Less than two weeks before classes begin, many of the District's 4,000 public school teachers are locked in a heated debate over Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee's proposal to offer salaries exceeding $100,000 for those willing to give up job security and tie their fates to student achievement. The rift is playing out in a blizzard of cellphone messages and e-mails, Facebook entries and posts on teacher blogs such as D.C. Teacher Chic and Dee Does the District. Some of the teachers who want "green tier" salaries plan to demonstrate this morning at teacher union offices on L'Enfant Plaza.
The split in the teaching corps largely, but not exclusively, is occurring along generational lines, with younger teachers more willing to accept the risks and older ones often questioning the proposal. Jerome Brocks, a special education teacher with 34 years of experience in D.C. schools, seethes when he talks about Rhee's salary proposal.
"It's degrading and insulting," said Brocks, to ask that teachers give up tenure and go on probation for a year if they choose the more lucrative of the two salary tiers under the plan, which is at the center of contract negotiations between the city and the Washington Teachers' Union. He said that Rhee wants only to purge older teachers and that for instructors to sell out hard-won protections against arbitrary or unfair dismissal is unthinkable. "For Michelle Rhee or anyone to ask that is like Judas and 30 pieces of silver," Brocks, 59, said.
Julia Rosen, putting her classroom in order this week for her third year as a second grade teacher at Key Elementary School, said she would have no problem with a system in which her pay, and maybe her job, was tied to her students' academic growth. "At this school, I think any of us could excel in that kind of a scenario," Rosen, 25, said.
The proposal is the linchpin of the chancellor's quest to overhaul public education in the District, a way to attract and retain high-quality instructors who would be held accountable for growth in student achievement. It would make them among the nation's best-paid public school instructors, enabling those with just five years of experience to make more than $100,000 in salary and bonuses.
Under the proposal, teachers who want to accept lower, but still significant, pay increases can keep the job security that comes with tenure. Those opting for top salaries, however, relinquish that protection. Those coming into the D.C. system would be required to enter the so-called "green" plan.
"Judas"? What is this, Free Trade Hall? It's very hard to square words like "degrading" and "insulting" with a pay system that teachers would only enter of their own volition. There's a certain infantilizing quality to this vision of teacher work, where individuals can't be trusted to make up their own minds about their relationship with management and shouldn't be allowed to make the tradeoff that virtually all well-compensated professionals make: more accountability and less security in exchange for more recognition and compensation.
If Rhee manages to make this stick, the key may very well be this:
One sentiment that seems to bridge the generational divide: The teachers union has done a dismal job in responding to concerns and questions about the plan. "You don't respond to emails, your voice mail is full, the website is not updated and you release no statements to let teachers know where we are in this negotiations process," Breipohl wrote to Parker yesterday.To be clear, Parker is by most accounts a good, well-meaning guy who is trying to work with the chancellor while dealing with a lot of internal dissent from some truly reactionary elements within the union. But that doesn't change the fact that his whole job is responding to teachers, while Rhee seems manages to be much more responsive to teachers and pretty much the whole rest of the world all at once. I spent some time in the central office earlier this year (doing research for a Washington Monthly article that's not on-line but is, of course, so great that you should run to your nearest library to track it down) and I can tell you that the above is true: Rhee really does respond to all her emails personally. She's also set up a whole "critical response team" whose only job is to fix problems and respond to questions as quickly and well as they can.
Some said Rhee, a prolific text-messager, has been far more responsive. "Pardon my ignorance, but why is the Chancellor able to e-mail me back with a multiple sentence response, but George Parker cannot send a one-word reply?" asked "Dee," author of Dee Does the District, who identifies herself as a first-year special education teacher.
Parker said he is trying to keep up with what he described as an enormous volume of calls and messages. "The numbers have just made it impossible to respond in a timely manner and carry on the day-to-day operations of the union," he said.
And here's the thing I think people don't really understand. Many if not most of those problems are being solved on behalf of DCPS teachers. Here's what I wrote about Margie Yeager, at the time the head of the rapid response team:
Yeager understands the importance of the HR office intimately; from 2001 to 2003, she taught second grade in DC's Simon Elementary School, back when their was no critical response team. At one point the district stopped sending her paychecks. Later, it accidentally cancelled her health insurance. Phone calls to HR were ignored, meaning that Yeager had to find time to come here to the central office--or, as she referred to it then, "this horrible, crazy place." The experience was so traumatic that when the district failed to refund her union dues (which had been embezzled by the union president and squandered on, variously, furs, handbags, shoes, Tiffany place settings, and a double-barreled shotgun) Yeager didn't both to call anyone. Now, many of the people who e-mail Yeager are tecahers dealing with the kinds of problems she once faced.
