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Former teacher: Progressives need to better convince progressives about need for education reform

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On April 9, 2012 in Progressives and ed reform, Teacher empowerment, Unionism

Editor’s note: The set-in-stone narrative about education reform is progressives vs. conservatives, Republicans vs. Democrats, teachers unions vs. the “corporate agenda.” The truth is more complex – and more colorful. One of the more dynamic angles is the degree to which progressives are divided. In this guest post, former teacher Catherine Durkin Robinson makes a case that progressives have become too resistant to needed change - and that fellow progressives need to do a better job persuading them.

When I began working in education reform, some of my Democratic friends and fellow activists weren’t happy. Some had long railed against any attempt to change education, empower parents or hold teachers responsible for their own performance. While plenty of Democrats support reform, including President Obama, some of my friends looked at other supporters of the movement – supporters like Jeb Bush – and freaked out.

I was one of them, once.

Years ago, as a new high school social studies teacher, I wondered how testing fit into the curriculum. I looked at too many students, with hungry bellies and less than ideal home lives, and wondered how to help them learn. I looked at my special education students, too often seen as afterthoughts, and wondered how to provide the unique help they needed. They already came to me so far behind their peers. How would I reverse years of a failed system in just under 45 minutes each day?

Then I got to work.

By my eighth year of teaching, I was helping even my most challenging students learn and grow. I prepared them for important assessments without teaching to the test. I showed them history and economics could be entertaining. The recipe? An unwavering belief in my students’ ability to learn, setting high expectations for them, and working hard to follow through and do justice to those principles.

But then I looked around me.

Too many other adults in the lives of these students relied on excuses for why they couldn’t do an effective job. While passionate educators devised creative and unique lesson plans, ineffective teachers blamed parents or faulted an unfair society. Principals faulted a lack of resources and elected officials blamed others. Continue Reading →

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Forming school communities on the basis of choice

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On December 20, 2011 in General, Parent empowerment, School Choice, Teacher empowerment

Boston University professor Charles Glenn, one of redefinED’s newest contributors and an expert on comparative school choice policy, has taken to the journal First Things to further explore what he has long called the myth of the common schoool. From 1970 to 1991, Glenn served as director of urban education and equity efforts for the Massachusetts Department of Education, where he oversaw the administration of state funds for magnet schools and desegregation:

What has developed in recent decades is a substantial emptying out of the content of democratic localism in education, without a corresponding increase in real control from society as a whole. Professional educational administrators and the teachers’ unions have, between them, come to shape educational practice in countless ways that are beyond the reach of the democratic process, whether at the local, state, or national level. Seldom are real issues of how, much less why, to educate put before parents and other citizens.

Most parents have little appetite to debate these questions, but they are eager to choose among schools with distinctive missions when the alternatives are explained clearly. I saw that in Massachusetts in the 1980s when I had responsibility for promoting educational equity and worked with a dozen cities to create choice-based desegregation plans based on clear differentiation of schools. Parents were much more interested in choice than in “voice.” This in turn made it possible for the teachers in each school to work together to fashion a distinctive approach or mission that would be attractive to parents.

American education now is undergoing a reinvention of localism, in the form of charter schools and other innovations that place significant decisions back in the hands of those engaged with shaping and maintaining an individual school: teachers and other school staff (and students as appropriate) in dialogue with parents and community institutions and supporters, as in the nineteenth century. Since the barriers of distance have been greatly reduced, such school communities can be formed on the basis of choice rather than of geography.

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Hey, Mikey! They like it! (or, hope for Washington State)

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On November 3, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General, School Choice, Teacher empowerment, Unionism

Editor’s note: This entry comes from Fawn Spady, the chairwoman of the American Center for School Choice

This past week, I spoke to an “Introduction to Teaching” class at Green River Community College just south of Seattle.

I was asked to speak by a teacher who had been following the work my husband and I have done over the past 17 years to bring education choice to Washington State. She had already shown her students the movies “Waiting for Superman” and “The Lottery.” Interesting.

I thought it might be fun to take the pulse of these future teachers. Has anything changed here over the past four years that we have taken a hiatus from our education choice work? We have a liberal president in the White House who supports charter schools. Many high-tech leaders in Washington have dipped their toes in the water of education reform by lobbying the legislature for small reforms. Schools haven’t improved. The state budget is a deficit mess. Teachers union credibility has been damaged by strikes and their irrational unwillingness to consider merit pay.

Were future teachers going to be open to the possibility of education choice?

