One final note on the teachers-unions argument: The comments to the original post on the low regard for teachers relative to lawyers immediately jumped on the union thing. Commenter Doug Hering provided what's probably the best statement of the causal link:
I do agree that teachers must be treated as professionals. However, part of that is eliminating a union. How many professional groups have unions? It seems to me that gives the impression of a non-professional class of employees.
You hear this sort of thing all the time, most frequently from engineers and computer-industry people, and other white-collar professionals who don't have unions. It illustrates an interesting difference in perspective. They see unions as an obstacle to be removed in order to gain respect.
I read their blogs and LiveJournals bitching about work, and hear phrases like "mandatory overtime," and my first thought is, "Son, you need a union."
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"How many professional groups have unions?"
Quite a lot of them. Ponder state bar organizations. You can't be a lawyer without being a member (closed shop), they set the rules, they collect the dues, and they lobby for the perceived benefit of their members. Presto: union.
See also doctors, psychologists, etc.
No, bar associations are not unions, because they don't collectively bargain.
As a gainfully employed firmware engineer, one-time private-sector entrepreneur and current corporate entrepreneur, I want to weigh in on the anti-union side. Yes, I work more than 40 hours a week, but I'm also paid much more highly than even the best teachers.
I'm also passionate about education for kids and have worked in the classroom on the 'south side of the tracks'. I saw one teacher who was passionate about her students replaced (for health reasons) by one who wasn't, and the difference was tragic.
Dr. Rudy Crew is right that the primary plus a good teacher brings to the classroom is caring, and in my opinion the psychological challenge involved in succeeding with the many and varied minds of today's neglected kids is every bit as complex -- and much more real-time -- as any firmware system.
Just as the auto unions are fighting for their remaining make-work postings, union teaching is by definition defensive rather than proactive. A true professional is not afraid to stand up and prove their worth to their customers.
With that in mind, let's remove all of the politicians, unions and administrative bureaucracies from power, and return the judgement of teaching skill to parents.
Hmmm... that might just improve the whole country a bit...
#3: "and return the judgement of teaching skill to parents. "
Ok, that assumes that parents have a clue, and care about teaching. In my experience that is NOT a save assumption. If we let the parents judge the teaching, we end up with teachers teaching creationism, and grade inflation. As an instructor at the university of Maryland, the number of parents who complained that their student (who didn't put enough effort into the class) got too low a grade was WAY too high.
Parents tend to assume 1) what they believe is correct and 2) that if their child doesn't succeed it's because the teacher was bad. These statements are not necessarily true.
This is one case where I'm not embarrassed to be an elitist. "Yes, I do know better than you, so shut up."
I daresay most IT workers would benefit from a union. I'd be surprised if many weren't worried, though, that the very mention of a union would result in the immediate outsourcing of their jobs.
"No, bar associations are not unions, because they don't collectively bargain."
They do more than collectively bargain: they dictate how lawyers may be employed, who and how they may allocate their earned fees, etc...
Kate, the bar associations and similar are also often the only organizations with a closed shop in a right-to-work state.
Hey, I wonder why nobody ever sues the bar associations to force the right for anyone, independent of qualifications or membership, to be allowed to work as a lawyer, in the right-to-work states... ;-)
Teachers do not have customers. They have students.
The comparison is closer to doctors than any other group of professionals. The people who find themselves 'buying' (although only rarely are either group paid directly by the direct 'customer') are not in any position to judge the persons overall performance on anything other than a fairly insignificant scale. They also rarely have any choice in the matter anyway, being seperated from the actual selection process.
Just as a good doctor might not be the most popular man at a hospital, so a good teacher may not always appear good to everyone.
My best maths teacher left our school partly because she got a bad reputation among students. She was very pasionate about maths, and was an excelent teacher. But because of the way the school worked, she was forced to teach almost entirely to uninterested classes (mixed or low ability groups), with only one older, higher ability group in the mix. She was forced to be a strict teacher, and so was hated, and grew to hate the groups in return. Only the higher group liked her, and that wasn't enough for her to stay on in teaching.
