Zombie Fallacies: Discredited School Reform Ideas That Refuse To Die

 

Alright, I admit it, I’m a Paul Krugman junkie, both his op ed pieces and his blogs. He reminds me of a concept that haunts us,

 

zombie fallacies — ideas that you kill repeatedly, but refuse to die — inevitably make their appearance.

 

So, as a tribute to Halloween, let’s kill them again.

 

ATRs have can’t find a job on their own should be fired after a year or so … they’re weak teachers, they don’t even look for jobs, they are a drain on the school system.

 

The 1300 or so ATRs are teachers who were excessed when their school closed, others are newer teachers who were bumped due to budget cuts or student register decreases, or, are teachers coming back from a leave. The “pool,” costing over $100 million a year was created by the Chancellor for political reasons. He has consistently vilified ATRs and attacked their competence, without a scintilla of evidence. At the NY Post and the Daily News the line between news and opinion is not blurred, it has disappeared and the newspapers attack the UFT over the Tweed-created ATR issue. 

 

Many ATRs have applied for scores of jobs with nary an interview. They carry the stigma of a rain of attacks by the press and the Chancellor, and principals shy away. The mark of Cain, tenure and higher salary dooms them to the depressing nether-nether land of teacher ATR purgatory.

 

The Chancellor is willing to spend over $100 million of public dollars, in a climate of declining dollars and a bleak budget future, to force the union to the end of the contract bargaining process: fact-finding, in the hope that the fact-finders, the arbitrators, will issue a report supporting the Chancellor, a report by the way that is not binding.

 

The Chancellor has succeeded in driving teachers together and strengthening the union, if there ever was a strike issue the firing of ATRs would be that issue.

 

Resolution: ATRs are permanently assigned to their current positions, DOE picks up the full cost for the remainder of this year and half the cost for next year. If an ATR receives a U rating in June, 2010, they are mandated to participate in Peer Intervention Plus (PIP) for the following year. If they are truly terrible teachers the principal can prefer charges and the PIP intervener reports are admissible at the trial.

 

Rubber Rooms are filled with incompetent teachers that can’t be fired because of union rules.

 

There are about 600 DOE employees, mostly teachers. scattered in the Teacher Reassignment Centers, aka, “Rubber Rooms.” Who are they? One group have been arrested for a minor offense. The police routinely “overcharge,” charge the arrested person with a violation or crime well above what actually happened. The case eventually gets before a judge and is “Adjourned Contemplating Dismissal” or “Dismissed” outright. The teacher returns to his/her school or is dumped into the ATR pool. Another group is pulled from school due to an accusation of “verbal abuse” or “corporal punishment.” Many, many months later, sometimes more than a year, the accusation disappears and the teacher slides back to their school or the “pool.” In other cases the teacher agrees to pay a modest fine, their file is expunged and they return to school. Well under 100 cases actually go to trial and fewer reach a conclusion. With forty years and thousands of cases the case law is deep.

 

Why does the DOE waste millions? Either shortsightedness (they claim they don’t have enough attorneys, but they pay the 600), incompetence, or, once again to gain political points in the war to drastically change the union contract and state law.

 

Resolution: A rapid due process hearing before an arbitrator, similar to a grand jury, to determine whether or not the teacher can be removed.

 

A State law passed through the political clout of the union prevents student achievement data from being used in the tenure granting process, allowing endless incompetent teachers to achieve tenure.

 

Teachers serve a three year probationary period, the principal should have been in and out of the classroom a hundred or so times, conducted a score of formal observations, if inept teachers receive tenure it is the fault of the principal not the law. The teacher union is concerned that the DOE will issue a regulation: “No teacher shall receive tenure unless their class show x progress on State examinations.”

 

The end product of an outcome-based system, that ignores teaching inputs is both fatally flawed and dangerous. The scandal at Lehman High School is a prime example. If students in classroom A are exceeding expectations and students in classroom B not achieving expectations the “answer” is not giving teacher A a raise and firing teacher B. The “answer” is finding out why.

 

If we believe that teacher classroom decisions are based on evidence, on artifacts, on data, then we can only expect that the Secretary of Education follows the same pattern. Education Next, published by Harvard University argues that “…school turnaround efforts have failed more often the not.”

 

Researchers at the Chicago Consortium for School Research report,

 

 This report reveals that eight in 10 Chicago Public Schools (CPS) students displaced by school closings transferred to schools ranking in the bottom half of system schools on standardized tests. However, because most displaced students transferred from one low-performing school to another, the move did not, on average, significantly affect student achievement.