So on the one hand you've got an uber-responsive chancellor who reformed the bureaucracy to better support teachers and wants to give them the option to voluntarily enter a system that would pay them a whole lot more money. On the other hand, a union that can't return emails and is notable chiefly for a history of theft and venality so outrageous that it's memorable even by the highly attentuated moral standards of DC municipal government. As I said, it's interesting see what happens next.
7 comments:
Michelle Rhee is coming with a sword, not a practical proposal for helping kids.
Were her plan to be actualized,education would be forgotten during the civil war that would rip through the schools. And when things get racial, its going to be particularly sad. Think of the New York City teachers strike being protracted over five years.
But the plan would not survive past five years, if that long.
Rhee's followers remind me of Generation Kill. The history you don't know can kill you. I will always despise Bush for taking the best of so many Americans' idealism, and warping it in a war that was choreographed by ideologues who thought that reality is "the old paradigm." Rhee advocates the same type of faith-based policies and she is so sure of her righteousness that she's adopted an "end justifies the means" strategy.
Rhee exhibits the narcissim of a person in too much of a hurry to heed the lessons of history. Consequently, she's an unwitting tool of corporate powers who use her as a flying wedge to destroy unions and deprofessionalize teaching, but who don't even think how all of this bloodletting could help schools. She's a modern day Pinkerton (who I might add was a civil rights advocate who thought he was doing God's will in destroying unions.)
To understand what is wrong with Rhee's approach, please recall the early 1970s. The energy crisis did clobber the old industrial economy and we would have de-industrialized over the decades, but progressive union leaders had a rational plan to retool for the post-industrial world. It was politics, funded by corporate powers, that shut down our industrial system in little more than a decade. When old jobs disapeared virtually overnight, blue collar families did not have time to adjust. "Market-driven" policies from 1983 to 1983 may be the single largest reason why our schools are crippled today by urban pathologies.
D.C., today, is in the shoes of the first Southern governor tempted by the first corporate offer to relocate in return for freedom from collective bargaining.
Had it begun and ended with that one deal, no harm would have been done. Wages in that state would have risen to the level of union wages in the North. But a flood of give-backs occurred. Before long, every state, North and South, was dragged into a "beggar thy neighbor" competition that lowered wages for all. And now, those factories are empty shells
And schools in abandoned inner city neighborhoods aren't overcoming those pathologies and teaching the skills and educational values for the 21st century economy.
Kevin, you aren't like Reagan who completely miscontrued the lyrics of Bruce Springsteen? When Reagan tried to coopt "the Boss," Springsteen asked how Reagan like the true story of his father driving him in the big old Buick, tossling his hair, "take a look around, this is your hometwon." By the time Bruce was a teen "... in my high school, lots of fights between Black and White, there was nothing you could do. Two cars at a light, Saturday night, in the back seat there's a gun, Words are passed, shotgun blast, troubled times they had come to my hometown."
Why, "They're closing down the textile mill cross the railroad track, They say these jobs are going South and they ain't coming back - to my hometown."
I saw the same story, compressed, as it wiped out working class Oklahoma. Now, for us, like Buffalo, and the rest of the Rust Belt, most Black men and almost as many White men over fifty are no longer in the job market, and kids are raising kids in a world devoid of male role models.
There was an alternative though. The union, like the Scandanvians, knew that is may be counterintitive, but the fastest way to modernize is to maintain and update safety nets and the New Deal measures that keep us from Social Darwinism. Give people confidence and stability and they are much more willing to accept change.
What is most dangerous thing about truck driving? It is stress, and it is worsened greatly when drivers are monitored by computers. Were Rhee's system implemented, the cost in heart disease and strokes and other stress-related ailments would go through the roof. Human being weren't designed to function under "Taylorism." Rhee's dystopia would be a modern day piece work system, impersonal and arbitrary. During your twenties, you may seem indestructable. But the stress-related ailments that get to so many fifty something teachers are really going to wipe out this young generation of teachers if they buy into Rhee's "culture of accountability."
But it won't happen. Rhee's benefactors will initiate similar efforts strategically in areas where the union is vulunerable. Again, the purpose is to spread discord to advance a political and/or economic agenda not help school children. Who would want to send their kids to a school where the teachers despise each other?