At a prior job, the company bought out another company. We used Oracle to do our accounting, they used something else. We converted their system to ours and adapted our systems to the additional needs of their products in 90 days. Oracle said that was the best that they'd ever seen, and asked us to not publicize it - it was too fast. The Application group in our IT department put in 3 months of 6 and 7 day weeks, 10-12 hours/day.
At the end, the IT department got a nice little plaque on the wall. Our CEO got a bonus of 80% of his salary that year for 'successfully integrating the two companies'.
That's the type of thing that leads to one of two things - IT departments that don't give a sh!t, or unionization. It's a pity that so much of the IT community considers union to be a dirty word - IMAO, they'd do us a lot of good.
Well, speaking as an IT worker who doesn't have a union, I say there are three reasons why I don't want one.
1. A union shop is apt to have an adversarial rather than collegial relationship with management. I don't believe this would be to my advantage.
2. I want to be, and try to be, a superior performer, and expect to be rewarded accordingly. Unions tend to be hostile to this by pushing standardization, making it difficult to get rid of the loser-boys, and fighting merit pay.
3. If I don't like my job, I can quit. And since there are plenty of other employers, this is a realistic recourse in my field.
Hey, I wonder why nobody ever sues the bar associations to force the right for anyone, independent of qualifications or membership, to be allowed to work as a lawyer, in the right-to-work states... ;-)
Well, I know some people who are fully qualified attorneys but would rather not be a member of the American Bar Association if they had a choice, due to that organization's political views. The NLA (http://www.nla.org/about.asp) is an alternative bar association for politically conservative lawyers, but they wouldn't get any membership if they didn't say, everywhere, "In order to join National Lawyers Association, you need not resign from any other bar association." Because no one can afford to resign from the ABA.
So it does almost seem like there could be right-to-work issues with bar associations.
I have suspicions that the union aversion is class based. It's working class folks who have/need unions. I'm middle class and therefore am above that.
Based on what I have personally observed in Silicon Valley, those computer folks could *really* use a union.
MKK
Be honest, though: How many times to you see mandatory overtime for engineers-- not IT people-- mentioned in a context other than, "Fuck that, we won't do it?"
Because in this industry it used to be a common practice, but it's been effectively dismantled on the ground by engineers flat out refusing to do it. The reaction of younger engineers to older engineers telling those stories is halfway between my reaction to Dad's "Uphill in the snow both ways," stories, and pure contempt at allowing themselves to be taken advantage of that way.
Without unions oh so many years ago teachers were hired and fired at the will of the administration. Their life was up to scrutiny by the community. The wages were barely livable and the benefits were poor. My father made $3,000.00 a year in the 50's. He stocked shelves in markets and washed rugs in stores in the evenings to make ends meet since he was the only bread winner. This was the state of a man who spent 2 years at the University of Chicago (and had Enrico Fermi as a professor) and then earned a Bachelor's and Masters after that. He was a highly respected man in the community and to this day former students are in contact with me.
I have been teaching since the late 70's and started at a salary of $9400.00. A little better than my dad. With union support I am able to make a living and have good benefits.
Teachers do not make widgets that can command a market price that will maximize profits. A good teacher cannot negotiate for a salary based on their expertise and success. Private school salaries and benefits are less than the public sphere because unions have created stable working conditions and liveable salaries and benefits for the highly educated teaching profession. (Bachelor's and Master's degrees.) I have 2 Masters. Administrators can negotiate their salaries and benefits.
Quite frankly those who look negatively upon unions do not have a historical perspective on the middle class of our country. Unions of all kind have enabled the average worker to have a stable income and benefits that are not feudal.
Communities would not pay for the expertise teachers provide. And I would like those who are not teachers to develop a curriculum of 180 days that is stimulating, addresses the knowledge level of a variety of intellects, is sequential from day to day, ensures students have a working knowledge of the concepts from the prior day and all days from the beginnig of the year, all when many of your "widgets" don't want to be there.
I would love to see parents who are not science people create an effective lesson on projectiles. Will they have the expertise to lead their students to see that the vertical and horizontal components of the velocity of that baseball are independent of each other?
Unions are an important part of the success of our country and one of the reasons we are a desireable place to be. We have had, but it is now shrinking, a strong middle class. Stop accepting the rhetoric of the right that unions are bad. They have a very important role in our society!!
