The Public Policy
Bargaining for Reform?
The American Federation of Teachers is showing its admirable side.
Considering its role in sparking the most-important teachers union strike in American history five decades ago with its shutdown of New York City’s schools, and the years it has since spent making teaching the public sector profession most-insulated from performance management, the American Federation of Teachers is an unlikely name to be found among the wonks and advocates at the helm of reforming America’s public schools.
But these days, the nation’s other national teachers union is getting some qualified praise for supporting a handful of initiatives that tip-toe toward the prescription of more-rigorous curriculum standards, standardized tests, school choice and consequences advocated by the school reformers the union has long opposed. Whether or not the AFT will fully embrace school reform — or simply backslide into its inveterate support of traditional education concepts — is another matter entirely.
In October, the AFT shocked the education world when its New Haven, Conn., local agreed to a new contract that would allow the New England city’s school district to offer merit pay to the best-performing teachers and allows for the conversion of laggard schools into charter schools. Given the longstanding hostile opposition to performance pay of any kind, the concession even made normally skeptical education scholar Andy Smarick of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute call it “a set of very exciting developments.”
That same month, the AFT’s foundation handed out $3.3 million in grants from an “innovation fund” it had set up earlier this year. Among the projects funded is an effort by the union’s San Antonio local to expand the number of charter schools operated within the city’s school district. Another project, an alternative teacher preparation program started by its Saint Paul, Minn., unit geared at attracting mid-career professionals and college students, bears more than a passing resemblance to Teach For America, the pioneering teacher program that has produced such vanguards of school reform as D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee.
The AFT’s innovation fund even managed to win over some school reformers that have long sparred with the traditional education establishment. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the prime backer of teacher quality advocates (and AFT foes) such as the National Council on Teacher Quality, poured $225,000 into the fund. Also ponying up money is the Eli & Edythe Broad Foundation, whose cofounder (a homebuilding and insurance magnate) has helped lead battles against the National Education Association’s notoriously bellicose Los Angeles local over reform of the nation’s second-largest traditional public school district.
This is, of course, the same union whose president, Randi Weingarten, complained that President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top effort was little more than advocacy for expanding charter schools and using test scores to measure teacher performance. Despite the NEA’s gargantuan membership and sizable campaign donations, it was the AFT who transformed teaching from a profession to one of the most-ardent defenders of public sector union privileges. And the union’s battles with the two most reform-minded public school leaders — Rhee and New York City Department of Education Chancellor Joel Klein — over new contracts also confirms fears among many that it is only trying to co-opt and subvert meaningful reform.
But the AFT’s idiosyncratic past means that it isn’t as resistant to breaking with public education — or labor union — tradition. During the 1930s, when most labor unions supported the passage of the racially bigoted Davis-Bacon Act, the AFT fully embraced the integration of blacks into the economic mainstream. During the 1970s and 1980s, its longtime president, the fiery Albert Shanker, was one of the few union leaders who demonstrably supported Lech Walesa’s battle against Poland’s Communist regime; argued for the kind of more-rigorous standards that would later form the heart of the No Child Left Behind Act; and even helped foster the early development of the charter school movement, the most-successful vehicle for the promotion of school choice.
The AFT also faces the reality that unlike the NEA — whose locals are largely concentrated in the Midwest and South — its rank-and-file teaches in the nation’s most-woeful traditional public school districts, the hotbeds for the most-important efforts in school reform. With the big-city mayors, inner-city parents and young centrist Democrats more concerned about improving the quality of education than about union solidarity — and even divisions within locals between older teachers nearing retirement and younger colleagues less invested in keeping tenure — the AFT also finds itself in the biggest battles over the future of American public education.
AFT President Weingarten knows this all too well. Before taking the reins of the national union in 2008, she ran its New York City local, which is also the nation’s largest. There, she found herself steamrolled by Klein — the former Clinton anti-trust czar-turned-schools chancellor — and his boss, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, as they successfully won control of the school system from an appointed board, and proceeded to authorize charters, instituted new curriculum standards, and won concessions from the union to allow school principals to remove laggard teachers. Weingarten eventually learned to play along with some of the changes in order to get rich salary increases and keep such sweet protections as a “Rubber Room” where poor-performing teachers can collect salaries even as they are turn themselves around.