 

If Arne Duncan’s reform are seriously questioned in Chicago why is he moving ahead with the same reforms nationally. Frederick Hess at the American Enterprise Institute, as reported in the NY Times, finds

 

The Obama administration’s solution is that we’re going to make all the lousy schools better, but that’s harder than the administration has let on. The next most attractive alternative is to shut them down, and let the kids go to other schools, but this Consortium report has found that that brought little benefit to students in Chicago.

 

Arne should take his head out of the pumpkin.

Making Curriculum Matter: Does Curriculum Trump Governance and Accountability?

 Obama/Duncan are pumping $4 billion into highly targeted “Race to the Top” funding, with a host of caveats all driving a single agenda. Mayoral control, charter schools, early childhood education, state-wide student data systems, accountability-based schools and school leaders, teacher pay and evaluation fixed to pupil performance, somehow tying ed schools to the performance of their graduates’ students.

 

Nick Kristof and David Brooks , NY Times op ed writers are totally on board.

 

Interestingly no one is talking about curriculum, in other words the content of what is actually taught.

 

The one national test is the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), referred to as the “gold standard.” It is distressing that Barack and Arne are moving ahead with an agenda that ignores nationwide NAEP scores.

 

Why are some state doings much better than others?

 

Shouldn’t we be investigating the wide discrepancy among state NAEP scores?

 

The just released NAEP scores for 4th grade Mathematics places Massachusetts, as usual at the top, New York State is 26th and Illinois 34th.

 

Arne Duncan served as the Superintendent in Chicago, yet the NAEP scores in Chicago are flat during the Duncan years, just as the scores in New York City have been flat during the Klein years.

 

A Brookings Institute Report, “Don’t Forget Curriculum,” muses,

 

 But one can also imagine an administration that is staffed with policy makers who cut their teeth on policy reforms in the areas of school governance and management rather than classroom practice, people who may be oblivious to curriculum for the same reason that Bedouin don’t think much about water skiing.

 

The Report investigates the impact of the range of “innovations” that are at the heart of the administration reform efforts,

 

Curriculum vs. Other Policy Levers

Summary of Effect Sizes

Charters
Charter schools in general		0.00 mathematics
Oversubscribed NYC charter schools		0.09 mathematics
Reconstituting the teacher workforce
Merit pay for teachers in India		0.15 reading and mathematics
Teach for America		0.15 mathematics
Preschool programs
Abecedarian Preschool		0.45 reading
Head Start		0.24 letter naming
Head Start		0.00 vocabulary
Even Start		0.00 vocabulary
Nurse Practitioner Partnership		0.09 reading & math test scores
State standards		0.00 mathematics
Curriculum comparisons
More effective math curricula		0.30 mathematics
Most effective preschool curricula		0.48 vocabulary
Most effective dropout preventions		1.00 progressing in school
Most effective early reading programs		0.80 alphabetics

 

 

 Anyone interested in, “doing what works for the kids,” should pay attention to this table. The particular point estimates of effect sizes are not important, but the general range and magnitude of effects is. Curriculum effects are large compared to most popular policy levers.  

This is not to say that curriculum reforms should be pursued instead of efforts to create more choice and competition through charters, or to reconstitute the teacher workforce towards higher levels of effectiveness, or to establish high quality, intensive, and targeted preschool programs, all of which have evidence of effectiveness. It is to say that leaving curriculum reform off the table or giving it a very small place makes no sense. Let’s do what works for the kids …

 The Brookings Study has already created a flurry of comment, see Debra Viadero at Inside School Research and Curriculum Matters at Education Week.

 

Linda Perlstein over at the EWA blog goes even further in regard to Obama’s claim re: the impact of teacher quality, and, has generated some real interesting comments.

 

In his education speech to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in March, President Obama said, “From the moment students enter a school, the most important factor in their success is not the color of their skin or the income of their parents. It’s the person standing at the front of the classroom.”

To put it bluntly: “He’s wrong.”

  

Perhaps, coincidently E. D. Hirsch’s new book, The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools, has just been released. (See reviews here). Hirsch’s position is clear,

 

…the core problem with American education is that educational theorists, especially in the early grades, have for the past sixty years rejected academic content in favor of “child-centered” and “how-to” learning theories that are at odds with how children really learn.

