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As the son of two public school teachers, I think you’re too hard on the union, especially where you say: “There are strict seniority rules about pay, school assignment, length of the school day and year. In New York, it is near impossible to fire a teacher — even one accused of a crime, drug addiction or flagrant misbehavior. The miscreants are stashed in “rubber rooms” at full pay, for years, while the union pleads their cases.”

The seniority rules are too strict, sure. But they’re there because teacher shave been chronically underpaid. You don’t meet a lot of teachers anywhere who are living it up financially.

Why shouldn’t people who have served longer get some say about what school they’re assigned? In most private companies some one with seniority gets that kind of consideration.

And why shouldn’t workers get some say about the length of their work day or the schedule of their work year? This is really one of the points of unions — remember, we didn’t even have weekends off until unions came along. Most teachers already work long hours — grading comes home with them and they manage the after school activities. Lesson plans are made “on your own time.” My parents were always working. Heck, the parents of the students have jobs too, if they need to talk to the teacher it tends to happen off the clock. Then there are the overnight trips where the teachers work 24/7.

Finally, about the impossibility of firing people for being accused of a crime… anyone can be accused of a crime. The union makes sure that innocents are railroaded. Every working American should have that kind of protection.

Destor–

First, I applaud your parents’ teaching service…but you’re making the same mistake the union does. If it wants to be a Union of Professionals, it should follow the work rules that professionals do: they are paid according to skill rather than length of service, they make their own work schedules.

In my ideal system, teachers have much more creative control over what they’re teaching, higher pay if they merit it and greater accountability.

This is a fascinating issue, one that I’ve covered off and on for 30 years–and I plan to spend time taking a closer look at charter schools, and why they seem to be working so well, in the months to come.

@Joeklein: Thanks for the really thoughtful response. It is a fascinating issue and I bet there’s room for both our ideas in it.

Unrelated question: I bought a book of interviews and profiles about Woody Allen and there was a great article from like the 70s with a Joe Klein byline on it. Was that you?

Joe: Spouse, daughter, sister of public school teachers here. I’m confused by your line about professionals “paid according to skill rather than length of service.” In every corporate job I’ve had, length of service figured into the pay equation. Yes, people who had the same job started with the same base pay, but added length of service in the position increased that pay.

Also, when you examine charter schools, please take into account the issue that so many seem to ignore or not understand when addressing “why they seem to be working so well”: they do not have to accept every student in their service area. They can remove students who are not performing to their set standard.

Guess where those sub-performing or declined students go? To the non-charter public school down the street. So their numbers suffer. It’s not an even playing field when comparing the two school models.

If it wants to be a Union of Professionals, it should follow the work rules that professionals do: they are paid according to skill rather than length of service, they make their own work schedules.
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Thoughts:
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- ‘Skill’ in teaching is tough to measure, as a student’s success in learning is greatly affected by environmental factors beyond the teacher’s control.
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- Professionals are frequently paid due to a perception of skill, not continued demonstration of that skill.
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- Teachers have their work schedules made for them or forced on them.
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..I plan to spend time taking a closer look at charter schools..
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Looking forward to it, as long as you put down that axe you’re grinding.

Sorry Joe, charter schools are not significantly improving our education system. Here in Michigan, charter school performance lags the public school system. While the charter schools are free to experiment and take a more creative approach to education, most have taken the traditional routes. The experimentation has more to do with finances than teaching. The charters in Michigan tend to concentrate on grade school rather than high school because there’s more profit in teaching the lower grades. For every excellent charter school in this state, I can point to several excellent public schools. The jury is still out – way out. The teacher’s unions do need to be more flexible, but they must also deal with ignorant school boards, apathetic parents, and incompetent (or corrupt ) administrators. It’s a real complicated issue and you should do more than just blast teachers.

Write–

Yes, you’re right. Seniority counts in professional trades…as it should, since wisdom comes with experience. But, in professional trades–journalism, for example (although I’ve always considered journalism more a dodge than a profession)–those who stop growing, those who get burned out, are washed out.

In our private conversations, Albert Shanker and I agreed that it should work more like the military–a career step-ladder where teachers are evaluated every five years or so, and move “up or out,” with greater authority and more pay for each step up.