The experience partly explains why the AFT has taken its most-recent steps — and may eventually go further. How far will largely depend on the outcome of what it considers its two most-important battles on the ground.
In New York City, the AFT local and Bloomberg are negotiating a contract to replace the one that expired last month. So far, the local’s president has already vocally opposed Bloomberg’s plans to test scores in evaluating the performance of teachers seeking tenure. Although the local and state locals had already thwarted Bloomberg on this effort last year, the pursuit of federal Race to the Top funds has end up leading to the tying of student test score data and teacher performance in California and other states over the opposition of other state and local NEA and AFT affiliates.
Back in D.C., the AFT is actively inserting itself into the protracted bargaining between its local and D.C. schools boss Rhee, who wants to replace tenure with a system of performance pay and stricter performance evaluations; the plan itself has formed a generational divide within the rank-and-file and even some of the leadership. This year, Rhee has unilaterally imposed a teacher evaluation system based largely on student test-score growth. In September, just as school began, she also used a $21 million cut in the school budget to lay off 266 teachers (including many longtime instructors); the AFT has since lost a lawsuit aimed at rescinding the move. The battle will likely spill over into next year, as Rhee’s boss, Mayor Adrian Fenty, faces re-election.
A few more lost battles won’t likely make the AFT as much a bastion of school reform as the Democrats for Education Reform. But they could help push the union further in their direction.
About the Author
RiShawn Biddle the editor of Dropout Nation , is co-author of A Byte at the Apple: Rethinking Education Data for the Post-NCLB Era. He can be followed at Twitter.com/dropoutnation.
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Pingback| 12.23.09 @ 6:50AM
Twitter Trackbacks for The American Spectator : Bargaining for Reform? [spectator.or links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
Le Cracquere| 12.23.09 @ 8:25AM
So the cornered thieves are considering limited give-backs on carefully defined terms? Sorry, they get no props for that. There's precious little way for the teachers' unions to set things right now, short of utter dissolution and financial/penal restitution for their generations of malfeasance against American liberties, intellectual formation, and wallets. Which is to say, realistically there's none.
Richard Baker| 12.23.09 @ 11:40AM
AFT or NEA. Six of one or half dozen of another. Ultimately, both unions will continue in the historical direction they've been going. They are not professional teacher associations, they are Trade Unions. Trade Unions are concerned about the membership and not the product. That's what unions are for.
Stephen Zierak| 12.23.09 @ 11:46AM
If urban district public school teachers go on strike, can anyone tell the difference?
Richard Baker| 12.23.09 @ 12:07PM
Stephen Zierak:
Probably not. The public/government school system is nothing but expensive day care.
Pingback| 12.23.09 @ 1:02PM
The American Spectator : Bargaining for Reform? School’s Rate links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
Kevin Killion | 12.23.09 @ 2:07PM
The AFT -- unlike the NEA -- has consistently argued for solid curricula and real teaching. They just don't want anybody actually to have an opportunity to choose that for their own children.
Pingback| 12.23.09 @ 2:24PM
Flaherty Says Russia, China May Buy Canadian Dollars to Diversify … | Canadian Dollar links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
Yosemeti Sam| 12.24.09 @ 12:13AM
" ... the American Federation of Teachers is an unlikely name to be found ... at the helm of reforming America's public schools ...."
Reforming? In what way?
Anyone remember Joe Clark?
His attempts to afford students peace and
quiet in their education - by obstructing
miscreants from invading and disrupting
school classrooms - were challenged
vigorously.
These PC people - so-called teachers - allow miscreants to despoil other students rights to
a climate of peace and quiet enjoyment of educational opportunities.
Striking - no mention of PTAs!
Seems to me that reforming/guarding
Americas' public schools from PC-dulled
would-be 'guardians/guarantors' of childrens' educations should be a clarion call to PTAs across the land to become 'engaged' as never
before. And none of this mmm,mmm,mmm
crap in schools - for starters.
Paul| 12.25.09 @ 2:31AM
The unfortunate reality is that many middle-class taxpayers pay twice for their children's education: once through general taxation for the public education system, and again for the best private school they can afford and their kids qualify for.