  

Although principals can chose from a range of Support Organizations the preferred  methodology cuts across the system: the workshop model is the pedagogy of choice, in fact, in many schools deviance is considered grounds for unsatisfactory ratings.

 

One of the blurbs on the back cover of the Hirsch is by NYC Chancellor Joel Klein,

 

…he not only highlights the ‘knowledge deficit’ that has long impaired our student’s reading abilities, he also explains how this deficiency in undermining the role of education in developing an informed citizenry. With all the talk in Washington about national standards and what it means for a high school student to be ‘college ready’ this book is an essential read.” 

  

Maybe Joel should make it an essential read for his 1450 principals.

The Intractable Power of School Cultures: Why Teachers Resist Chancellors and School Culture Determines Quality Education.

 The Chancellor dubs the new principal on each shoulder with the ceremonial sword of leadership, grants him/her the scepter and the orb, and they stride onto the stage before the faculty, who snickers at the ermine clothed principal. Leadership is earned, not granted.

 

A just released report by Public Agenda finds that 40% of teachers nationally define themselves as “disheartened.”

 

the Disheartened, … which accounts for 40 percent of K-12 teachers in the United States, tend to have been teaching longer and be older than the Idealists. More than half teach in low-income schools. They are more likely to voice high levels of frustration about the school administration, disorder in the classroom, and an undue focus on testing. Only 14 percent rated their principals as “excellent” at supporting them as teachers …

 

I would say that the percent of the “disheartened” is much larger in New York City. An unintended consequence of the Joel Klein “reform” agenda has been to alienate teachers, create toxic school cultures and empower the teacher union both at the school and the city-wide level. Randi Weingarten’s brilliance has been to seize upon the discontent of her members and build strong, adversarial union chapters in schools and a powerful force on the city stage.

 

School culture is the behind-the-scenes context that reflects the values, beliefs, norms, traditions, and rituals that build up over time as people in a school work together.

It influences not only the actions of the school population, but also its motivations and spirit (Peterson, 1999).

One of the ironies is that union activism and collegial school cultures are an inverse function. A highly effective school with a totally collaborative culture has a school secretary as the chapter leader, whose sole role is to post union notices on the bulletin board.  Another school that uses lead teachers instead of assistant principals, a school in which teachers design and run the professional development, elects a chapter leader with little actual function. Schools with vibrant active chapters are frequently schools with toxic school cultures.

School cultures are thought to be located on a continuum, ranging from bureaucratic to collegial culture. And there is one type of school culture known as the “toxic culture” that is a death knell for longevity of teaching careers and an instigator of high teacher turnover in a school. The toxic culture is evident in a negative ambience where dissatisfaction is highly palpable.

Beginners in isolated settings soon abandon their initial humanistic notions about tending to students’ individual needs in favor of a routine technical culture characterized by a more custodial view, where order is stressed over learning, and where students are treated more impersonally, punitively and distrustfully. (Rosentholtz, 1991, p 73)

The Klein model lauds their increases in standardized test scores and graduation rates and points to an emphasis on accountability, the empowerment of principals and a focus on data through the Inquiry Team approach. In reality they have created toxic school cultures.

The disastrous NAEP math scores in New York State have deflated the claims of success by the chancellor. The widespread use of highly suspect unregulated credit recovery school-based programs question graduation rate figures. The State Ed Department has proposals before it to “tighten up” credit recovery.

Only 57% of 8th graders, as per Department data, with a score of 3.0 (proficient) on the State ELA test graduate within four years. Dropout rates in the City University (CUNY) system among NYC high school graduates are staggering.  The phasing out of the local diploma and replacement by the Regents diploma has NOT prepared students for college and especially for the highly competitive world of work.

Thomas Friedman in his NY Times column, quoting author Daniel Pink hits the “nail on the head,”

In a world in which more and more average work can be done by a computer, robot or talented foreigner faster, cheaper “and just as well,” vanilla doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s all about what chocolate sauce, whipped cream and cherry you can put on top. So our schools have a doubly hard task now — not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.

Bottom line: We’re not going back to the good old days without fixing our schools as well as our banks.

Principals are empowered by their staffs not by the Leadership Academy. Highly effective schools are schools in which the line between supervisor and teacher, between leaders and the lead are blurred. School cultures cannot be imposed. Angry, disheartened teachers close their doors and go through the motions. They may produce adequate scores on standardized tests, but, are they creating educated students? Students prepared to compete in this new economy?