As for your charter school comment about “creaming” off the better students, that may be true in some places, but it’s not true in New York. Not only are the students chosen by lottery, but the percentage of special ed students is approximately the same as that of the entire system (11% for charters, 13% for the system).

Joe: Thanks for responding. One concern I have on the “up or out” idea is that some people who are supremely suited to the classroom, like my husband, will be forced into administration. He teaches AP Calculus, and not everyone can handle the material, and most particularly, the challenge of these very bright kids (same with the AP Physics teacher, both have been in the classroom 25+ years). He’s beloved by his students and would be wasted in some more “senior” job.

Here in our high school district (suburban San Diego area), it is not by lottery and the admin of the charters get to pick the kids and send them off when they don’t perform (or when they’re a behavior problem). So, I urge you to look beyond New York when investigating that model.

Write–

Shanker and I talked about a new definition of “senior.” Great teachers like your husband shouldn’t be administrators–but they should be coaching and evaluating other math teachers and making more money, as a result.

I was in a terrific charter school in Harlem the other day–100% of the students are at grade level in Math (though most arrive in 5th grade with 1st grade proficiency)–and walked into a brilliant teacher’s fifth grade math class. At least, I thought it was brilliant: she was being evaluated by a “master” math teacher, who faulted her on her blackboard organization and a couple of other things. These sort of evaluations are, apparently, constant. They are part of the culture and value system of the school…and they are welcomed by the teachers, who really do want to improve. That’s the sort of role your husband might play (and, as a result, earn a lot more).

And as for your comment about charters, I think New York City has created a model that should be adopted elsewhere–maybe even San Diego.

Joe wrote: ” But, in professional trades–journalism, for example (although I’ve always considered journalism more a dodge than a profession)–those who stop growing, those who get burned out, are washed out.”
Actually, Joe, journalism is one of the worst examples of professionalism. Cronyism and nepotism are hugely rampant (think Jonah Goldberg or Luke Russert) and many journalists do good work and then rest on those laurels for decades (think Broder or Woodward). There are some journalists who are professional, but journalism is no longer a profession.

Where are the parents Joe?
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The biggest single contribution to the education of a child is parenting. What is the state of that?
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Blame the teacher, blame the system, blame some one, any one, but let us not look at ourselves.

Thank you for responding to our commentary, Joe.

@marvyt: hear, hear!
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And in addition to the boards, parents and administrators, if you are a Michigander outside of the wealthier suburbs of the Detroit Metro area, you also get to deal with the ongoing effects of “Proposal A” which has helped to institutionalize the problem (the unequal distribution of tax revenue to schools) it was meant to solve.

the problem with focusing on the parents is that as a society we’ve pretty much said that we aren’t very comfortable enacting meaningful “parent reform.” looking at teachers, school boards and the like are places where government can make an impact.

One thing that always drove my Mom up the wall when I was in school was how teachers who’d been there 20 years and still had the same lesson plans that they had in their first year were getting paid the same scale and had the same seniority as the teachers who were there 20 years and reinvigorating their curriculum every year. If your parents were working all the time, I’d suspect that they’re more likely in the latter category, but we’ve all had teachers that were amazing and we’ve all had teachers that couldn’t care less. I think there should be some pay increases for length of service and in most industries, there is, but there should also be an increase for skill and commitment – and in most non-unionized (and a few unionized) industries, there is.

Nor should we, as a government, enact parent reform, but we should put the blame where the blame is. We should however, as individuals enact parent reform.
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Explain to me how we are going to reform education with out the parent involvement? Explain to me how we are going to motivate good teachers when we blame them for our own failures?
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All we are doing is giving some more political fodder, to a major problem in the fabric in the American life. Seems to me all we are doing is passing the buck. We do not government involvement, except we do want government involvement. We do not want the President to talk to our children, except we do not want to be involved with that education, but we want the government to keep them 8 hours a day.
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I keep hearing the same old crap. I wish the government would just get out of my life, I wish I could just keep my taxes. How come my roads have so many pot holes. Why does a college education coat so much? I do not want to vaccinate my children. Why does Health care cost so much?

This is a problem in many if not all professions. Take a look at the play Too True to be Good by G.B. Shaw for an excellent exploration.

