Pedro Noguera knows that closing public schools and shifting kids to charter schools is not a remedy to the huge economic and social problems of Chicago.
What else is needed?
Archives for category: Unions
Amanda Ripley, who usually writes pro-corporate reform articles in TIME, has an article in the Wall Street Journal about how teachers in other nations embrace “reform.”
Her first example is Finland.
That is a curious example for a devotee of today’s carrot-and-stick reforms because Finland would never permit a teacher with five weeks of training to teach. As she notes, they must complete a rigorous four-year college program PLUS a master’s degree. There is no “Teach for Finland.”
Furthermore, there is NO standardized testing in Finland. Ripley doesn’t mention that.
And teachers are not evaluated by the test scores of their students, because there are no student scores.
Also, as I saw when I visited several schools in Finland, the classes are small. About 15-19 in elementary schools, in the low-to-mid 20s in the other grades. And the elementary schools are saturated with services for children that need extra help.
What’s the lesson? How can we get to be more like Finland? After all, Finland borrowed most of its pedagogical philosophy from John Dewey.
LIFE & CULTURE
September 14, 2012, 6:29 p.m. ET
Training Teachers to Embrace Reform
Chicago-style war with unions is the past. Here’s how Finland and Ontario found a new way forward
By AMANDA RIPLEY
Making sense of the Chicago teachers’ strike (where the two sides were reportedly moving toward resolution on Friday) is like trying to understand the failure of a friend’s marriage. You can’t help speculating about who’s to blame, but you’ll never really know. In truth, it doesn’t matter. Many countries have revolutionized their education systems in recent years, but not one of them has done it through strikes, walkouts or righteous indignation.
Just about every country in the developed world has a teachers’ union, so the mere presence of a union doesn’t determine the quality of a country’s schools. There is, however, a significant relationship between the professionalism of the union and the health of an education system. The all-important issue is not how easy it is to fire the worst teachers; it’s how to elevate the entire craft without going to war with teachers.
Striking Chicago public school teachers on Friday picket outside Whitney M. Young Magnet High School in Chicago.
That’s where other countries can show us a better way. Working with unions doesn’t mean turning into Mexico, where the education system has been gifted to the union in exchange for political favors—and teenagers perform at the bottom of the world in math and reading. In a few countries, politicians and union leaders have managed not only to raise expectations but to get teachers to drink from the same punch bowl as reformers.
In Finland in the 1970s, teachers had to use special diaries to record what they taught each hour. Government inspectors made sure that a rigorous national curriculum was being followed. Teachers and principals weren’t trusted to act on their own.
At the same time, however, the government began to inject professionalism into the system. The Finns shut down the middling teacher-training schools that dotted the rural landscape and moved teacher preparation into the elite universities, where only the top echelon of high-school graduates could study (something the U.S. has never attempted). Opponents said the changes were elitist, but the reformers insisted that the country had to invest in education to survive economically. Once teachers-to-be got into the universities, they were required to master their subject matter and to spend long stretches practicing in high-performing public schools.
In the 1980s and ’90s, with higher standards and more rigorous teacher training in place, the reformers injected trust. They lifted mandates and asked the teachers themselves to design a new, smarter national curriculum. Today, Finland’s teenagers score at the top of the world on international tests.
If Finland feels too remote to serve as a model for the U.S., consider Ontario, Canada. After years of labor strife in the 1990s, a new provincial premier was elected in 2003. Dalton McGuinty chose Gerard Kennedy, a critic of the old regime, as his education minister. He spent months in school cafeterias, principals’ offices and parent meetings before the negotiations began. “You couldn’t wait until you were at the bargaining table,” explains Benjamin Levin, the former deputy minister. When it came time to negotiate a new teachers’ contract in 2005, Mr. Kennedy harangued the bargainers and kept them at the table all night on more than one occasion—deflecting the distractions that normally dominate such talks—until he finally got an agreement.
The plan that emerged put pressure on Ontario’s schools to improve results and also offered more help to educators. This worked in part because Canada already had fairly rigorous and selective education colleges, so teachers had the skills to adapt to these changes. And by giving in to teachers’ requests for smaller elementary-class sizes, politicians bought themselves enormous good will.
The system in Ontario became “a virtuous circle,” says Marc Tucker, author of “Surpassing Shanghai,” a book about top-performing education systems. “When the young people came out of their training programs, they were damn good teachers. Because of that, they were able to raise public and political confidence—and when that happened, it made it possible for them to get higher salaries and even higher quality recruits into teaching.”
