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9486 in the collection
Union Vs. Kids
THE overhaul of public education that is now under way in New York City is much-needed and long overdue.
For all of our successes, the simple fact is that, by any measure, we are not providing at least half of our students with the skills they need to compete in the globalized, service-based economy of the 21st century. Let me repeat: At least half of our kids are not getting a basic education.
What makes this fact all the more startling is that there is nothing new about it. For more than three decades in America, we have known that public education is failing many students, especially those who grow up in poverty, are recent immigrants or have special needs. Indeed, as others have pointed out, the last third of the 20th Century can aptly be characterized as an era of constant educational reform resulting in virtually no real change.
In New York City, under the leadership of Mayor Bloomberg, we are trying to undo this dire situation and replace it with a system of 1,200-plus schools that all New Yorkers would be proud to have their own children attend.
That is not an easy thing to do, and certainly will not be accomplished if we seek only incremental changes, such as seeking funding for additional support programs. Helpful as these programs might be - and some of them can be quite helpful - they will not provide an effective systemic solution. That will require much more fundamental change.
LAST year, we began the process of fundamental change under a new state law providing for mayoral control of our schools for the first time in memory.
* A system defined by 40 separate, and largely independent, school districts - each governed by its own local politics and patronage systems - has been streamlined and restructured into a regional system designed to foster greater accountability and focus on instruction and youth development. As a result, some 30 percent of the resources previously captured by a micro-managing bureaucracy have been transferred to our schools, where the real action of teaching children takes place.
* We have implemented a tough and demanding core curriculum in both literacy and math. It is a curriculum that has worked well in our more successful schools and can work in all of our schools if implemented properly by, for example, relying on increased teacher training coupled with interim student assessments during the school year (so teachers can more easily identify kids who need support during the school year, rather than having to wait for year-end tests which are administered when it is likely too late for intervention and corrective action).
* We have developed a Leadership Academy to recruit and train a new generation of "can-do" principals who are committed to creating educational environments inside our schools that respect and support teachers and other staff and reflect a shared belief that all of our children can succeed.
* Finally, we have placed a full-time parent coordinator in each school - a close to $50 million investment - to increase parental involvement in, and support for, their kids' education.
IMPORTANT as these changes are, they need to be augmented and supported by an entirely new approach to labor-management relations in public education. We are currently governed by a set of union contracts - often hundreds of pages long - that micro-manage virtually every aspect of our school operations.
Successful schools can't operate successfully according to a system of adversarial, contract-based regulations. Schools must be much more organic in their culture. And regulatory control - externally through law or internally through contract - must be replaced by discretion at the school level and real, performance-based accountability.
This will require a radical transformation, which many in the system will find difficult to accept, but I believe such a transformation is essential.
No organization that has its incentives wholly misaligned can succeed. Take, for example, the three pillars of the teachers-union contract: de facto life tenure, lock-step pay and seniority-based assignments.
COLLECTIVELY, these provisions mean there is no employee accountability in the system, no meritocracy and no incentive to take risks or innovate. If the very best and very worst teacher - the one who works hardest and the one who simply punches a clock - get paid based on length-of-service, the system will inevitably drift toward mediocrity rather than strive for high-performance (although, thankfully, there are many exceptions among our teachers).
These principles now governing labor-management relations play themselves out in myriad ways that harm our students and teachers alike. Because of seniority rules, our newest, least experienced teachers overwhelmingly and disproportionately end up in our most challenging schools, those often characterized by major student behavior problems and other classroom management issues.
This is a total mismatch: Classroom management takes time to master and no rational system would give the toughest assignments to its least experienced professionals.
WE lose far too many new teachers each year. Teachers would benefit from a couple of years in a somewhat less challenging school to get their "sea-legs" before they go to a more difficult school. And it is not just our teachers who would be well served by a significant change in policy but so too would our kids: Those with the greatest needs deserve, at a minimum, a fair share of the human talent and experience in the system. They are not getting it now.
To similar effect is the fact that, under the teachers-union contract, we cannot use pay differentials to get talent where it is needed. For example, we have no discretion to pay more to teachers whom we want to encourage to work at more challenging schools. Similarly, we are prevented from providing incentive pay to teachers in shortage areas (like math, science, special education, and English language learners) who are in short supply and can command higher salaries from private-sector companies and from other school systems.
As a result, every year our students are left to deal with a shortage of certified teachers in those areas simply because the supply and demand curves are different for them than for other areas. Every university understands this and pays more for certain teachers than others. How can it be any different for our schools?
ANOTHER example of how the current labor-management regime strikes at the heart of accountability is the virtual impossibility of removing incompetent teachers in a timely fashion. While the vast majority of our teachers are caring, diligent and hardworking, it is an open secret among principals, parents and teachers themselves that a small but significant percentage of teachers (meaning several thousand individuals in our system) either don't have the tools to be competent teachers or don't care enough to do the hard work of teaching our kids.
The trouble is that it takes years - yes, years - and incredible amounts of time by principals and assistant principals, filling out forms and attending hearings, to go through the teacher-removal process for tenured teachers, at the end of which an arbitrator is as likely as not to put an incompetent teacher back in the classroom.
This makes absolutely no sense. Most principals, rather than investing the time and effort in what is likely to be a futile effort to pursue the disciplinary process, instead will try to convince incompetent teachers to transfer to another school (by invoking seniority rights). This kind of passing the buck may be understandable under the circumstances, but this only perpetuates incompetence in the system.
THIS forced acceptance of poor teachers is unfair - not only to the thousands of kids who suffer with them, but also to the talented, hardworking teachers who often go above and beyond for their students but are entitled to no greater reward for this effort than that given to those who won't or can't do a good job.
To be sure, teachers should be accorded reasonable due process protections and not be subject to arbitrary termination decisions by principals. But there must be a means of expeditiously removing incompetent teachers who have been given a fair opportunity to improve and have not done so.
No one wants a truly incompetent teacher - one who is perpetually late or absent, one who doesn't know grammar or how to spell, one who can't do basic math - teaching his or her child. Yet the fact is that we have quite a few of them in the system today and there is, as a practical matter, very little we can do about it.
These examples - and there are many others - demonstrate, I believe convincingly, that we need a very different approach to labor-management relations.
SOME might incorrectly suggest that advocating a new approach is "anti-union." I believe unions play a critical role in protecting worker rights and that role should be supported and respected. In this case, I don't believe that the teachers union or its members favor rules that prevent us from attracting and retaining the best teachers or that protect the most poorly-performing teachers from discharge.
I look forward to working with the union to create a set of labor-management rules that respect our teachers while simultaneously providing all of our students the quality of teaching they need and deserve.
— By Joel Klein
UNIONS VS. KIDS
New York Post On-Line Edition
2003-10-23
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/8835.htm
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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