Joe, I agree with a little bit of what you say but you only present a tiny part of the problem.

The biggest problem aren’t teachers but school boards across the country that have become increasingly political and have too much say into what teachers can teach.

Also, a teacher can work his or her butt off but she/he can only do so much. If we go only by results when it comes to raises, the best teachers will probably bypass school systems like New Orleans or Harriman TN (which has predominantly white students; my mother lives there now). These two cities are very economically depressed but more than that for whatever reason education is simply not valued. It’s very hard for a teacher to undo what kids learn at home.

Our schools are not perfect but our system is a hundred times better than England’s, where kids who don’t measure up by the sixth grade pretty much have no future at all.

Blaming teachers is very simplistic.

My mom is a teacher in Texas, where it is illegal to have teacher’s unions. She is very much for higher pay, but also understands that having teacher’s unions are not in the best interest of the public, precisely because they directly lead to a lack of accountability (why the hell should public grade school teachers have tenure?)
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She is opposed to merit pay, not the principle of it but because there really isn’t any good way of determining it. She once said to me that if teachers were truly paid based off of performance, some would get minimum wage and others would get $250,000 a year.

Everyone is to blame- the government, teachers, school districts/boards, parents, and even the students themselves. Not sure that anyone is more to blame than the others though.

From what I hear, Texas’s problem isn’t teachers but school boards that are bent on imposing a right-wing conservative curriculum, not in education our young to be thinkers and innovators.

I could see why you would think that. Yes that is somewhat of a problem but there’s no way that it’s to blame for sub-par Math and Reading scores. As far as I could tell the sex-education wasn’t half bad when I was in high school here though, in fact abstinence really wasn’t mentioned that much. In our book it listed all the methods of contraception, and then ended the section by saying that while protection is a good thing, the only fool-proof method is abstinence. Not gonna disagree with that. Also we were shown pictures of advanced (and disgusting) results of STD’s on genitals. Ughhhhh. I think this (decent sex ed.) may have been more to do with my school district though (Plano) than the state.
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It doesn’t seem like Texas is in too bad shape educationally, especially given it’s size (2nd population) and poverty levels in certain areas (illegal immigrants exacerbate this problem). Most rankings I see place it between 23-27, in other words average. Not bad.
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Really the biggest problem here is school finance. My home district has been ravaged by the “Robin Hood” program that takes money away from wealthier school districts and sends it to lower income ones. My mom lost her assistant this year (she has been a school librarian for the past few years…she hated dealing with parents) because of it and has terrible benefits.
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To see more on this failure of a socialist experiment, check out the Wikipedia article:
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_hood_plan
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Joe, as an ex-teacher, I am not against looking at the current system. As far as merit pay goes, would you like to have your salary dependent on testing of your readers to see what they comprehend of your writings?

Testing does not allow an objective look at the student’s home life, the support the teacher gets from adminstrators and school boards, the curriculum emphasized by the school, and the school plant itself.
Most schools districts allow principals the right to observe and dismiss teacher’s before they are tenured. Few principals take the time to observe and mentor teachers. As usual, we are critical of the worker but not management.

Also, I would like to see a real comparison of current education to past education in this country. I know Joe you think that the current generation isn’t too bright. But, having been schooled in the 50s, I think we have a haloed rememberance of educational standards in the past. There were many drop outs. Jobs were available for those without a high school degree. Students got married much earlier and left school.
As I mentioned in the post on JD Salinger, books were censored (unfortunately we still do this), Sputnik made the nation panic about our poor math skills.
How is it we have the best Universities. We wouldn’t be able to fill them if students were so badly prepared.

Joe, Unions helped build a middle class that is now being dismantled. Sorry you don’t understand that. This is another one of those issues that pundits like you claim to have an expertise. How do you keep track of your superior intelligence regarding all subjects. Joe, go teach and see how cushy those teachers have it. Go live on their average salary. Do the lesson plans, consult with parents who have no interest in their children, wipe the runny noses, hold their hands when they are being bullied, handle 30 or more kids in a classroom. Teaching is a priviledge but that doesn’t mean that teachers should give up their rights to negotiate.