“Accountable” schools and data-driven classroom instruction is not antithetical to a collegial school culture. Raising the bar so that the advanced eight Regents diploma is the standard requires schools in which the entire staff, from school leader, to teachers, to support staff, all have a voice and a vested interest in the success of all students.

Tom Friedman is absolutely right, we must produce “innovative and creative” students, that can only be done in school with an “innovative and creative” staff.

UFT Contract Negotiations, the Mayoral Election and NAEP Scores: Can Conflicting Interests Create Lemonade Out of Lemons?

Chris Cerf, the politics guy for Klein, and now for the Mayor must have been chortling. At a crucial time in negotiations he places the Steve Brill hatchet job, “Rubber Room” article ripping the UFT in the New Yorker, and now a scathing Nick Kristof op ed in the NY Times. His blackberry is jumping off the table, not with praise and adulation for his political acumen, but about the above the fold article on the front page of the Times highlighting spiraling NAEP Math scores in New York State sinking the Klein-Bloomberg house of cards.

 

The so far $65 million in campaign spending has primarily focused on improvements in education, can you imagine how the Thompson campaign will respond to the NAEP scores (“liar, liar, pants on fire”)?

 

Will a scant 8% point edge in the polls and an expected historic low turnout still result in a Bloomberg victory? No one has any idea. Will the UFT and Working Family Party voters, as they did in the run-off dominate the turnout?  The Bloomberg brain trust has to be squirming, by now, the sages all figured he would have a dominant double digit lead.

 

All this in the midst of a teacher contract negotiations, a contract that ends 10/31/09 (although under the Public Employee Relations Act the current contract remains in full force and effect after expiration).

 

Will Mulgrew, Bloomberg and Klein standing on the steps of City Hall on the Thursday before the November 3rd election day, haggard after an around the clock session, announcing a settlement, be a plus or a minus for Bloomberg?

 

Bloomberg: Any contract that does not eviscerate the union would normally be trashed by the NY Post and the Daily News op ed-ers and editorial writers, but, if they just endorsed Mike can they trash him and risk chasing votes to Thompson? A contract could attract some teacher and parent voters and remove “education” from the first few years of his third term agenda.

 

Mulgrew: The Stimulus package has a year to go and then the City and the State face a fiscal abyss. Locking in a two year salary increase and resolving some other thorny issues would give the union breathing space and assure Mulgrew of a win in his first voting test with the membership.

 

Klein: A contract would be a major loss, he’s on a roll, attacks on tenure, linking evaluation to pupil progress, the ATR pool, principal as CEO, Fair Student Funding are all moving forward, a lengthy, acrimonious contract negotiations would highlight the struggle and push these weighty issues to the national scene.

 

And let’s not forget that the UFT contract has repercussions beyond the environs of the five boroughs.

 

Meryl Tisch and David Steiner: The NAEP scores are a major embarrassment, somebody decided to give retired Commissioner Rick Mills a “gift,” dumbed down standardized tests and Regents exams, it is a scandal. A lengthy conflict-ridden contract fight in NYC is the last thing Tisch-Steiner need, they need cooperation from everyone, especially the teacher unions to ratchet up the state testing system and restore credibility.

 

Duncan: The reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (undoubtedly with a new name) is a major plank in the Obama-Duncan legacy, and he needs the national unions on board. A lingering battle in the largest city in the nation would be a disaster.

 

With only two weeks till election day is a settlement possible/inevitable?

 

A new contract in New Haven, lauded by Randi Weingarten, and, surprisingly, the Wall Street Journal, includes pupil achievement data in a teacher evaluation plan,

 

The contract sets out a new teacher evaluation system, one that will include student progress as a component. Only part of that component will be student test results, both parties agree, and the new contract establishes a labor-management committee to determine what constitutes “student progress” and how much weight it should be given in evaluations. The new contract also establishes high-quality intervention through a peer assistance and review program staffed by full-time, union-selected educators, and reaffirms tenure and the principle of fair dismissal for educators.

  

Is a form of the New Haven contract possible in NYC?

  

One of the 2009 UFT “Bargaining Goals” calls for the assignment of four mediators to assist in the resolution of 3020a (discharge) cases. With forty years of case law both sides can predict the outcome of cases. Well over half of the teachers in rubber rooms will eventually resolve cases before the trial, now they wait many months, sometimes more than a year before the case is resolved. The Klein administration has been willing to absorb the costs for the political benefits, maybe Bloomberg won’t.

