Backward, Forward, Upside-Down

Last week, Post business columnist Steven Pearstein praised the Fenty/Rhee proposal to pay teachers much more money in exchange for more accountability and less tenure. In doing so, he also acknowledged the tradeoffs and potential complications:

Sure, there will be times when teachers will be treated in an arbitrary and capricious way if they give up their tenure rights. Guess what: It happens all the time in the private sector, where hiring, promotion and pay decisions are sometimes made with incomplete information, favoritism, or undue emphasis on one factor or another. But despite this imperfection, despite the numerous instances of unfairness and poor judgment, somehow the vast majority of Americans manage to find a job, move up the ladder and enjoy their work, and companies manage to operate successfully and turn a profit.

Leo Casey of the United Federation of Teachers in New York responded to the above by saying, "In short, non-union employees are regularly screwed, so why should unionized teachers expect a fair shake? Can anyone say “race to the bottom?”

I think Leo is getting the directionality wrong. To be sure, there are millions of workers in jobs that combine low wages, few benefits, and a high degree of vulnerability to the caprice and ill intentions of management. Unions have historically played a tremendously valuable role in lifting such workers up, giving them the compensation, stability and dignity they deserve.

That said, there are also steps on the career and professional ladder above and beyond solid, reasonably paid union and civil service-type jobs: management and the highly-paid professions. Once people move into this realm, they start to relinquish the very same workforce protections and guarantees that they gained when they moved from poorly-paid, unstable positions into the the solid middle. But they do so from a very different position, one that affords them far more power to negotiate in the labor market and more flexibility to make choices about where to work.

The Fenty/Rhee proposal is really about moving teachers up into that third category. It's a race to the top, not the bottom. That comes with serious implications for the nature of teacher collective bargaining, which is why the DC contract negotiations have taken on larger national significance. But it's a conversation that has to happen if schools are going to get the kind of talented, highly-paid teachers they need. (Read more on this from Paul Tough at his new temporary Slate education blog here.)