For the past decade, there has been a détente in labor relations in Ontario. Despite a diverse population of students, a quarter of whom were immigrants, the province’s high-school graduation rate rose from 68% to 82%. Teacher turnover also declined dramatically. In 2009, Ontario was one of the few places in the world (aside from Finland) where 15-year-olds scored very high on international tests regardless of their socioeconomic background.
Interestingly, Ontario had its own labor flare-up this week—over a proposed wage freeze and a law that could limit strikes. But coming after years of relative harmony, the response has been reasonable so far. The union urged members to temporarily stop coaching sports and limit other voluntary activities. The situation could deteriorate, but for now, the tone in Ontario is revealing.
What happened in Chicago is about more than just Chicago. It’s about the deeper problem of transforming America’s schools. For too long our education reformers have tried to create a professional teaching corps from the top down, and union leaders have fought to maintain an untenable system. Both sides need to enter the 21st century.
—Ms. Ripley is an Emerson Fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of a forthcoming book about life in the smartest countries in the world.
In this article, five “liberal” pundits are cited who never side with teachers.
If the article had looked beyond the “liberal” side, it would have added Jonathan Alter and David Brooks, who are firmly on the side of the “reformers” who blame teachers and their unions for all the ills of American education. Alter appeared in “Waiting for Superman,” where he lauded testing and accountability, and Brooks claimed that the charter schools of the Harlem Children’s Zone had closed the achievement gap and never posted a correction to acknowledge that it had not. Anyway, he is a self-proclaimed conservative so there is no reason to expect him to support teachers and public education.
There will surely be an appeal, and more rounds of litigation.
But for the moment, there is good news. A county judge in Wisconsin struck down the law promoted by Governor Scott Walker to strip most public sector workers of their collective bargaining rights.
All those trying so hard to drive a stake in the heart of unionism must be in mourning. For now.
Marcus Winters recommends using value-added assessment to get rid of “ineffective” teachers. His paper was published by the conservative Manhattan Institute, which regularly issues his and others’ critiques of unions, tenure, seniority and any kind of job protection for teachers.
Many studies–and practical experience–have demonstrated that value-added assessment is unstable, unreliable and inaccurate. A teacher with a high rating may have a low rating the next year. The National Academy of Education and the American Educational Research Association published a joint paper warning that VAA says more about which students are assigned to the class than about teacher quality.
And then there is the problem that there is no district that has been able to demonstrate that VAA actually identifies ineffective or effective teachers. When New York City published its value-added ratings, the allegedly “worst” teacher in the city taught immigrant students who cycled in and out of her class as they learned English. As Linda Darling-Hammond and others have warned, value-added assessment will encourage teachers to shun the students with the highest needs and gifted students. Neither will produce the expected gains.
It is interesting and curious that Arne Duncan’s favorite innovation happens to be the favorite solution of the right to find and fire “ineffective” teachers.
I will never understand why the rightwingers are so devoted to high-stakes testing, which is known to produce narrowing of the curriculum, teaching to the test, gaming the system, and cheating. What’s to like? Maybe they like it because it gives them a club with which to bash teachers, their unions, and public education.
The Los Angeles Times printed a thoughtful editorial about the teachers’ strike and about evaluating teachers by student test scores.
These days it is unusual to find an editorial or opinion column asking whether the tests were designed to measure teacher quality. They were not. Frankly, the test publishers ought to be yelling bloody murder about the inappropriate use of the tests, but they are making so much money that it’s hard to hear their complaints or to expect them.
I wish more writers would look at the research about the inaccuracy and instability of value-added assessment. I wish they would think a bit about how this high-stakes testing invariably leads to teaching to the test, narrowing the curriculum, score inflation, and cheating.
The one thing it does not produce is good education. If it did, we would see it in all the best private schools. But not a single one of them uses value-added assessment or even standardized tests. That would insult the intelligence of their teachers.
Andrea Gabor has a valuable post about industrial history.
The lesson from the past is clear, she says: Everyone benefits when there is trust and collaboration.
Gabor thinks it is necessary to get beyond the punitive tactics of the present–the idea that lots of teachers must be fired–and to identify evaluation models that seek to support the ongoing development of teachers.
There are important issues of tone that affect–and that erode–trust.
Some years back, Anthony Bryk and Barbara Schneider wrote an important book called Trust in Schools, in which they concluded that no school reform could take place without trust. Trust, they said, is the glue that makes reform work and stick.
It is not up to the teachers to build trust; their work is crucial but they are at the bottom of a very sharp pyramid. Building trust is the task of leadership.