 

The ATR pool, driven by the decision not to permanently place excessed teachers has created a “pool” of over a thousand teachers serving temporarily in schools and costing over $100 million a year. The 2007 District 79 Reorganization Agreement, currently embedded in the contract, might offer guidance for a plan to reduce the numbers in the ATR pool. 

 

It is not uncommon for contracts to create the frameworks for the settlement of difficult or complex issues (see Article 17 F of the UFT Contract, “Voluntary Severance for Excessed Personnel”), even if time runs out before the details can be hammered out.

 

Ultimately it’s Mike Bloomberg’s decision: a timely contract that includes a salary increase and moves toward the settlement of ATR pool,  ”rubber room” and Fair Student Funding could garner Bloomberg votes in the short run and create the beginnings of an alliance … perhaps Bloomberg/Mulgrew leading and engaging Tisch/Steiner and Duncan on a state and national stage.

Ouchi v Senge: Which Management Guru Should Guide NYC School Reform? Are There Lessons from the Just-Announced Nobel Prize Winners?

 Urban school systems are complex organizations, in NYC almost fifteen hundreds schools, separate quasi-independent organizations that have had innumerable management systems imposed by superintendents and chancellors.

 

The current iteration, for lack of a better term let’s call them the “Klein Years” began with the folding of the thirty-two community districts and the high school districts into ten mega pre-k-12 regions. A few years later, strongly influenced by the writings of William Ouchi the Department recast itself into the current format. Klein has frequently referred to the influence of Professor Ouchi , a professor of management at UCLA and his 2003 book “Making Schools Work.”

 

His research finds that the schools that consistently performed best also had the most decentralized management systems, in which individual principals — and not administrators in a central office — controlled school budgets and personnel.

  

A problem with the Klein-Ouchi model is the chimera, the illusion of the “bad, old centralized” bureaucracy versus the sleek, new decentralized school system. By my calculation, under the “old” system,  85-90% of teachers were hired by principals or school-based SBO committees, not assigned by the bureaucracy or by the union transfer plan. The thirty-two school districts varied greatly as far as central office controls over curricula. As far as budgets are concerned principals have “controlled their budgets” for as long as I can remember. There aren’t too many choices!!  Over 90% of  a school’s budget is used to pay teachers.

 

In reality Ouchi has been used as “cover” for a school management system that is more controlling then any in memory. While principals can select from among 14 school support organizations the differences among the organizations are meager.

 

Teachers are collectors of student achievement data, consumers of periodic assessments and in most schools required to use the “workshop” model in classroom instruction. All is driven toward achieving higher standardized test scores, measured by the School Progress Report, and guided by the Quality Review. The system has stripped schools of art and music and physical education, and, teacher after teacher describes “joyless” classrooms, using proprietary packages all geared to “the test.”

 

The network leaders within the support organizations and the superintendents, actually drivers of the Inquiry Team process, work with principals to ”support” a rigid, top-down management system, in reality antithetical to the essence of Ouchi.

 

Teachers have no “ownership” of their work, teacher collaboration is not encouraged or appreciated, in too many schools principals manage by edict trying to impose a set of core principals imposed by “on high.”

 

In the huge system that is NYC some principals manage to operate under the radar and involve staff in the myriad decisions that schools face. Chancellors invent, the few circumvent.

 

While principals generally bask in the illusion of power teachers sullenly plod under the yoke of a system, that unfortunately is not preparing students for post secondary education. By the Department’s own data only 57% of students with an 8th grade ELA score of 3.0 (proficient) graduate in four years. The college dropout rates in the NYC CUNY colleges among NYC public school graduates are appalling. The standards for entry into a four year CUNY school is the advanced diploma, earned, after excluding the entry-exam high schools, by students numbering in the single digits!!

 

Joel selected the wrong guru! Perhaps he would have been better served had he selected Peter Senge, author is the 1990 classic, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, followed by The Dance of Change: The Challenge to Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations, and Schools That Learn: A Fifth Discipline Field Book for Educators, Parents and Everyone Who Cares About Education.

 

Senge’s vision,

 

Our traditional views of leaders – as special people who set the direction, make key decisions, energize the troops – are deeply rooted in an individualistic and non systemic world view … great men (and occasionally women) who “rise to the fore” in the times of crises … they reinforce a focus on short-term events and charismatic heroes rather than on systemic forces and collective learning.