There is hardly any mention here of what I feel is the biggest cause (next to shoddy teaching) of failure in the schools across the country — the students themselves.

It used to be that if a student didn’t perform up to set standards, then that student(s) was failed in that particular class, or classes, and was told they must go to summer school and correct the problem, or be held back from promotion for the next year. Not anymore. If Johnny or Sue can’t pass their coursework, then it must be the fault of the environment, or their family income, or any of a dozen things not even remotely connected to their ability to actually do the coursework; to study, do their homework, and ask questions about things they do not understand.

If you didn’t show up to school, the truant officer was immediately dispatched and the consequences were fairly severe.

If you didn’t behave in class, you were removed and sent to the principal’s office. And if the misbehavior was bad enough, you were suspended and/or expelled. Not any more.

Yes, a great deal needs to be done to hold teachers accountable — and get rid of the bad ones. But at the same time, hold students accountable for their own actions and behavior. No more coddling of them. If they drop out of school, it is their own fault and they must accept the consequences for their actions and/or inactions.

It used to be true that teachers were grossly underpaid, but no more. If I can live on a disability income of under $20K a year, then a teacher making way in excess of $50K should be able to get by.

I say YES to charter schools. Let them pick their students. As the number of charter schools increases, one of the results will be a decrease in class size in the public schools. And if a teacher is a “good” teacher, they should be able to teach the remaining students. Will the remaining students, the ones who are not the “pick of the litter” (so to speak), rise to the level of great academic achievement? Hard to say. But I firmly believe that the outcomes will be much better than what the teacher’s unions would have us believe.

I think there are two separate issues at stake here. The first is merit pay – teachers that work harder, try harder and communicate better should get paid more than those that don’t. While that is near impossible to measure at a national level for many of the reasons you listed, I think it’s generally fairly easy to measure at a school level.
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The second issue is how you measure it and using test scores to achieve that is, I agree, ridiculous. Indeed, teachers at inner city schools should get paid more to incentivize a rather difficult and dispiriting job but they will almost certainly have lower test scores. Once again, we have a very complex issue, but such is a necessity in this world.

A little late on this thread, but this is for JK.
“What Teachers Make”

As in all fields there are those who excel, and those who do not. The idea of evaluating teachers by how well the students do very appealing, especially to those doing the evaluating. It makes a difficult job seem easy, reducing it to a simple standard–say grades.
I have a daughter who is a new teacher and she calls me almost every day to go over what transpired in her classes. The biggest complaint is how to handle the student who refuses to do anything, disturbs the class, argues just for fun, and then says they don’t like it in class and simply leaves to “go to the office”. There they say they are having a bad day, and that is it, they are off the hook. If she could get rid of these students who refuse to learn, or at least get them to be quiet then she could handle the rest of the class easily.
She was not raised in a home where this happened, nor did she have any friends whose homes tolerated this behavior. I remember my other daughters saying classes were such a waste because the teacher had to spend 40% of the class trying to get the class settled down, and by this time little time was there to learn before the bell. And this is in the 90′s, it is worse today.
So to evaluate her consider: she did not raise the children, does not control their home lives, has no control over the school admin policy, no control over financing that keeps the purposely failing student there for the money, went through a certification program that dealt with these problems in the most superficial ways, then after being switched around as a fill in, was placed in a classroom that had a series of subs because the teacher decided in mid semester she had had enough and quit.
Does she want to keep teaching, yes. Did she feel this way when she first started , no. I told her it was just like the army, you get some training, you have an idealist/unrealistic view of what you are going into, then they drop you off a truck and you’re getting shot at by strangers. Hopefully you learn how to duck and how to survive and after a while you get pretty good at what you do.
And all the while she and so many others are doing this they face sniping from parents who don’t want to be parents, administration with a siege mentality, school boards of varying and everchanging quality, state-local-feds who blow with the wind on what they expect, “experts” whose main focus is getting their next book published, and then pundits etc who have never taught, but who really know how to do it.
Should some teachers be “retired”? Of course, but so should irresponsible parents, ineffective admins, and on up the line. Will it happen, nope. You know they used to say if you can’t do, teach. Let me add if you can’t do, or even know how to do, then be an evaluator.