I began my presentation with a quote from one of their heroes, Steve Jobs:

I believe very strongly that if the country gave each parent a voucher … several things would happen. Number one, schools would start marketing themselves like crazy to get students. Secondly, I think you’d see a lot of new schools starting … I believe that they would do far better than any of our public schools would. The third thing you’d see is … the quality of schools again, just in a competitive marketplace, start to rise.

They were receptive. As in the old Life cereal ad, I thought to myself, “Hey, Mikey! They like it!”

I summarized our 14-year battle, gave out union dues statistics and showed them education choice Web sites from around the country. The online maps showed the spread of choice programs nationwide and provide a stark contrast to the absence of choice in Washington State.

I also showed them how their future union is willing to break campaign laws and use their money to keep them from having choices, merit pay and removing ineffective teachers.

In the end, they wanted to know what they could do. We talked about the importance of elections and picking candidates wisely based on information and not party. I told them not to let “the blob” lie to them or the public, and to help spread the truth about education choice among their friends and family. I told them that when they become teachers they need to hold their union accountable, even though it will be hard.

I feel hopeful. We will have to see how the 2012 election goes in Washington State.

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What if teacher unions played by NFL rules?

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On October 4, 2011 in General, Teacher empowerment, Unionism

Hall of Fame quarterback Fran Tarkenton got a lot of mileage out of his Wall Street Journal column exploring how the performance of NFL athletes “would steadily decline” if they organized under the same tenure and salary protections pushed by teachers unions. “The only difference between Tom Brady and the worst player in the league is a few years of step increases,” Tarkenton writes. “And if a player makes it through his third season, he can never be cut from the roster until he chooses to retire, except in the most extreme cases of misconduct.”

But Tarkenton missed an opportunity to advance the discussion further. Instead of asking, “What if the NFL played by teachers’ rules,” why not reverse that question, as only a writer in Tarkenton’s position could do effectively? Why not export free agency into teacher contracts? RedefinED host Doug Tuthill asked that question last winter:

As public education moves away from the one-size-fits-all assembly line and towards customization, teacher unions will lose market share to schools that aren’t easily covered by a master collective bargaining agreement. So they might be forced to consider other models, and pro sports unions are one. Whereas teacher unions use their collective power to disempower individuals, pro sports unions use their collective power to empower individuals.

This might presume that either Tarkenton or the WSJ are looking for new business models for unionism. That would be a bad presumption. Op-eds such as Tarkenton’s are becoming a classic staple on the Journal‘s opinion page (Remember economist Donald J. Boudreaux’s analogy between supermarkets and public schools — “Each family would be assigned to a particular supermarket according to its home address”). This may provide more entertainment than information. The nation’s financial paper of record is in a more authoritative position to redirect our arguments.

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Duffy blazed a trail for a new unionism. Who will follow?

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On September 13, 2011 in Charter Schools, General, Teacher empowerment, Unionism

A.J. Duffy, the former president of United Teachers Los Angeles and outspoken critic of charter schools, illustrated the dilemma teacher unions are facing when he recently explained why he is now running a Los Angeles charter school:

I saw that despite the promises made by the district to pilot school leaders, the district just piled the bureaucratic rules back on and never made good on the promises of autonomy. The only way to make a difference is to have real independence. Besides, charters were started in the first place from the ideas of a real union leader — Al Shanker — he wanted teacher-led schools. I want teacher-led schools. I believe that will be best for the students.

Teachers began forming industrial unions fifty years ago to protect themselves from the abuses of school districts, which were political monopolies. I became a teacher union organizer in the winter of 1978 when a colleague lost her job for rejecting the sexual advances of her boss. My two primary union mentors had both been fired in the sixties because of their political beliefs. Agriculture was king in Florida back then and the political elite ruled public education like a plantation. Workers were expected to be docile conformists who did what they were told, and any questioning of authority was not tolerated.

After a long political struggle we succeeded in implementing procedures that protected education employees from these political abuses, but unfortunately that’s where we stopped. We never used our collective power to transform these political monopolies and that failure is haunting teacher unions today. Increasingly teachers, parents and taxpayers want teacher unions to do more than protect teachers from dysfunctional school systems. They want teacher unions to help transform those systems. They want teachers to be empowered to create more diverse learning options for parents, and they want parents empowered to match their children with the learning options that best meet their needs. They want teacher unions to put the interest of teachers, parents, students and taxpayers over the interests of school districts.

By becoming a charter school operator, Duffy has put teachers and students first, but don’t expect other teacher union leaders to follow suit while they’re still in office. Teacher unions are feeling insecure at the moment and consequently are highly resistant to change. Just last spring, I watched as the Florida Education Association pushed out its talented chief of staff, Alfreda Davis, as she was trying to move the union out of its siege mentality by finding common ground with social justice efforts like the tax credit scholarship program I lead.