 

The new view of leadership in learning organizations centers on subtler and more important tasks. In a learning organization, leaders are designers, stewards, and teachers. They are responsible for building organizations where people continually expand their capabilities to understand complexity, clarify vision, and improve shared mental models – that is – they are responsible for learning. (5th Discipline, p. 340).

 

The just-announced Nobel Prize winners in Economics, again erodes the philosophical underpinning of the “Klein Years,” a school system that has created another parallel system of charter schools, in direct competition with public schools. A Milton Friedman model of the marketplace as the determiner of success or failure. Closing “failing” schools, opening new “small” schools with the threat of faux highly successful, unrestrained by the limitations of union contracts, charter schools haunting public schools.

 

The two Nobel Prize winners in Economics, Elinor Ostrom and Oliver E. Williamson provide an interesting counterpoint. Summarizing their findings the award announcement said:

 

Rules that are imposed from the outside or unilaterally dictated by powerful insiders have less legitimacy and are more likely to be violated. Likewise monitoring and enforcement work better when conducted by insiders than by outsiders. These principles are in stark contrast to the common view that monitoring and sanctions are the responsibility of the state and should be conducted by public employees.

 

Talking with an experienced teacher she told me,

 

Adults come up to me in the street, and recite a poem we learned in the fifth grade, or tell me I took them to art museum for the first time and they still go. I had them create a work of art, write essays reviewing other students work, our music teacher taught them to read music. Now our Leadership Academy principal has eliminated art and music and joy from classrooms. I don’t expect an adult to run up to me in the street and praise the McGraw-Hill test prep book. I’m optimistic that this too will pass … I just can’t wait to much longer and neither can my students.

Collaboration and Justice Potter Stewart: Can the Department of Education “Principal As CEO Model” and the Union “Defend Contract Rights Model” Be Reconciled?

 

There is general agreement that principals, parents and teachers working together is desirable, State Ed Department regulations establish School and District Leadership Teams and the regulations are now embedded in the new governance law.

 

Management supports collaboration within the Jack Welch/Bill Ouchi accountability framework, working together with parents and teachers as long as the arrow of accountability does not detract from the ultimate responsibility of the principal.

 

The union sees collaboration as the elected union chapter leader sitting at the table as an equal partner.

 

So, how do we define collaboration?

 

Perhaps the same definition as Judge Potter Stewart used to define pornography,

  

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that. [Emphasis added.] Justice Potter Stewart concurring in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964)   The “I know it when I see it” test.   I’ve visited Eric Nadelstern’s former school many times, a truly collaborative environment, a staff, supervisors and teachers, working together to drive an effective educational team approach to teaching and learning.   I was a guest at an SLT meeting at JHS 234, the principal, Jeff Lotto told the team, “I really don’t think it’ll work, but everyone else feels strongly about it, let’s give it a try and monitor progress.” The issue has faded in my memory, but the attitude of the principal made an impression. Trust in the opinions of teachers and parents: a true collaborative spirit.   On the other hand, a principal at an SLT meeting spending the entire meeting surreptitiously texting and not participating in any discussion.   The union can be equally at fault: the principal at a middle school and the staff agreed that the kids were too disruptive moving from classroom to classroom. The principal asked the teachers to spend a few minutes during passing in the hallway chasing the kids into their classroom. About a third actively participated, about a third intermittently and the final third complained to the UFT Chapter Leader, the suggestion was “hall patrol” and prohibited by the contract. The Chapter Leader, with the support of the union middle management vehemently complained to the principal. The Chapter Leader told the staff if anyone went into the hallways they were undercutting the union. When the principal asked for other ideas the Chapter Leader responded that wasn’t the job of the union, the union simply enforced the contract.   An accountability driven school system in which 97% of school received grades of “A” and “B” is laughable, the true Lake Woebegon effect. While some are critical of “testing,” let’s remember, we have been testing kids for as long as I can remember, Diane, when did city-wide testing begin in NYC? We argued over norm versus criterion-based tests, the accountability function was at the district level. Schools purchased “test sophistication” materials and practice, practice, practice for the months before “the test.”   Now, goals, objectives, printouts, interim assessments, predictors, inquiry teams, all designed to improve scores on tests, and, effectively discouraging any innovative thinking and any collaboration.   While collaboration may be a tool in achieving a goal I have never seen such enmity toward  principals and the Department leadership from teachers.   In an excellent article in the AFT magazine American Educator collaboration is described,   When teachers advise each other, consult with experts, think deeply about new ways to teach the material, and examine in a systematic way …. They are working in schools that have the structure and systems in place that make collaboration meaningful.   Randi Weingarten and Eric Nadelstern agree on more than they disagree. How do we free Eric from some of the misguided policies of Joel Klein and free Randi from decades of a tough, defend the contract, conflict driven culture of the teacher union? How to we get Randi and Eric, and Michael, to collaborate?   The easiest road would be to negotiate salary increases and nothing else, the pitted, twisting, road would be to take on the issues that divide management and labor and use the contract to move a system closer to the culture that Eric established as a principal with his staff.   It will take courage and is risky for management and labor. Too many principals lack collaborative skills and use the threat of U-ratings to impose their ideas and too many teachers fear anyone peeking into their classrooms.   Real leaders are risk takers and I hope that Randi and Michael and Eric take this window to leap across the abyss and move a school system in a different direction.