In case anyone is wondering, that's also what's going to happen with healthcare. We'll pay all the taxes and penalties for a largely public health system, and then when a loved one gets sick, if you can afford it, you'll turn to private care faster than you can say "death panel".
Professor| 12.26.09 @ 2:08AM
Re: taxes. You don't "pay twice," because you don't pay taxes for the sake of your own children. You're welcome to think so, but taxes for education are an investment in the future of our society. Whether you have kids or not, you need the upcoming generation to get an education. That happens more in some places than others, but please stop bashing the whole system at once. The vast majority of American kids go to public schools, and we're sending them off to college at ever-increasing rates. There's plenty of success in the system, but it doesn't help your doomsday narrative so you ignore it. Where we see the most failure, we also tend to see the most poverty. In some urban schools, one third of the students suffer from PTSD, and you'll blame NEA/AFT for not fixing that, I guess. And finally, ever noticed how the international models people use to bash the U.S. for falling behind all tend to have more socialist tendencies than we do?
kathryn| 12.27.09 @ 8:13AM
Professor, the intellectual dishonesty of the academic world never ceases to astonish me. Several points:
You point out that the number of students going to college is ever-increasing, but most of us know that quality is decreasing as the quantity grows. I have a friend who teaches graduate-level courses at a major university, and she recently shared some of their (essay) test papers with me. The majority of her students are unable to construct a complete sentence, and have no idea how to use punctuation. However, I suppose I should take comfort in the fact that an increasing number of students are "earning" their master's degrees. It's all a numbers game, right?
I see that the scapegoat for our education woes hasn't changed, however--let's continue to blame our abysmal failures on "poverty." We can continue to shadow-box that particular phantom, or we can be honest and place the blame squarely where it belongs: on parents, teachers and the students themselves. My parents had less than the poorest of today's students, yet they managed to complete high school with an education that was far superior to anything offered by today's public school system. As long as we allow parents, students and teachers to use "poverty" as the scapegoat for our failings, we will NEVER improve our children's education. Poor people can discipline their children; poor people can set expectations for their children; poor people can choose to take advantage of the myriad of public services available to them. As long as you and other academics make it easy for the poor to blame society for their poor parenting (and hence, their children's poor performance), we will NEVER improve. As long as you stick labels such as "PTSD" on children who place a higher value on a pair of tennis shoes than a passing grade on an exam, we will continue to sink deeper into failure. By the way, lest you think I'm a WASP princess living in an ivory tower: I was a single mother who raised a child by herself, a mother who couldn't let her child out of the apartment after dark due to the violence and drug-dealing in the parking lot. No one told me that if my daughter didn't do her homework, I could blame it on poverty.
Wake up, professor! Success stories are the exception rather than the norm in today's educational abyss. Our tax dollars aren't an investment in the future. We need to change direction and take steps toward REAL reform, and you and your intellectual friends need to quit making excuses for all parties involved.
Karen| 12.28.09 @ 7:59PM
Well said!
Richard Baker| 12.26.09 @ 7:06PM
Professor:
The present system of primary/secondary education in the US is abysmal. I love when your kind refer to it as an "investment in the future." When I found out a few years ago from my UNC graduate wife that Duke and many other top drawer schools have remedial classes for their freshmen, I realized that the entire public/government system is nothing but a scam and a jobs program for Education grads. Show me, please, where this "investment" has been a gain and not a dead-bang loss for the kids and the country. Where are our kids ranked internationally, since international ranking is soo important to liberals, in comparison with these other country's systems? The whole world wonders.
Marc Jeric| 12.27.09 @ 7:02AM
Show me a strong union and I will show you a dead or dying industry - cars, steel, electronics, apparel, textile, ships -and of course education. Only education cannot be outsourced, unfortunately. Since they were permitted to unionize the teachers themselves are victims, and their pupils as well. We have already 3 generations of illiterate nincompoops - how otherwise explain Abu Hussein as our President?
Only 45% of teachers "teach" (mainly self-esteem); the other 55% "administer, develop, coordinate, streamline, congregate, write reports, LOBBY, protest, etc., etc."
And now we have fallen from No 1 in the world to No XXX - who knows?
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