Author Archive | Doug Tuthill

In parent trigger debate, teachers unions sounded an awful lot like management

By Doug Tuthill on March 22, 2012

I started teaching in the fall of 1977, and by the winter of 1978 I had become a union organizer. A law authorizing public employees to participate in collective bargaining had passed a few years earlier in the Florida legislature, and public educators were actively organizing themselves into unions.

Management was hostile toward our efforts. They asserted that unions would pit teacher against teacher, and teachers against management. They said collaboration was the key to improving our working conditions – not the adversarial relationships that are inherent in unions. They set up teacher advisory councils and said we didn’t need unions. They said we had input through the councils.

Management always uses these arguments to fight union organizers, which is why I wasn’t surprised they surfaced during the recent parent trigger debate in Florida. The parent trigger legislation is part of an effort by progressive Democrats to begin unionizing parents in school districts, and management is opposing their efforts. But it’s ironic that teachers unions are also opposing parent unions and using the same arguments management used against them in the 1970s. Continue Reading →

Businesses, teachers unions benefit financially from status quo in education

By Doug Tuthill on March 21, 2012

Editor’s note: Corporate greed! Profits! Privatization! Shout the same, alarming buzz words enough – as critics of education reform are doing – and it defines the debate. But as Doug Tuthill, a former teachers union president, argues in this post, businesses benefit more from the status quo in education than they will from expanded parental choice.

Public education would not exist without the products and services provided by for-profit corporations. Every year, for-profit corporations receive billions of tax dollars from school districts to build schools and supply them with desks, books, computers, pens, pencils, paper, calculators, buses, crayons, and power to turn on the lights. And yet school choice critics continue to assert that giving parents more schooling options is a plot by for-profit corporations to make more money.

I don’t buy it.

The profit margins of businesses providing goods and services to public education are greater under the current command-and-control system because the costs of sales and servicing contracts are lower when the customers are large, centrally controlled organizations. My friend Jean Clements, who is the teachers union president in Hillsborough County, Florida, was the first person to explain this to me.

Four years ago, I asked Jean why her union refused to sell union memberships to private school teachers. Her answer? She would lose money. Jean said the membership revenue she would receive from teachers in small, non-district schools would not cover the costs of negotiating and servicing their collective bargaining contracts.

Large school districts allow teachers unions to spread their costs across a large number of members, which is why large districts are their preferred market. It’s also why unions are so opposed to public education occurring in schools not owned and managed by school districts.

I suspect the same economy-of-scale issues influencing Jean’s business decisions are also relevant for Dell, Pearson and Apple. Continue Reading →

The progressive choice: embrace school choice

By Doug Tuthill on March 6, 2012

Editor’s note: Vouchers, charters, tax-credit scholarships – all part of the right-wing conspiracy to privatize education, right? Doug Tuthill argues that it’s the political left that should champion choice – because it’s the only path to equal opportunity in education.

For progressives who believe in equal educational opportunity, the current state of school choice is problematic. As the movie “Waiting for Superman” illustrated, limited access to school choice is exacerbating inequalities. Parents who win lotteries, have the right political connections or have the money to buy homes where they want have schooling options less fortunate or less wealthy parents don’t have.

To resolve these inequities, progressives can advocate eliminating all parental choice – and force every child to attend their assigned neighborhood district school - or they can support making school choice ubiquitous.

Leveling the playing field by eliminating all parental choice is not a viable option. This solution would mean closing down all within-district choice programs such as magnet schools, alternative schools, open enrollment programs and career academies, and choice programs that occur outside school districts, including charter schools, online learning programs, homeschooling and private schools. This approach would also require eliminating the most common form of school choice: parents buying homes in their preferred school zone. To stop this practice the government would need to assign families to school zones and then require them to purchase homes in their zones. Of course, this is never going to happen. Continue Reading →

In Florida, a teachers union that doesn’t just say no

By Doug Tuthill on February 29, 2012

Editor’s note: In one of yesterday’s posts, we noted how often school choice supporters are caricatured. But truth be told, we’re not alone. Teachers unions and their members are sometimes dismissed with unflattering generalizations too. Doug Tuthill, a former teachers union president himself, pauses today to spotlight a union right here in our backyard that defies the stereotype.

Jean Clements is the teachers union president in Hillsborough County, Florida, which is the eighth largest school district in the U.S. And she and her union, the Hillsborough Classroom Teachers Association, are unique in a way that deserves national attention – and national praise. While most teacher unions are resisting efforts to systemically improve public education, Jean and her constituents have partnered with their school district to embrace innovations that are taking on all kinds of sacred cows.

Teacher unions came into being in the early 1960s to protect teachers from management decisions, most notably in the areas of employee evaluations and compensation. Consequently, teachers’ collective bargaining contracts today prescribe evaluation procedures that render evaluations irrelevant except in the most extreme cases, and standardized pay scales that treat every teacher the same, regardless of their effectiveness. So, naturally, eyebrows were raised across the country when Jean and her HCTA colleagues partnered with the Hillsborough school district to win a $100 million Gates Foundation grant to reinvent the district’s employee evaluation and compensation systems.