Nonetheless, public education is expanding beyond school districts, teacher and parent empowerment is increasing and a few teacher union leaders are beginning to speculate in private about post-industrial teacher unionism. Duffy may have been the first large urban union leader to run a charter school after leaving office, but he won’t be the last.

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Understanding our two education reform movements

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On September 6, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General, Parent empowerment, Parental Choice, School Boards, Teacher empowerment, Unionism

Two parallel and at times interdependent education reform movements are occurring in Florida. They differ in how they’re attempting to improve public education and in the political responses they’re generating.

The largest and most contentious effort is trying to improve public education by giving school districts more power over personnel decisions. Weakening tenure, tying teacher evaluations and pay to student achievement and eliminating the role of seniority in transfer decisions are core features of this district-centric reform.

Teachers strongly oppose these efforts to empower school district managers because they believe this power will be abused. Fifty-years ago teachers organized themselves into industrial unions and used their collective power to reduce the power of school district managers because too many managers were putting politics and patronage over student achievement. Today’s teachers have no intention of returning to those days without a fight.

The second reform attempts to improve public education by empowering teachers to create more diverse learning options and empowering parents to match their children with the learning options that best meet their needs. Whereas the first reform movement is focused exclusively on school districts, this second effort is advocating for greater teacher and parent empowerment in and out of school districts. School districts oppose this latter movement because they fear teachers will create — and parents will choose — learning options they don’t control, thereby causing districts to lose market share. And because the potential market share of a teacher union is tied to its school district’s market share, teacher unions also oppose this effort, even though teacher empowerment is one of its core components.

The political opposition to the within-district reforms has been more intense than to the teacher and parent empowerment movement because the empowerment reforms have focused primarily on low-income and exceptional education students and programs for these students are harder for school districts, teacher unions and Democrats to oppose. In addition, district employees are increasingly choosing non-district learning options such as charter and virtual schools for their own children. The within-district reforms, on the other hand, are universally opposed by teacher unions and elected Democrats since the impact of greater management power is more visible and threatening to teachers.

Understanding there are two distinct education reform movements occurring in Florida is a precursor to understanding the politics of improving public education in the Sunshine State. Eventually the teacher and parent empowerment movement will prevail because it is the best way to maximize public education’s greatest resource — its people. And when it does most of the contentious issues in the district-centric movement will become moot as key decision making moves from school districts to schools.

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A misplaced faith in top-down decision-making

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On June 7, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General, Parent empowerment, Teacher empowerment

David Brooks focuses again on health care in today’s New York Times, and his observations have huge implications for public education. Here are his key points:

Democrats tend to be skeptical that dispersed consumers can get enough information to make smart decisions … Democrats generally seek to concentrate decision-making and cost-control power in the hands of centralized experts … Republicans at their best are skeptical about top-down decision-making … Democrats have much greater faith in centralized expertise … Republicans … have much greater faith in the decentralized discovery process of the market … This basic debate will define the identities of the two parties for decades … In the age of the Internet and open-source technology, the Democrats are mad to define themselves as the party of top-down centralized planning.

I am a lifelong Democrat and the Florida coordinator for Democrats for Education Reform, but I agree with Brooks’ critique. Certainly in public education, continuing to centralize power in the hands of school boards and state legislatures is mad because doing so disempowers teachers and parents and ultimately undermines student achievement.

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As owners become workers, alliances shift

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On May 31, 2011 in General, Parent empowerment, Teacher empowerment

A Monday New York Times story headlined, “As Physicians’ Jobs Change, So Do Their Politics,” suggested that as doctors increasingly abandon their private practices and become employees of large health care institutions, they are no longer thinking like Republican-learning owners and instead thinking like Democratic-leaning workers. “Doctors were once overwhelmingly male and usually owned their own practices,” the article states, “but as more doctors move from business owner to shift worker, their historic alliance with the Republican Party is weakening.”

The parallels with public education are instructive. A primary rationale for government taking over public education in the mid-1800s was the need for universal access to quality education. Horace Mann and other state political leaders argued that too much decentralization was undermining quality and allowing too many children to go uneducated. Their answer was a more centralized, uniform public education system owned and managed by local governments under the guiding hand of state governments.

The industrial revolution that transformed our way of life in the 1800s also transformed how the government organized and managed public education. By the early 1900s public education had become a government-run factory with educators being assembly line workers. In the late 1950s and early 60s, teachers began organizing industrial-style unions to protect themselves from the abuses of these politically-run factories, and in doing so became a core constituency of organized labor and the Democratic Party, which is where they remain today.

