It isn’t hard for New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg to grab the attention of both the nation’s school-reform movement and the teachers’ unions. After all, the Big Apple mayor — with the help of former schools chancellor Joel Klein and Klein’s successor, Cathy Black — has spent the past decade overhauling the country’s largest school system with such moves as shutting down more than 100 pervasive dropout factories, embracing concepts such as charter schools, and giving school principals the ability to remove laggard teachers from city classrooms.
So Bloomberg’s announcement late last month that in the event of another round of state subsidy cuts (which is likely), he would have to lay off as many as 21,000 of the city’s 80,000 teachers, garnered attention — and not only because of the size of the possible reduction in force. Bloomberg’s threat (from which he’s backpedaled slightly) was the latest flashpoint in the much wider battle between school reformers and the nation’s teachers’ unions over the array of lucrative seniority-based privileges that have made teaching the best-compensated profession in the public sector.
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Since the 1960s, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) have used their massive campaign war chests — they spent some $59.3 million in the 2009–10 election cycle alone — and collective-bargaining power to insulate teachers from the kinds of performance management found in the private sector. For Baby Boomers, who account for 26 percent of the nation’s teachers, the deals are especially sweet. A 20-year veteran can earn a base salary of $54,170 for nine months of work (and more with an advanced degree), near-lifetime employment in the form of tenure (which teachers in all but a few states earn within just three years), and a defined-benefit pension that can be worth $2 million or more over a lifetime.
The best perk of all comes in the form of reverse-seniority (or last hired–first fired) rules — long ago ditched by most of the private sector — which allow veteran teachers to keep their jobs at the expense of younger instructors regardless of their classroom performance or compensation. Such an approach was easy to adopt thanks to the fourfold increase in education spending (in constant 2007–08 dollars) between the 1959–60 and 2007–08 school years.
But now, state governments and school districts, beset by the nation’s economic malaise, the end of $103 billion in federal stimulus and bailout spending, and $1.4 trillion in pension deficits and unfunded health-care costs for retired teachers, must trim their teaching staffs. Particularly for the nation’s big-city districts — which are home to the largest concentration of dropout factories and are the leading centers for school-reform efforts — it means tossing out the very energetic yet less senior teachers they need to improve student achievement and end the culture of mediocrity. The need for more rational approaches to budget-cutting and school spending is finally giving school reformers the opportunity to push for the end of reverse-seniority layoff rules.
Washington, D.C.’s school district became the first in the nation to abandon reverse seniority in 2009 when then-chancellor Michelle Rhee laid off 266 teachers (including many longtime instructors) as part of a budget-cutting effort. The district successfully forced the AFT to ditch reverse seniority altogether in its latest contract. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Unified School District has abandoned the use of reverse seniority in 45 schools that serve its poorest students; it moved to do as part of a settlement of a suit filed last year by the American Civil Liberties Union over the impact of layoffs on student achievement at three schools. LAUSD is also lobbying California state officials to abolish the state law requiring the use of reverse seniority.
I arrived at my current public school teaching position to find I was now part of a department that contained arguably the worst teacher in the district (I could go on about why but trust me on this one) and another whose medical problems and subsequent wheel chair bound status sapped his vigor, that and some multiple battles with admin.
I support those who would give districts the opportunity to address and eventually terminate such anathemas to my profession. There are however two problems with this approach.
First, tying teacher evaluations to student achievement is of limited value. There are too many variables that affect student achievement such as a given students innate abilities, their motivation, their behavioral issues, their parents presence and their attitudes toward education, their homelife, their culture, etc.
I have no issue with evaluating teachers. There are easily identifiable characteristics that make up a good lesson. An agreed upon set of objectives can be used to evaluate a teacher to determine if they are teaching the way they are supposed to teach (hitting their objectives) and if the lesson they are teaching is done in a competent manner. This and the teachers interactions with their students should be the basis of an evaluation.
Second, focusing on teachers, while easy to do, distracts us from the ugly realities that do affect student achievement. Students must want to learn and must actually do work. Parents must value education and support it in the home environment. I could go on for a while but the point really is that going after the teachers is only really going to be a small part of the solution.