This wasn’t the only time Jean went out on a limb. Continue Reading →

Who you calling conservative?

By Doug Tuthill on February 27, 2012

I am a left-of-center Democrat who’s been an education reformer for 34 years and have always considered myself progressive, so I was surprised when the Ledger, a newspaper in central Florida, recently asserted that education reformers in Florida are conservative:

“Conservative education reformers are back in the state Capitol this year with an array of proposals that would strengthen alternatives to Florida’s traditional public schools, from more private school vouchers to expanded virtual education programs. But the bills promoting charter schools are generating the most resistance from public school districts.”

Now I’m not naive to the partisan politics that shape many of these debates and, given the large Republican majorities in the Florida Capitol it is hardly surprising they would be driving the agenda. But let’s pause for a moment on the term “conservative education reformers.”

I’ve always assumed traditionalists protecting the status quo were conservatives, while those advocating improvements were progressives. Had this Ledger writer shared my assumptions, he would have written, “Progressive education reformers are back in the state Capitol…”, and the next sentence would have read, “But the bills promoting charter schools are generating the most resistance from conservative public school districts.”

Even if the writer in this case is using the terms conservative and progressive as synonyms for Republican and Democrat, he still has some explaining to do. Clearly, not all charter school supporters are Republicans. President Obama is a charter school advocate, as was President Clinton, and these men are both prominent Democrats. In Florida, the original charter school bill was signed into law by the late Gov. Lawton Chiles, also a Democrat.

Given how rapidly the political landscape surrounding education reform is shifting, trying to label reformers as conservative or progressive seems counterproductive. The most successful public education reformers are values-driven pragmatists who effectively balance progressive and conservative solutions. So are education reforms conservative or progressive? They’re both.

Why it matters that compulsory education can mean private schools

By Doug Tuthill on February 6, 2012

The modern school choice movement was made possible by the 1925 Supreme Court decision, Pierce v. Society of Sisters. This unanimous decision struck down an Oregon law, which was strongly supported by the Ku Klux Klan, requiring all Oregon children be educated in government-run schools. The law was part of the KKK’s anti-Catholic campaign and was intended to force Catholic schools to close.

The court used the 14th Amendment as the basis for its decision. Writing for the court, Justice McReynolds asserted:

“The fundamental theory upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the State to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the State; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.”

As Joseph Viteritti, one of the country’s top experts in the relationship between the U.S. Constitution and school choice, has observed, the Pierce decision helped establish “the constitutionally protected right of parents to have their children educated in schools that reflected their own values, as well as the commensurate right of religious and private schools to coexist as viable alternatives to public schools.”

Unfortunately, all parents do not have an equal opportunity to exercise this constitutional right. Parents with sufficient resources may satisfy their state’s mandatory school attendance law by sending their children to secular or sectarian private schools, but parents with insufficient resources cannot. As Steve Sugarman recently wrote on this blog, just as the choices guaranteed by the Court’s Roe v. Wade decision require public funding to be fully realized, so do the choices guaranteed by the Pierce decision.

Over the last decade, school choice opponents have used state and federal constitutional provisions as the basis of legal attacks on various school choice programs, but these same provisions provide the basis for expanding and strengthening school choice. For example, if the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses require that government remain neutral when parents choose their child’s school, then shouldn’t the government provide equal financial support for the parents’ choice — regardless if the chosen school is secular or sectarian? Isn’t government putting its collective thumb on the scale when it financially supports parents to attend secular schools but not sectarian schools? And shouldn’t the Free Exercise Clause and the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee low-income parents the same access to sectarian schools as wealthy parents?

Though the Pierce decision is the better part of a century old, it may still have direct relevance to the issues playing out in a public education system that today is trying to keep pace with the individual needs of students and growing demands of parents. Liberty, equality and pluralism are so deeply embedded in the cultural DNA of America that parental choice seems inevitable.

The exception that disproves the rule

By Doug Tuthill on January 30, 2012

Public educators sometimes criticize private school choice options by contrasting them with district-run public schools they say must accept all applicants. While that take-all-comers assertion is certainly true for school districts, a Miami Herald story from last week reminds us it is not necessarily true for individual district schools. As Herald reporter Cara Fitzpatrick put it, “Securing a spot in Broward County’s most selective public schools isn’t a task for the faint of heart.”

On virtual education, some districts are learning to adapt

By Doug Tuthill on January 23, 2012

Four school districts on Florida’s east coast are joining with Indian River State College and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the world’s largest publisher of educational materials, to form a regional virtual school to compete with the Florida Virtual School (FLVS). Florida recently passed a law requiring every student to pass an online course to graduate and Florida districts are worried they’ll lose revenue if students meet this requirement by taking FLVS courses. We want “to keep the resources within the region,” said St. Lucie Schools Superintendent Michael Lannon.

After years of trying to protect their market share by denying parents choices, Florida school districts are increasingly acknowledging that parental choice is the new normal and they’ll need to improve their programs if they’re going to keep parents in district schools. Hopefully this greater emphasis on customer satisfaction will benefit students, educators, taxpayers and parents.

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