Johan #11, ask yourself this question: How did Dilbert come to be so popular, particularly among the engineers and IT folk who tend to view unions as anathema? I have specific responses to all of your points:
So would I. And as long as I'm dreaming, I'd like a pony. It's true that there are many examples of adversarial union-management relations (the case of my university's AAUP chapter and the Board of Trustees is a textbook example), and that those cases are the ones you tend to read about in the papers. But this is not always, or even primarily, the fault of the unions. Furthermore, there are many non-union shops where management and staff have an adversarial relationship--see Dilbert for numerous illustrations.
You have obviously been fortunate never to have worked for a PHB, or for a company with a Catbert for a human resources director. Managers are often better rewarded (at least in the short term) for failing conventionally than succeeding unconventionally, and the know-nothings in management tend to be particularly hostile to their most competent underlings.
Good for you. Most of us don't have that recourse, since in many cases it would mean relocating (possible but difficult), often to a location distant from where the spouse (for those of us who are married) works (also possible but difficult--this scenario arises so frequently in academia that it has been named the "two-body problem"). For those with children, the kids' lives are also disrupted. So it's not a step that most of us can take lightly.
No one is required to join the ABA to be a lawyer; indeed, most lawyers aren't members. In most states, you are required to join the bar of the state or state's highest court, which is essentially a professional licensure entity and an arm of the courts, and which is different from the state bar association. (Confusingly, in some states that entity is actually called the state bar association. In those states the the special interest group for lawyers that is usually called the state bar has a different name.)
I believe there are some very important and clear distinctions between associations like the bar and the teachers' unions. Unlike the marketplace for legal and medical services, where consumers can decide which doctors or lawyers to patronize, public school students are largely stuck with the teachers that are in place. So there is no broad mechanism for market forces to reward strong teachers and penalize weak ones.
Worse, while the teachers' unions do serve collective bargaining and protective purposes, they have also grown strong enough to impose what amount to prohibitions on teacher assessments, performance-based compensation (they only support tenure-based pay scales), and any reasonable mechanism to fire poor performers.
So many students are stuck with poor, unqualified, and unmotivated teachers with absolutely no recourse.
My sense is that the lack of percieved professionalism in the teaching profession is largely due to the fact that there is observably poor quality control, no transparent performance assessments or standards, and almost no accountability whatsoever, in a marketplace where the Union actively works to undermine and prevent the growth of alternatives.
That perception would improve dramatically if the unions could evolve from protecting all of their constituents, to protecting only the competent ones, maintain and support higher standards while accepting/supporting real consequences when the standards are unmet, and helping their challenged members improve or face the consequences of their lack of performance.
But they have to open the door to assessments first, and that's a tough row to hoe, because they would then be forced to admit that many (most?) of their constituents are performing poorly, given the challenged national school systems.
I'll never understand why otherwise sensible people have such binary views of Unions. They can and have been both good and bad and need to be evaluated on a case to case basis. Unions can be a force for good and have proven that time and time again. However, like any organization, once it attains enough power, the people leading it tend to fight to maintain or extend the organizations power, instead of looking at an issue in a reasonable manner to attempt to find the best solution. Hence becoming an obstacle to progress.
While I think it's silly to claim that Unions are always detrimental, or that the Teacher's should abandon their union if they want to be considered professionals, I do think the it is valid to ask whether the stands being taken by the unions (steadfast opposition to any merit based systems) are making them a force for good or an impediment to good teaching. There is a reason why Unions have fallen out of favor, and that is because the stands they are taking don't make sense to the non-union public. (or they haven't bothered to try to sell their position to the pubic)
I read their blogs and LiveJournals bitching about work, and hear phrases like "mandatory overtime," and my first thought is, "Son, you need a union."
Sort of a variation on the, grass is always greener. Only If it is yours than you want to change the name to turf or something with more PR zing! LOL!
Dave Briggs :~)
IT workers having their jobs outsourced for considering unions? IT workers are having their jobs outsourced _without_ considering unions. Too bad corporations can't learn from one another - or themselves - and see that it is failing miserably and costing FAR more than expected for less than adequate results.
Sorry, I don't have sources to cite, other than having to work with (read: also do the work of) the outsourced branches.
I would love to belong to a union. And I like my job! Unions are about an appropriate balance of power.