I agree there are bad teachers and there are those who should be shown the door. But it would be naive to believe that there are that many "bad" teachers out there. In my experience, there are no more bad teachers than there are bad accountants, doctors, brick layers, factory workers, cooks, policemen, or any other field you likely can think of. We would be better served by facing the realities of this complex problem than by being distracted from it by only focusing on one narrow part of a rather large problem.
I could try to comment, but Kaliix gave a very good sum up of the issues at stake. There are things outside of teacher control, that cause students to do poorly, namely parental involvement. However, merit based pay, and first in first out policies, properly implemented would be a great contribution to the teaching field.
@Kaliix: The concerns you raise are valid but there are solutions to them. While I'm not a teacher myself I am married to one and at least somewhat familiar with the testing.
Evaluations can be made relative the scores of the students in prior years rather than just raw scores. If the students improved, the teacher did well. While for an individual student the outside circumstances can chance radically year over year, for the group of students the teacher is working with, the teacher's influence is the key variable.
Your second point is also addressed by judging teachers on the difference they make rather than raw scores. Even parent involvement is something that a good teacher has some, limited but significant, influence over.
In my wife's case, she has a lot of students with very poor scores starting out, including many who shouldn't have even gotten into her class given their scores last year. While her students scores are still lower than she would like to see, they are showing significant improvement over prior years.
I recommend all to the latest book by Barbara Ravitch. After more than 40 yeares in the education establlishment, she admits that she doesn't have a clue how to improve the quality of education in the US public schools. In New York in the middle of the last decade, Bloomberg and Co. increased teacher salaries by 40%, and got zilch for results. Now, all they do is teach to the tests, and all they test is math and reading.
Several years ago I was on a school board in the mid-western middle class district. We found that it was possible to test the students at the end of each week to see if the class learned the materials. If not, it was a simple matter to repeat the lesson, so that they did. If you waited until the end of the semester, you could not go back. We also were able to see in short order which teachers could teach and which could not.
We also put in place other simple mechanisms, such as testing incoming kindrgarden kids so as to see if they were ready; demanding that teachers were qualified to teach the subjects they were assigned to teach, rather than just certified to teach; and raised the qualifications for grades. Worked wonders.
I could not get reelected to a second term, as the teachers' union flooded the field with candidates, running three of their own against me. Of course, it would have helped if the parents were paying attention. I guess what I am saying is that it is possible to make changes that make differences. However, just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic won't do much to keep the ship afloat.
You know it's funny cicero, because I am fond of saying that we have the schools we have because we choose to have them. There are simple, straight forward solutions to these problems but society in general is unwilling to do that which needs to be done.
A simple case to illustrate. I have a friend, who works in an urban district like mine, at the high school level. He was telling me, quite fondly, about the cell phone blocker he installed in his classroom and how well it works. He purchased this device because he could not effectively teach to kids who ignored the "no electronic devices" rule. Students would text, surf the web, and updates statuses during class and not being paying attention, i.e. not learning. His administration does not back their teachers because in the end, the parents WANT there kids to have the phone and don't care if it affects learning, nor do they care to enforce proper cell phone use rules with their children. And we won't even touch the problems that can come about from having to take the phone or the problems and hassles that can accompany the possession of a $400 - $500 smart phone if a student/parent wants to make your life difficult.
At the end of the day, a perfectly capable and dedicated teacher must resort to breaking multiple laws in order to realistically be able to teach in his classroom. And it is that way because we/the parents/society want it that way and in fact demand it that way.
That is the reality of parts of our society today. It is a sad commentary I think...