According to the Times story, health care and doctors are beginning to follow a similar path. But, ironically, while doctors are abandoning their private practices to join large health care factories, teachers and parents are increasingly using charter schools, homeschooling cooperatives, dual enrollment programs, publicly-funded private school options and virtual schools to create smaller, decentralized teaching and learning options. Schools, or learning networks, with fewer than 50 students are still rare, but they’re proliferating. Perhaps in a decade or two more teachers will own private practices than doctors. Then political debates over tenure, merit pay and employee evaluations will be more common in medicine than education.

Finding the proper balance between contradictory forces is a challenge we all face in our daily lives, so it’s not surprising to see doctors and educators struggling to balance big versus small, centralized versus decentralized, and government-owned versus practitioner-owned. Despite the power of ideology, pragmatic concerns will ultimately control how these tensions are managed, although doctors should spend time in school districts talking with teachers before abandoning their medical practices and joining large health care factories. Working on an assembly line has its downsides.

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Unions and entrepreneurs — finding common ground leads to freedom for each

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On May 23, 2011 in General, Teacher empowerment, Unionism

Writing in the newest edition of The Washington Monthly, Barry C. Lynn says unions need to find common ground with entrepreneurs as a counterbalance to the centralized power of large monopolies. Here’s the crux of his argument, which has relevance for public education:

… the great middle class of twentieth-century America stood atop two foundations. One was freedom to organize the industrial workplace, to erect a ‘countervailing power’ within a necessarily hierarchical governance structure. The other was freedom from organization, the freedom to be one’s own boss, the freedom to build up a business that — thanks to anti-monopoly law — was largely safe from predation. Every American could choose the path that fit best.

School districts are monopolies with hierarchical governance structures, and over the last fifty years their employees have successfully organized industrial unions to protect themselves. But teacher unions strongly oppose the existence of entrepreneurs in public education, and they are especially hostile toward teachers being entrepreneurial and having the freedom to be their own bosses. Today’s teacher unions are the foot soldiers of school boards and protecting school board monopolies is a top priority.

Teacher unions are under siege, in part, because they insist on putting the power of school boards over the needs of teachers, parents, students and taxpayers. Embracing Lynn’s call to find common ground with entrepreneurs and abandoning their faith in school district monopolies will enable them to regain their status as a progressive force in education and the larger society.

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Two approaches to ed reform, but one may do little to reform

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On April 27, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General, Teacher empowerment, Teacher quality, Testing and Accountability, Unionism

Two divergent approaches to education reform are operating in public education today. Both are focused on improving the effectiveness and efficiency of human capital, but while one seeks greater centralization of power the other seeks greater decentralization.

Recent tenure, evaluation, seniority and merit pay reforms are examples of state government trying to improve education by giving school boards more power and mandating that they use this power to increase teacher productivity. Teacher unions, which were created to curb the power of school boards, oppose this power transfer since it’s their power that is being redistributed to school boards.

School board members seem ambivalent about receiving more centralized management power. They like having this additional power but know teacher unions, which play a significant role in local school board races, will fight them if they use it. So board members are trapped between governors and state legislators who will expect them to use these new powers to improve teaching and learning and teacher unions who will demand board members maintain the status quo.

When faced with this dilemma in Florida, our school boards have traditionally followed the letter of the law to satisfy the state while maintaining the status quo in the districts to keep peace with their unions. I predict school boards in states such as Indiana and Ohio will do the same when implementing their states’ new tenure and merit pay laws. Even though these new state tenure and merit pay laws are intended to benefit low-income children, particularly low-income children of color, they won’t because low-income families lack the political clout to counterbalance the pressure school boards will receive from college-educated, middle-class teachers.

Parental empowerment is the other education reform approach sweeping the country. Magnet schools, homeschooling, virtual schools, dual enrollment, tax credit scholarships and charter schools, among others, are enabling more parents to customize their children’s education by matching them with the learning options that best meet their needs. This latter approach is shifting power from school boards to parents and is opposed by board members and teacher unions.

Ultimately parental empowerment will be what generates systemic and sustainable improvements in publicly-funded education. As parents demand more and better learning options for their children, teachers will have more opportunities to be innovative and entrepreneurial, thereby allowing them to be more empowered, also. Unleashing the knowledge and skills of teachers and parents is the best way for public education to maximize its human resources.

Why teacher unions oppose both teacher and parent empowerment is an interesting story I’ll address in a future post.

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