#18: Do you have any evidence that there are any more poor or unqualified teachers than poor or unqualified doctors? I keep hearing people say this, and yet seeing no evidence. And there are MANY MANY more unmotivated doctors and lawyers, who are motivated ONLY by the money...
#19: Agreed. It's a standard part of today's political dynamic. admitting that things are complicated is seen as a sign of weakness.
To #18, Philip
I think those who talk about merit pay just gloss over the fact that we are not making widgets from standized materials that are the same every time they come into our "factory." What would performance assessments be based on? How one plans your lessons? How well your students do on some standardized test? The gains in performance on some normative evaluation? (In my case it could be based on the "Force Concept Inventory" in Physics. http://www2.physics.umd.edu/~redish/Talks/Revitalize/sld031.htm )How about the observations of an administrator? A portfoliio of.....? What about student and parent evaluations?
What happens when you have students in your class who have many difficulties outside of the classroom? I have had 14 year old students who get calls at night to pick up a parent at the bar because the parent was too drunk to make it home. They were taking care of their younger siblings. I have had students who have been fully responsible for their own living arrangements. Working outside of school time to make enough money to pay rent, food and utilities. Are students like these to be included in the evaluation if their performance is the way of evaluating my success?
Teaching is not about widgets. It is a human endeavor that has many variables that change each year and each month. Most teachers are working hard every day to provide the best program possible for all of their students. This country has no standard of what we really want from our educationals system. Do we want to create a competent workforce? In that case lets just track every student the way many other countries do so students know what level of education they can get at early ages. Or do we want an informed citizenry that can make appropriate decisions about our society? The standard of success of our educational system cannot be determined if we do not know what success is. And it seems to me that our public system has been extremely successful considering the number of us who are on this blog who are a product of that system and who have been to college and who are innovative and hard workers.
It is another of those conservative talking points that we are failing. What is failing? Exactly what is the standard of evaluation? I do not mean to say that we cannot improve. We can and we do regularly.
As an educator I am always working to improve what I do to help students be more successful. Change is good as far as I'm concerned. But change without a clear purpose and goals with standards of success are useless.
I'm a public school teacher (8th grade) and am a member of the CTA and my local district union. My dues comes to a little over $3000 a year.
Personally, I'm glad they're there, but that doesn't mean they're perfect. I fight with my union all the time but I understand that I would be much worse off if they weren't there at all. What people miss is that the teacher's union has a primary responsibility to the teachers. My primary responsibility is to my students.
Case in point: I am currently 20 students above my union-negotiated classroom limit (5 different periods, 4 students over per). I gladly take them because I feel I'm a good teacher and those 20 students benefit. If it wasn't for the union I'd take them for free. Now I get a little extra pay. Of course this extra pay doesn't make up for the extra money I spend on labs and such but it helps nonetheless.
Tony L, #19:
While I think it's silly to claim that Unions are always detrimental, or that the Teacher's should abandon their union if they want to be considered professionals, I do think the it is valid to ask whether the stands being taken by the unions (steadfast opposition to any merit based systems) are making them a force for good or an impediment to good teaching. There is a reason why Unions have fallen out of favor, and that is because the stands they are taking don't make sense to the non-union public. (or they haven't bothered to try to sell their position to the pubic)
Ah, a voice of sanity. My response to Eric, #16 is in the same vein:
How did Dilbert come to be so popular, particularly among the engineers and IT folk who tend to view unions as anathema?
Dilbert is popular because many aspects of engineering life are unpleasant, arbitrary and capricious. It does not logically follow, though, that I must be in support of unionizing, since every interaction I have ever had with a union as a union has been unpleasant, arbitrary, and capricious as well.
And likewise, just because unions are solving some problems really doesn't require me to believe that they cannot be improved, or are not also doing harm elsewhere. Those who will not admit the warts of the modern union really have zero credibility in my eyes because they are telling me things that violate my own personal experience.