As to the central point of Biddle's contentions, I would have to vehemently disagree. Laying off teachers by reverse seniority is easily as stupid as the opposite approach. Why would you assume that younger less experienced teachers would do better, on average, than older more experienced ones? Because they are more familiar with up-to-the-minute progressive theories of education doggeral most recently postulated by the overwhelmingly left-wing ideology-soaked education establishment, hoping to indoctrinate our children into becoming more sympathetic "citizens of the world?" There is no evidence that younger teachers are smarter, better trained or more effective at teaching core curriculum skills to children. If anything, the opposite is more likely to be true. I know many older teachers, my wife included, who see many young ed school graduates arrive at their classrooms nearly totally ignorant of how, or even what, to teach anybody, but, perhaps, with strong liberal opinions and wonderful Microsoft PowerPoint skills. And, when they try in vain to use their most cherished techniques, and then observe their older teaching team mates using their own hard won skills to vastly greater effect, they invariably come to their more experienced colleagues for guidance in how to actually handle and teach their students what they must learn.
Cutting the teacher rolls by reverse seniority would diminish the greatest, most underrated, and least ideological resource most school systems have, their older experienced teachers, who learned how to teach before ed schools were as politicized and fraught with non-productive theory as they are now.
Yes, some older teachers get tired, burned-out and quit trying, and some are, excuse me for saying it, idiots to begin with, but they are in the minority, and any rational system would make allowances to remove obvious laggards from the rolls. But just thinning the ranks by starting with the most experienced will most likely have a very negative net effect on overall student learning.
Last, please also consider that the situation with regard to constant student testing has, in many cases, tilted beyond usefulness and become counter productive, with teachers taking so much time to perform student tests, the results of which were already obvious to good teachers before they were taken, that their overall teaching time is reduced to a level insufficient to do their best for some of their most needy students. This is a ridiculous situation, another counter-productive CYA "just do something" non-solution.
The reverse seniority rules are especially unfair and disruptive because many teachers with seniority have moved on to less-demanding support roles. They no longer have regular classroom duties, but serve as "resource teachers", pulling out groups of underachieving students to give them extra attention where needed. (They continue to earn a regular teaching salary tied to years of experience, by the way. Paying more money to teach fewer kids is a huge drag on productivity, but that's another story.)
Anyway, when school districts have to bite the bullet and make cuts, they generally try to trim support staff positions and keep as many classroom teaching positions as possible. The problem is that for retention purposes, a teacher is a teacher is a teacher, whether working in the classroom or not. Faced with being laid off, a resource teacher with seniority may be given the classroom position of a younger teacher who is let go.
So the problems with reverse seniority described in the article are compounded by the disruption of unnecessary turnover in classroom teaching positions, the difficulties faced even by experienced teachers in returning to the classroom after time away, and the injustice of displacing younger/newer teachers with staff who haven't been doing the same job.
If the evaluation is made by an individual, say the principal, the rules for judgment may be clear, but the teacher's ability to satisfy requirements would depend on a variety of non-classroom factors.
Exaggerating, a teacher's key abilities could be:
1. Ingratiating himself with the principal
2. Contributing money and time to the mayor
3. Keeping a quiet classroom, and making few demands or complaints.
Subjective evaluations can be gamed.
Then there's test results as a means to evaluate teachers. Such results are claimed to identify only the best and worst teachers, so more than a comparative few layoffs would require using outcomes which are insignificantly different.
Then, assuming tests aren't de-emphasized during the revision of NCLB, instruction would be changed (or continued) to meet requirements. Such changes would be effective only to the degree that factors outside school - the real constraint on performance - don't prevent achievement.
Teachers would of course teach to the test. That means relentless drilling on a few parts of a limited number of subjects. With almost everyone teaching exactly the same material the same way, it would be difficult for any teacher to be much worse than any other teacher.
Those teachers who are worse than mediocre would be able to conceal themselves among the mediocre masses.
That means the worst teachers will prove to be those with the worst students. The campaigns to have even marginally better students assigned to one's classes will be life-and-death desperate.
And older teachers will have to hope to take advantage of their seniority to get the right students. Because they are a bigger savings if eliminated, and if they're ever laid off, the likelihood they'll work again at their age is small. At least younger laid-off teachers are more easily hired.
The idea of removing worse teachers is good. It's identifying them that can border on impossible.