There is a lesson for the union also. We have to be more energetic in cleaning our own house. In law they say, "tough cases make bad precedents." In education, lousy school systems make destructive "reforms." Data driven accountability is impossible without integrity. We need to get back to ethical and proactive bargaining. Otherwise, more business people will look to NYC, D.C., Detropit etc. and agree to wipe out "ther status quo." It would be so much easier to address our problems together before the system craters.
john thompson
It's very hard to square words like "degrading" and "insulting" with a pay system that teachers would only enter of their own volition. There's a certain infantilizing quality to this vision of teacher work, where individuals can't be trusted to make up their own minds about their relationship with management and shouldn't be allowed to make the tradeoff that virtually all well-compensated professionals make...
I'm torn. I used to 100% agree with the standard merit pay arguments, and I still think the ideal system involves merit pay, and I certainly agree that teachers can't be considered professionals without accepting such a system. However, you can't have a solid merit pay system without quality evaluation, and you can't have quality evaluation without a level of trust between labor and management. Unfortunately, many school administrators have not conducted themselves in a way worthy of trust, and just as unfortunately, the culture of teaching is not one of trusting and collaborating with administrators.
I hope Rhee makes this one stick -- but I hope one of the reasons it sticks is that, by actions such as establishing the critical response team, she fosters trust.
How can teachers be mad that they have a choice? No one is forcing them to quit, or even take a reduction in salary, they are simply being given the choice accept more money for increasing student achievement. The ONLY teachers complaining about this are the teachers who are "comfortable" with having tenure - which is the measuring stick for mediocre teaching.
John,
Lots of boilerplate there, but perhaps you could edit it down, and give us the condensed version.
Leaving aside comparisons to the poor textile workers of Oklahoma, I think most DC residents are concerned about the children in a way that they're not concerned about bolts of cloth.
As far as I can tell, the union is shredding what little credibility it has left, and we're almost at the point where the vast majority of DC residents would wholeheartedly support a complete evisceration of the teacher's union (a la Reagan & the air-traffic controllers).
By nature I'm sympathetic to unions, but when it becomes clear that the WTU is bargaining at the expense of the schoolkids, they can go fuck themselves with a stick wrapped in rusty barbed wire.
OK here's the short version. Rhee's plan has no chance of helping students. It would be tough enough in DC if we had a school leader with a record of good faith and a union with a better track record.
Rhee is just a front, and I doubt she knows or cares about the recurring history designed for the "complete evisceration of the teacher's union (a la Reagan & the air-traffic controllers)" as has been done when destroying the lives of blue collar workers in the 70s and 80s. Nationwide, this de-industrialization is the biggest cause of this extreme collapse of the family and the resulting educational crisis.
The only winners in this political theater will be people who are so frustrated that they want the union to "fuck themselves with a stick wrapped in rusty barbed wire."
If you want to help kids, then here's my boilerplate suggestion:
"There is a lesson for the union also. We have to be more energetic in cleaning our own house. In law they say, "tough cases make bad precedents." In education, lousy school systems make destructive "reforms." Data driven accountability is impossible without integrity. We need to get back to ethical and proactive bargaining. Otherwise, more business people will look to NYC, D.C., Detroit etc. and agree to wipe out "their status quo." It would be so much easier to address our problems together before the system craters."
"It would be so much easier to address our problems together before the system craters."
Before? Seriously, that ship sailed decades ago. An entire generation of students has been failed by the system since then. There is no patience left.
I'm a good teacher. My students make good progress every year. In fact, I'm one of those young white teachers that came up through the program that Rhee founded. I like Rhee's reforms thus far. She is a bit arrogant but I generally like her style too. And on an idealogical level, I like the idea of merit-based bonuses. But I don't like this contract proposal because as andromeda pointed out there is no plausible means of evaluating teachers right now in DCPS.
Using test scores is questionable for classroom teachers, ridiculous for special education teachers, and inapplicable for special subject teachers (art, music, etc.).
The current PPEP process where teachers are evaluated by their principal is a joke. I know teachers whose prinicipal never set a foot in their room all year and then rated them "Exceeds Expectations." The PPEP process in no way takes student achievement into consideration.
I also know teachers who work West of the Park and they admittedly have an easier job than those of us East of the River. Even if the research shows that all children can succeed despite their backgrounds and current life-situation, it doesn't mean that it is not very difficult (near impossible in some cases) for those students to succeed. In other words some teachers have to work a lot harder in order for their students to achieve student success. If there is to be merit pay then I don't think those teachers should be held to the same standard as those who do not have to work so hard. I'm working my ass off down here and I don't really want any sticks wrapped in rusty barbed wire shoved in there to may my job harder.
So until there is a solid program of evaluation, I'm against merit pay here in the District.
P.S. The teachers won't have a choice of what salary or tenure track they want. Only those of us currently in the sytem get the choice. All new teachers are forced into the merit-based system.
P.S.S. Kudos that this contract would get rid of senority!
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