Why many Democrats have turned against teachers unions

[No1]

BY VALERIE STRAUSS July 5

Randi Weingarten (AFT)

For years now it’s been clear that Democrats have splintered over the issue of corporate school reform. President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have been leaders of the movement to transform public schools through standardized-test-based “accountability” and the expansion of charter schools, with other Democrats arguing that these reform measures are not effective ways of closing the achievement gap and improving student performance.

That split came into stark relief with the recent verdict in Vergara v. California in which a judge threw out state statutes giving job protection to teachers. The plaintiffs had argued that tenure and other protections that had been negotiated by teachers unions deprived students of their constitutional right to an adequate education. Though no real evidence was presented to prove that claim, the judge agreed, though he stayed his decision until an appeal could be heard. Duncan praised the verdict....

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In the following post, Jeff Bryant writes about why some Democrats have turned against teachers unions. A version of this appeared on the Salon Web site.

Remember when Rod Paige, secretary of education under President George W. Bush, called teachers unions “terrorist organizations”?

The year was 2004, and, according to accounts written at the time, Paige made the remark “in a private White House meeting with governors while answering a question about the National Education Association.” He was speaking “at length” about the implementation of the then relatively new law called No Child Left Behind. Now that law is widely regarded as a failure.

NCLB, you may recall, rolled out unfunded mandates for nationwide testing and unreachable “accountability” goals for the nation’s schools – policies that are now regarded as unworkable. At the time Paige made his remark, the National Education Association had said the law was “practically impossible to implement,” under-funded, and in need of more “flexibility” – criticisms today generally regarded as true.

Recall also that Paige’s remark ignited outrage from politicians and activist groups on the left.

Leading Democrats, including Sen. Harry Reid, joined with the NEA in demanding Paige resign, and before the year was out, he was gone.

How things have changed.

Flash forward to today.

The campaign against public school teachers and their unions has evolved from casting insults to inflicting real injury. The recent ruling by a California judge in the Vergara v. California case made it a legal precedent to equate teachers’ employment security to an affront to students’ rights to a quality education.

David Cohen of the California teacher leadership network, Accomplished California Teachers, wrote on that organization’s blog that the Vergara decision was determined before the case was even tried. “No real proof of harm to individual or schools was ever shown. The testimony against teacher job security policies relied mostly on economists. And the ruling was based on mostly “a thought exercise” rather than relevant legal precedent."

As education journalist and author Dana Goldstein pointed out in The Atlantic, whether you like or dislike the California policies that Vergara struck down, those policies, “aren’t the only, or even the primary, driver of the teacher-quality gap between the state’s middle-class and low-income schools. The larger problem is that too few of the best teachers are willing to work long-term in the country’s most racially isolated and poorest neighborhoods. There are lots of reasons why.”

What happened, and why has the left shifted?

Education policy analyst and research expert Matthew Di Carlo of the Albert Shanker Institute, a nonprofit organization founded to honor the life and legacy of the late president of the American Federation of Teachers, recently explained that many on the left have been conditioned to regard teachers as separate from their unions. As an example of this notion, Di Carlo pointed to a quote from liberal Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter, who stated in the union-bashing documentary “Waiting for Superman:”

“It’s very, very important to hold two contradictory ideas in your head at the same time. Teachers are great, a national treasure.Teachers’ unions are, generally speaking, a menace and an impediment to reform.”

Really? As Di Carlo explained:

“Teachers’ unions are comprised of members who are teachers, they’re led by teachers (many still in the classroom) who are elected by teachers, and union policy positions and collective bargaining agreements are voted on and approved by teachers.”

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Another easy answer for why teachers unions have fallen out of favor with some liberals is that when education policy is the matter at hand, they don’t know what they’re talking about.

A piece on the Web site of the Center for American Progress, for example, claimed the Vergara case rested on “the role of effective teaching in educational equity.” While no one denies that good teachers matter a lot to the education trajectory of children, the whole notion that policy makers have a valid and reliable method for identifying who is and is not an effective teacher is far from a settled matter.

Currently, new teacher evaluation systems are being rolled out across the nation at the encouragement – others would contend, coercion – of the federal government.

According to Education Week , at least a dozen states have asked the U.S. Department of Education to allow them delays in rolling out those evaluation systems due to their complexity and the often-controversial results.

In states that claim to have had more success at implementing new teacher evaluations, the results have been decidedly underwhelming.

As Education Week reported last year:

“In Michigan, 98 percent of teachers were rated effective or better under new teacher-evaluation systems recently put in place. In Florida, 97 percent of teachers were deemed effective or better.Principals in Tennessee judged 98 percent of teachers to be ‘at expectations’ or better last school year, while evaluators in Georgia gave good reviews to 94 percent of teachers taking part in a pilot evaluation program.”

Indiana ‘s new evaluation program found that “88 percent of teachers and administrators were rated as either effective or highly effective under the system; only about two percent need improvement, and less than a half a percent were deemed ineffective.”

In many of these states, where supposedly under-performing teachers have been spotted, there are numerous anecdotes that the labeling has been either highly questionable or blatantly mistaken. Teachers in Florida and in other states, for instance, have had their performance rated using the test scores of students they’ve never even taught.