It is also a test of true leadership.
From a small union local:
We are a small local of about 300 members and have become fascinated with what you are doing not just for yourselves, but for ALL of us. A million thank you’s are not enough for what you are doing for every teacher in America…. the informed, the uninformed, the unionized, the non-unionized. You are fighting to restore a sense of dignity to our profession. You are telling the word that we are tired of being kicked around and you are making people take notice! At no point in the last several years have important education issues been discussed in the MSM the way you have made them this week. In my decade as an educator your fight is the most inspiring, moving, heartening, and important thing that has happened to public education. You’ve been the main topic of talk of the faculty room this week. Our local donated to your solidarity fund. Individual members of ours have donated to it. We wore red on Monday. We wore red again today. We sent pictures of us in red to the AFT and NYSUT. We have tweeted them out. Our local’s blog (thepjsta.org) has been updating our members on your fight for several weeks now and the blog has had a record number of hits. We will support you in every way we possibly can. We can not possibly repay the debt of gratitude that we owe you. Whatever you need from us, name it. Your fight truly is our fight and there couldn’t be a better, more courageous group of educators in America to fight it. Stay strong CTU!
Margaret Haley was the driving force in the early years of the Chicago Teachers Federation. She began her teaching career in a country school at the age of 16. At 21, she moved to Cook County where she taught for many years until going to work for the union in 1900. In 1901, she was the first woman ever to speak at a national convention of the National Education Association, which was then an organization of superintendents, college presidents, and other exalted educational leaders.
At the NEA convention in 1901, she gave a speech called “Why Teachers Should Organize.”
It is hard to find a copy of the speech. It is part of a collection called Readings in American Educational Thought: From Puritanism to Progressivism, published by Information Age, and edited by Andrew J. Milson, Chara Haeussler Bohan, Perry L. Glanzer, and J. Wesley Null.
Here are some excerpts from her famous 1901 address:
If the American people cannot be made to realize and meet their responsibility to the public school, no self-appointed custodians of the public intelligence and conscience can do it for them.
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The methods as well as the objects of teachers’ organizations must be in harmony with the fundamental object of the public school in a democracy, to preserve and develop the democratic ideal. It is not enough that this ideal be realized in the administration of the schools and the methods of teaching; in all its relations to the public, the public school must conform to this ideal.
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Why did schools not achieve their goals? These were the reasons she offered:
1. Greatly increased cost of living, together with constant demands for higher standards of scholarship and professional attainments and culture, to be met with practically stationary and wholly inadequate teachers’ salaries.
2. Insecurity of tenure of office and lack of provision for old age.
3. Overwork in overcrowded schoolrooms, exhausting both mind and body.
4. And, lastly, lack of recognition of the teacher as an educator in the school system, due to the increased tendency toward “factoryizing education,” making the teacher an automaton, a mere factory hand, whose duty it is to carry out mechanically and unquestioningly the ideas and orders of those clothed with the authority of position, and who may or may not know the needs of the children or how to minister to them.
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Two ideals are struggling for supremacy in American life today: one the industrial ideal, dominating thru the supremacy of commercialism, which subordinates the worker to the product and the machine; the other, the ideal of democracy, the ideal of the educators, which places humanity above all machines, and demands that all activity shall be the expression of life. If this ideal of the educators cannot be carried over into the industrial field, then the ideal of industrialism will be carried over into the school. Those two ideals can no more continue to exist in American life than our nation could have continued half slave and half free. If the school cannot bring joy to the work of the world, the joy must go out of its own life, and work in the school as in the factory will become drudgery.
Dana Goldstein has written an interesting commentary on the history of teacher unionism.
Chicago was the home of the very first teachers’ union, and it was founded by a tough female teacher named Margaret Haley.
Haley hated the factory-style schools of the day, objected to rigid standardization, and wanted dignity for the teaching profession. I will quote some of her words on another post.
For now, read Dana’s overview of the origins of the teachers’ union in Chicago. I told Dana, by the way, that I don’t agree with her conclusions, where she suggests that teachers need to give up “old notions of rigid job security and near nonexistent teacher evaluation.” Maybe I am quibbling over words, but I would hate to see teachers become at-will employees with no academic freedom, living in fear of community opposition to teaching controversial ideas and books. I am not sure about “near nonexistent teacher evaluation.” That sounds like a straw man. It is not teachers who decide how they should be evaluated; it’s the central office. If they fail to evaluate teachers, shame on them. The issue is not whether there should be evaluation, but whether it will be sound and not based on spurious metrics.
Diane Ravitch's blog 