I think it is a travesty that the U.S. is the envy of the world for post-secondary education but trails most of the first world when it comes to primary and secondary education. I think the problem is the teacher's union, which requires schools to give teachers tenure and pays teachers based on seniority. To improve the quality of teaching, schools need to pay teachers based on their performance and to fire those teachers who are least effective.
What governments have tried to do is just spend more money. By raising taxes to give more money to schools, it was hoped, test scores would improve. It has not worked. Across the U.S. (and, interestingly, world-wide) there seems to be a very poor correlation between school spending and test scores (correcting, as always, for factors such as socioeconomic status, which very clearly do impact scores).
For a while, I thought that school vouchers would be the way out of the problem. Allowing economic incentive to make schools more efficient (and get rid of teacher unions as well) seemed very sensible. Several states have experimented with charter schools and/or vouchers, but sadly the results have been mixed.
Perhaps on the whole, then, schools are getting most things right and that the teachers' union remains the only obstacle to success. Maybe the best thing is to offer a large enough carrot to the teachers union to get them to accept performance-based pay and give up tenure. Washington DC is about to try just that. The Washington Post reports that if teachers accept the newly proposed system, any teacher would be able to double their salary if they accept a performance-based system and forego tenure. Teachers who prefer the safety of tenure and seniority-based pay can stay with that.
The initiative is funded by a number of private donors (including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) who are hoping that this will provide a national test case. Even more obnoxiously, the national teachers' union is opposing the measure despite the huge increase in salaries. They are worried that the new system will lead to higher test scores and that will force the unions to give up tenure. I find it horribly perverse that the teachers' union is so opposed to the possibility of improving education.
Unions have performed a great service overall in our history. The power gained through collective bargaining has allowed unions to reform worker safety and give labor a more equitable share of proceeds. That same power has been abused to thwart improvements in productivity, though. In the early 20th century, for example, railroad unions forced contracts that required the railroads to employ two people in the locomotive, the engineer (responsible for controlling the locomotive) and the fireman (responsible for the water, fire, and resulting steam pressure). The union very sensibly wanted to avoid the unsafe practice of requiring one person to perform all of these tasks. When diesel engines were widely introduced in the 1940's, however, the fireman became entirely obsolete. The railroad union used its power to stick to the letter of the old contracts, though. Railroads were forced to pay a fireman to stand in every diesel locomotive over every mile of track and do absolutely nothing. The teachers' union is trying to pull the same power trip on the American people today. Don't let them!
What governments have tried to do is just spend more money. By raising taxes to give more money to schools, it was hoped, test scores would improve. It has not worked. Across the U.S. (and, interestingly, world-wide) there seems to be a very poor correlation between school spending and test scores (correcting, as always, for factors such as socioeconomic status, which very clearly do impact scores).
For a while, I thought that school vouchers would be the way out of the problem. Allowing economic incentive to make schools more efficient (and get rid of teacher unions as well) seemed very sensible. Several states have experimented with charter schools and/or vouchers, but sadly the results have been mixed.
Perhaps on the whole, then, schools are getting most things right and that the teachers' union remains the only obstacle to success. Maybe the best thing is to offer a large enough carrot to the teachers union to get them to accept performance-based pay and give up tenure. Washington DC is about to try just that. The Washington Post reports that if teachers accept the newly proposed system, any teacher would be able to double their salary if they accept a performance-based system and forego tenure. Teachers who prefer the safety of tenure and seniority-based pay can stay with that.
The initiative is funded by a number of private donors (including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) who are hoping that this will provide a national test case. Even more obnoxiously, the national teachers' union is opposing the measure despite the huge increase in salaries. They are worried that the new system will lead to higher test scores and that will force the unions to give up tenure. I find it horribly perverse that the teachers' union is so opposed to the possibility of improving education.
Unions have performed a great service overall in our history. The power gained through collective bargaining has allowed unions to reform worker safety and give labor a more equitable share of proceeds. That same power has been abused to thwart improvements in productivity, though. In the early 20th century, for example, railroad unions forced contracts that required the railroads to employ two people in the locomotive, the engineer (responsible for controlling the locomotive) and the fireman (responsible for the water, fire, and resulting steam pressure). The union very sensibly wanted to avoid the unsafe practice of requiring one person to perform all of these tasks. When diesel engines were widely introduced in the 1940's, however, the fireman became entirely obsolete. The railroad union used its power to stick to the letter of the old contracts, though. Railroads were forced to pay a fireman to stand in every diesel locomotive over every mile of track and do absolutely nothing. The teachers' union is trying to pull the same power trip on the American people today. Don't let them!
Are you a fellow right-wing nut?
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure about that teacher pay experiment, though. It won't get rid of the teachers who are useless and refuse to accept merit-based pay, although it might help identify them. If the government ends up implementing merit-based pay, but the salary levels go up as a result, it will create an interesting shift in the supply of teachers. Better people might opt for a teaching career in the future and probably many of the existing teachers will end up looking for jobs at Walmart. That would be good.
What scares me about the government running a merit-based system is the selection of standards to determine who merits an increase and who gets fired. While the current system is job for life, promotions are already merit-based yet the best teachers aren't the ones that float to the top (at least not in Hong Kong and I'm sure it is no different here than in the US!). I'd rather risk the free market than trust a government bureaucracy.
I have to think more about what I think about your comments on the NEA, but I do know that I appreciate this recent creative spate! For a while you were doing something like a blog a month. And now-more than one per week! Woo hoo! Lucky us. -liz
ReplyDeleteSorry, dude, but I don't think I could disagree more.
ReplyDeleteAlmost laughed out loud at the beginning of the fourth paragraph: "Perhaps on the whole, then, schools are getting most things right and ... the teachers' union remains the only obstacle to success" (emphasis mine). There are a lot of factors contributing to the problems in our country's public education system today, so when people suggest that fixing just one thing will make it all better, I have a difficult time taking their arguments seriously (and this is true regardless of that one thing: teacher pay, rogue school boards, societal apathy, student disrespect, shrinking budgets, etc.).
But, if I were to rank those factors in order of impact on the problem, I would place all of the following ahead of teachers' unions (not necessarily in this order): general public apathy, the commodification of education, high-stakes testing (No Child Left Behind, in general), budgetary priorities, and curricula and licensure in teacher training. I could ramble on about all of these, but I'll restrain myself. I would note, however, that most of these things are also slowly dragging down what you describe as our envialbe post-secondary education system, especially at public colleges and universities.
The above notwithstanding, I do share your enthusiasm for the DC experiment. "Merit pay" is a good sound bite (therefore easy to rally around), but extremely complex in the execution. We won't know whether it's useful, however, unless some systems try it out.
I'm afraid I'm with Adrian on this one. Teachers' unions obviously have their problems and are contributing to the decline of public education, but they've been made scapegoats in what is really a much bigger issue.
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