, though). That would make experienced teachers only marginally more expensive than inexperienced teachers. Would that address your new concern?

3) You’ve run into the public good v. private good argument. I can’t let you choose to put your kid in a car with an unlicensed driver because that is a public hazard. Sure, you’re putting your kid at risk, but you are also putting the rest of the people on the road and/or sidewalks at risk.

Schooling is not just a private good for you or your kid. The fact is that society bears costs for the un- under- or poorly-educated. There are things as obvious as crime rates. But there are also the cost of the unemployed and poor. The business taxes of unemployment insurance. Medicaid. There is the relatively lower productivity of the under educated, a drain on the whole economy. There is the costs we are all bearing today because of the immoral folly of Wall St, when they should have been taught big important lessons that made it clear that they should not do these things. There is the cost to all of us of the failure of democracy that has followed from the poor rates of civic participation in our society, something that schools are supposed to instill.

Moreover, I don’t think that you have the (moral) right to beat or starve your child. I don’t think that you have the (moral) right to deny your child contact with other children his/her own age. I don’t think that you have the (moral) right to harm or neglect your child. Society — and its formal expression, the government — has an obligation to protect you child’s interests, even protect them from you.

And so, as the impact of your child being well or poorly educated does not just fall on you, I think that you should not be free to do whatever you want with your child’s education.

4) You misread those clauses. They don’t limit hiring. Rather, they say that if people are hired to do the work of teachers, they have to be part of the bargaining unit. If you take some of the work that has been done by teachers and assign to new people who are not teachers, they have to be members of the union, too. This means that you cannot redefine roles and responsibilities to the point that you’ve rid of yourself of the union.

(And, in actuality, they way they work is that responsibilities core to the work of teachers must done by members of the bargaining unit, but that other work can easily be done by others. The classic example is bathroom duty. Teachers don’t want to do it, and are happy to have non-teachers who are not members of the bargaining unit do it. But if you hire a full time debate coach, like Lexington High School did, he’s got to be a member of the union.)

5) The work day and year clauses are not what you represent them as. First, let’s agree that you are not talking about 6.2.2-6.2.4, right? Next, those clause do not limit the amount of time — in days a year or hours a day — that teachers work. Rather, they limit the days and hours that teachers may be REQUIRED to work.

However, they do not guarantee teachers a job a good performance ratings if they stick to those hours and days. Teachers are not paid by the hour or for overtime. And I can count on one hand the number of teachers I have known who have stuck to contractual hours. In fact, every now and then some school or district engages in a work-to-rule action, wherein they just work the contractually mandated hours. That is a considered a labor action, and is meant to show how much work teachers do outside of required hours.

Demand performance. If someone needs 20 more hours a week to live up to the standards, so be it. If they need 40 more, so be it. And if they can do it in the contactually mandated time, more power to them. These provisions don’t undermine that. They only refer to required time on site. They don’t set limits on how much teachers can work.

And — and I don’t pull this out very often — it’s insulting to anyone who has actually taught that you think that they do.

6) Read it (i.e. green dot’s assignment and transfer stuff). What’s the problem? Which aspect of it would hamper a school? How is flexibility is class assignments limited?

7) Observations. There is nothing in the green dot contract that limits the number or nature of the observations that a supervisor may perform for a given teacher. However, there must also be two “formal observations” that follow certain procedures. But these formal observations do not not limit the number or nature of other observations. So, what’s the problem. I know plenty of people who work in corporate America, and its generally considered a best practice to have standards for evaluations and feedback at least once a year — and twice a year or quarterly at the better places.

The problem is not removing a bad teacher. The problem is removing a teacher with years of good reviews. The Green Dot contract allows for teachers to be removed in less than a year.

Let me be more explicit here. There are three situations.

* Bad teacher new teacher. They can be fired that day. Period.

* Bad teacher with just one or two years of experience. They can be fired that day. Period.

* Formerly good teacher with 3 or more years of experience in state (i.e. tenure) who has turned into a bad teacher. What do you want to do with that? What a good employee’s performance drops, do you fire them summarily, or do you work with them to get better?

* Bad teacher who has always been a bad teacher who has 3 or more years of experience in state (i.e. tenure). That’s the tough one. That’s the one who is hard to fire. But the problem there is not the teaching performance. The problem there is that the teacher was not fired when s/he could easily have been, and when s/he should have been. THIS is the problem. And it’s a management/supervision issue as much as it is a union issue — more so, in my view.

9) Are you backing off on this one? You originally said, “never read a teachers’ union contract” and in this case “Layoff provisions that favor factors that are unrelated to performance.” Green Dot — the contact that you volunteered! — begins with following the law, good evaluations and “Expertise and relevant experience.” Only AFTER those is seniority considered. This is exactly what you want right? And it’s in the contract, right?

Ken,

In response to your last sentence:

You made a claim, one that I disagree with.

We can argue in the stratosphere all day, or we can look at the actual evidence or basis of your claim. Neither of us has any chance of convincing the other of anything if we don’t actually look at the evidence or basis for our views.

At times, that is messy. At times, it is detailed. But it is a necessity. Otherwise, we just shout past each other.