Moving forward, Sen. Barack Obama would do well to agree in part and disagree in part with combatants on both sides of this old war -- something Shanker himself showed was possible by strongly defending the role of teacher unions in education but also challenging union orthodoxy where he believed it was bad for children. The Sharpton/Klein group is right to say schools matter and that teacher unions too often block needed efforts to get rid of bad teachers and encourage great educators to teach in high-poverty schools. Shanker forthrightly acknowledged these problems, supporting bonuses to attract good teachers to low-income schools and backing a "peer review" plan in which teachers judge one another and fire incompetents. Under such programs, more teachers are terminated than when principals evaluate teachers because every good teacher is hurt by the presence of bad teachers in a school.
What Shanker never did, however, was demonize teacher unions or say teachers alone should be held accountable. Oddly missing from the Sharpton/Klein mission statement is any call for student accountability. Why, as Shanker asked, would kids work hard to do well when told: If you fail this test, we won't punish you, but we will punish your teacher? Kids going to selective colleges have a strong incentive to do well, but for the vast majority of students who attend nonselective colleges, or go straight into the work force, doing well academically doesn't really matter that much.
"Learn from both sides" is inherently appealing but I don't think Rich really makes the case here. Where, in anything the Sharpton / Klein folks have to say, is there evidence of "demonizing" teachers unions? This nonsense certainly qualifies as such. But it's not demonizing to suggest that teachers unions support bad policies, any more than its inherently demonizing to disagree with anyone about their policy choices. There is simply no way to have a productive education policy dialogue if anyone who publicly criticizes union positions on the issues automatically gets thrown into the anti-labor camp.
As for the "student accountability" issue, I'll confess to never having really understood what we're missing. Students get grades, and if they don't pass, they don't graduate, which in this day and age is a catastrophic consequence and certainly a sufficient incentive to learn. Of course, it's well known that social promotion is rampant in many schools, which is why some states have decided to only award 12th grade diplomas to students who can pass a 9th or 10th grade (note: not a 12th grade) test. But as a rule, people on the teachers union side of the issues are opposed to such policies. Their positions tend to be less about balance via accountability for everybody and more about accountability for nobody.
Moreover, to say that "for the vast majority of students who attend nonselective colleges, or go straight into the work force, doing well academically doesn't really matter that much" is really, strikingly wrong. Students who go to nonselective colleges still have to take college placement tests, and the majority of them fail those tests, at which point they're assigned to non-credit-bearing remedial classes, paying thousands of dollars out of pocket (increasingly funded by student loans) to re-take courses they were told they passed in high school but really didn't. Remedial college students are far less likely to graduate than their peers. As for those who go into the workforce, is Rich really saying that there's little or no relationship between academic achievement and the ability to do well in a career? If so, why are we even debating the issues, that's a profundly anti-education argument more than anything else. I don't think Al Shanker would approve.
2 comments:
Its great being able to comment here. I guess it is no surprise that my first complaint is about your use of the word, "bad." At least you don't say Bloom Klein is "good" and unions are "bad," but its not much more mature of an approach to label union policies with that broad brush. We need to improve our staffing policies, adjust seniority rights, move from funding equality to funding equity, as well as persuade the central offices around the nation to enforce codes of conduct and abandon their "quick fix" mentality. Every one of those issues involve shades of gray.
Similarly, you don't seem to understand why unions deserve more respect. Even if you don't believe that collective bargaining is absolutely essential for education to succeed, you need to understand that the union is the sum of its people. Even if you didn't have unions, teachers would be staffed with people. Union leadership gives us one more opportunity to encourage and lead people to higher levels.
I'm not in favor of graduation exams, but the overwhelming majority of the teachers who I know are in favor of them. So, I want the union to collaborate in policies that maximize the benefits and minimize the harm done by those exams. The same goes for social promotion, discipline, use of tutorials, after-school remediation approaches, and virtually every other policy. And there is no "right" or "wrong" versions of these approachs, they all involve trade-offs. They all require people of good will to respect nuance and compromise. As in the case of classroom grading, as opposed the overarching, national test-driven accountability, it works best when people interact with each other respecting local differences.
Kahlenberg's decription is somewhat different than my appraisal. It is no criticism of Shanker the immigrant who continued to be young in heart to contend that his attitudes on accountability need to be updated for the 21st century. When a student asks, "'will it be on the test?'" we need to use that as a teaching moment to help the student develop a more mature attitude toward learning. When we were children, it was OK to have a child's view of tests, and "right" or "wrong," but we are adults and we need to help them move beyond a child's view.
But the big difference is that my whole career has been in the world that Shanker helped create. When my union leaders have protested that the membership wants "bread and butter" unionism, the AFT national office have made it clear that the leaders' job is to bring the membership into a new day where we represent children.
I know this is a blog, but I wish you would get in the habbit of saying that you disagree with the union's positions, and acknowledge that we have a difference in opinion about how to best serve children. And Kahlenberg points the way.
How's this as a way of posing the tension between the EPIs and the EPE's approachs? Social spending has not been effective enough, and one reason is that our social safety nets grew out of a dual mission - provide services and provide jobs for service providers. Education has the same dilemma and we must renegotiate in order to place the needs of children above the convenience of adults.
But, "schools alone" can not close the achievement gap unless we define "schools alone" as schools that are not alone. Schools can only close the achievement gap through improved classroom instruction, along with a broad array of social services. The best way to do that is to bring the community services into the schools and schools into the community.
My approach is much more difficult than yours. But if you think that it is challenging, just contemplate the challenge of improving schools without the judgments of teachers and our unions. BloomKlein has taken that approach and that may explain why they don't have a clue about what is actually happening in terms of student learning and they have to make such an extreme commitment to manipulating numbers.
In a paragraph about student accountability and student motivation, Kahlenberg wrote:
"Kids going to selective colleges have a strong incentive to do well, but for the vast majority of students who attend nonselective colleges, or go straight into the work force, doing well academically doesn't really matter that much."
As I read this passage, Kahlenberg is not expressing agreement with students who think that "doing well academically doesn't really matter that much." Rather, he is presenting their view of the situation, and contrasting their lack of motivation with the commitment displayed by students who clearly see what they have to gain by succeeding academically.
The context makes it clear, I think, that the sentence in question is about student attitudes, not about the eventual, real-world consequences of academic success or failure. Many students, Kahlenberg says, see no point in learning what schools are trying to teach them. And he notes that Shanker would reject attempts to hold "teachers alone" accountable for this state of affairs.
I wish that Kahlenberg's editor had suggested replacing "for the vast majority" with "to the vast majority." Then, perhaps, his meaning would have been clearer. Still, my sense of the passage as a whole makes me doubt that Kahlenberg stood in need of your indignant correction.
Post a Comment