Most of the flaws in these teacher evaluation systems stem from their reliance, in varying degrees, on student test scores...So the designation of “ineffective teacher” remains by and large arbitrary.​

In a recent conversation occurring on Salon with Thomas Frank, Barry Lynn of the New America Foundation pointed out that the Democratic Party, which has been serving as home for the left, suffers from a schism.Although Lynn’s analysis pertained mostly to economics, now that economics is the frame most used by policy makers to analyze education, his conclusions are apt metaphors to understand what produced rulings like Vergara and the adulation it received from supposed progressives.

In the conversation, Lynn contended while on the one hand, there are those in the party who “believe in community-based democracy and industrial liberty,” there is an “overlay … of people who still really believe that the main thing we should aim at is efficiency, and these people wield real power in the party.”

This cult of efficiency currently dominating the left is what has led to education policy driven by what Strauss called an “obsession with standardized test scores.”

Eventually, the cult of efficiency spawned in economic think tanks persuaded advocates in the civil rights movement to join in “a motley alliance,”...to impose new teacher evaluation systems and a way of thinking about teachers as the chief engineers of students’ education destinies.

This alliance has the support of the federal government and rich private foundations, as well as venture capitalists who paid for the Vergara lawsuit ...Yet it has produced little if any progress in achieving education equity for children, despite the stated intent.

What it is definitely producing, though, is an economic system geared toward treating teachers as replaceable parts in a manufacturing process in which their jobs become more expendable even as student achievement levels barely budge and the least served children in the system remain that way.

The costs of this are not just a deteriorating teacher profession made up of low paid, expendable workers and an irreparably harmed education system capable of serving only the most fortunate students, but, as Lynn puts it, “the end of democracy.”

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[88m3]

People who attack teachers and unions should be lined up against a wall and shot.


The rich are using the uneducated and poor against the middle class and ultimately themselves.

Your wage envy doesn't equate to stripping someone else of their collective bargaining rights, livelihood, and career. @BarNone

 

[wheywhey]

You poll is unfortunate. I am for removing teacher tenure. I don't think teachers should be held accountable for students test scores since those are based on race and income. Although New York City has alleviated this problem by comparing test scores to schools with similar demographics. However, NY has tons of schools and most districts can't do that. If a teacher's technique isn't working they should be retrained.

I think that when egregious problems occur like drugs, sex with students or on campus, sleeping in class, etc, the district should be able to fire the teacher quickly.

 

[No1]

You poll is unfortunate. I am for removing teacher tenure. I don't think teachers should be held accountable for students test scores since those are based on race and income. Although New York City has alleviated this problem by comparing test scores to schools with similar demographics. However, NY has tons of schools and most districts can't do that. If a teacher's technique isn't working they should be retrained.

I think that when egregious problems occur like drugs, sex with students or on campus, sleeping in class, etc, the district should be able to fire the teacher quickly.

Being for removing teacher tenure is exactly one of the things the case is about. If you really want that option I can add it. Be specific.

As for @theworldismine13 contribute to the thread or get out of it. This is a major case, and the OP in HL gets to dictate what type of thread they want (via the rules). I just happen to be the OP of this thread .

@Serious I see you're trying to find a way to end up in that HL WOAT poster ballot

 

[Serious]

People who attack teachers and unions should be lined up against a wall and shot.


The rich are using the uneducated and poor against the middle class and ultimately themselves.

Your wage envy doesn't equate to stripping someone else of their collective bargaining rights, livelihood, and career. @BarNone

This tactic has been going on, well forever.

Honestly I feel sad the a lot of the poor whites in this country; their one's who eat up all this garbage and send their children to war, to fight on the frontlines and ultimately their one's who are being screwed so badly by the politicians

 

[Hiphoplives4eva]

Teachers unions are a travesty to modern education.

 

[the cac mamba]

People who attack teachers and unions should be lined up against a wall and shot.


]

cant cosign this at all, teachers unions are far from immune from criticism breh

when someone like jerry sandusky has to be sued by the state in order to have his pension stripped, something is wrong there (and i know thats not an exactly relevant example). teachers need to be paid more when they start out, and have tenure eliminated or at least easier to contest

another case in point: the unionized teacher who beat off into cookies and fed them to his kids, is using his representation to fight for his job and pension

 

[88m3]

cant cosign this at all, teachers unions are far from immune from criticism breh

when someone like jerry sandusky has to be sued by the state in order to have his pension stripped, something is wrong there (and i know thats not an exactly relevant example). teachers need to be paid more when they start out, and have tenure eliminated or at least easier to contest

another case in point: the unionized teacher who beat off into cookies and fed them to his kids, is using his representation to fight for his job and pension

Use child rape as a buttress to attack all teachers and unions.


Get a life

 

[the cac mamba]

Use child rape as a buttress to attack all teachers and unions.


Get a life

so we cant point out flaws now good to know

 

[88m3]

so we cant point out flaws now good to know

I feel embarrassed for you.

 

[the cac mamba]

I feel embarrassed for you.

that might mean something to me if this wasnt a community of anonymous people