Teacher-Principal Created Contracts: Should Teachers and Principals Craft Work Rules at the School Level? Do Teacher Union Contracts Impede Teaching and Learning?

 Teacher contracts are a set of agreed upon sections called articles: standard legal boiler plate delineating the nature of the management/union relationship, i. e., union recognition, fair practices, salary and benefits, pension and retirement, licensure, safety and health, leaves, excessing, layoff, per session, and, the more controversial section dealing with “work rules;” programs, assignments and teaching conditions. 

 

In a 2008 study evaluating the “restrictiveness” of teacher union contracts the Fordham Foundation, a conservative think tank, ranked the NYC contract 36th out of 50 … with the second lowest ranking of “restrictive.”

 

Sol Stern, in the City Journal and Thomas Carroll, a charter school booster, in the NY Post op ed also sharply criticized the current contract on the eve of beginning of contract negotiations.

 

Criticism of  teacher union contracts only matter if they impact negatively on teaching and learning.

 

There is no evidence of any correlation between teacher union contracts and pupil achievement.  The core of the charter school philosophy is that the freedom from management regulation and union contracts will somehow result in more effective instruction and higher student achievement, an unsubstanciated philosophical underpinning.

 

Charter school advocates aver that something “different” is happening in charter schools.

 

Do teachers in unionized classrooms and teachers in non-unionized charter school classrooms do anything differently?   I doubt it, however, we have no idea.  In fact we do not know why some teachers are more effective than others.

 

In 2006 the Gates Foundation, in a report, suggests, 

 

. We propose federal support to help states measure the effectiveness of individual teachers—based on their impact on student achievement, subjective evaluations by principals and peers, and parental evaluations

  

The NYC Department of Education and the United Federation of Teachers have gone a step further and are commencing a three year study called the Measures of Effective Teaching Project. What specific classroom teacher practices impact instruction.

 

Let’s embark upon another “experiment,” allow a cohort of schools to collaboratively craft their own “work rules, both within the contract and Department policies.

 

In my view, these mis-titled ”work rules,”  are simply responses to management abuses, or a way of making some other clause of a contract more palatable to the members. Remember,  teachers must approve any new contract in a secret ballot vote.

 

I suggest that Article Seven, (“Programs, Assignments and Teaching Conditions in Schools and Programs”) be “at play.” Schools decide what sections of the article they want to remain, what sections they want to eliminate, amend or replace. In addition schools should be able to amend or ignore current Board policy.

 

1. Schools would opt to participate in the project by a super majority vote of the teaching staff and the approval of the principal.

 

2. The DOE and the UFT creates a simple mechanism by which the UFT Chapter Leader and the Principal accepts, rejects amends or creates the various relevant sections of Article Seven and Department policy.

 

3. The teaching staff, again, by a super majority accepts/rejects the school-created work rules/policy, with the approval of the Principal, and the Chancellor and the UFT President.

 

4. Limit the experiment to fifty (50) schools, with designated union staff to support.

 

5. The school-based contract would sunset at the end of the year, “buy in” would be annual.

 

If a school community, teachers and school leaders, want too, let’s allow them, within clearly delineated parameters, to become the equivalent of a charter school in the public school sector, perhaps obviating the need to “raise the charter cap” and removing the “it’s the contract” argument from the landscape.