I also forgot to mention the union protected my wife about 10 years ago. The school was trying to charge her sick time when she had our last child. This was in July. They argued that since she was taking three months off in the beginning of the school year it should start from the day after the baby was born.
re: Unions protecting bad teachers. I've always felt that teachers fall along a normal bell curve. There are bad ones and good ones, most are kind of in the middle. Usually the bad ones get weeded out pretty early though. At least with my kids (8th grade) they can sniff them out pretty early and quickly enter seek and destroy mode. I have definitely seen teachers holding on too long but I would say in almost every case that's because the teacher still loves to teach and loves the students, rather than just pulling in salary.
My district started moving those teachers that still have the love and the brains, but maybe not the energy, into advisory roles for new teachers. They serve as mentors and generally don't have students are a very reduced load (1 elective or something like that). I think that's a good strategy.
Nah. Management would just be confused. But one's cow-orkers would do an awful lot of heckling - and most importantly, not join.
In my experience, the most brain-dead, and most expensive programming errors were all made after three or more weeks of 90+ hours apiece. Avoiding bugs, finding bugs, and fixing bugs, is very much about reading code, and understanting what it does. Plenty of research indicates long hours seriously degrade reading comprehension. So it's not just software developers that might benefit.
But relative to most workers, we have it good (not easy - but good). So no-one is going to rock the boat.
Johan: 1. A union shop is apt to have an adversarial rather than collegial relationship with management. I don't believe this would be to my advantage.
2. I want to be, and try to be, a superior performer, and expect to be rewarded accordingly. Unions tend to be hostile to this by pushing standardization, making it difficult to get rid of the loser-boys, and fighting merit pay.
Evidently, you prefer to have your adversarial relationship be with your co-workers...
As for most of the rest of this thread, I'm not fool enough to claim that there are no bad teachers holding down jobs that could be given to people who would do a better job-- I can think of two or three from my own school days. And I'm sure there are plenty of examples of unions doing bad things or opposing sensible policies for stupid reasons-- you get that with any large organization. I'm generally skeptical of news stories that paint unions that way, as there's a distinct pro-management bias in most media, but there are idiots everywhere.
My knowledge of unions, and teachers' unions specifically, comes from the years that my father spent as a union official, and on balance, they did more good than harm. They fought off no end of petty and tyrannical behavior from the school superintendent (who was a real piece of work), and managed to block a number of really stupid ideas from the school board and members of the community. The vast majority of news stories I hear regarding teachers' unions end up in one of those two categories.
To the extent that they do defend complete idiots, or idiotic actions by otherwise sensible teachers, they do so to defend the integrity of the process, for the sake of good teachers who might need protection later. They play the same role as defense attorneys and the ACLU-- they stick up for the civil rights of people they don't necessarily agree with, in order to prevent those rights from being whittled away for the rest of us.
My knowledge of unions, and teachers' unions specifically, comes from the years that my father spent as a union official, and on balance, they did more good than harm.
Okay, but at the end of the day, my experience mirrors yours, in that my dad was IBEW for 45 years(!) with bad experiences all over... and none of that reversed by my own later experiences as a professional. And frankly, in the face of some of the stories I could tell you, "integrity of the process," rings pretty hollow at best. (Seriously. Ask me about our receiving bay situation next time I see you, if I haven't told you before. I'm not going to tell it here.)
Now, I'm not going to change your mind, and I'm not trying to. But, I am trying to get you to understand why you're really really unlikely to change mine-- it flies directly in the face of my entire life experience.
And likewise, just because unions are solving some problems really doesn't require me to believe that they cannot be improved, or are not also doing harm elsewhere. Those who will not admit the warts of the modern union really have zero credibility in my eyes because they are telling me things that violate my own personal experience.
What doesn't have warts? The biggest one I can think of for unions is that they're sometimes poor at acting as a proxy for workers[1].
As to harm, I imagine it the workplace as venn-diagram-ish set of overlapping goals and desires. Some of them will be complementary, and some will be in conflict. So there will always be cases where a benefit over here causes harm over there. Ideally, a union will help even out the distribution so that the harms and benefits are more equitably distributed.
There are, of course, things that end up being harmful to everyone, too.
[1] Working on the theory that organizations serve their own interests. So in those cases where the interests of the union and the interests of the workers diverge, or in the case of unions where that tends to happen, the union is failing to be a proxy for the workers, and thus not doing its job very well.
Dilbert is popular not because it has anything to do with engineering but because it has everything to do with big businesses, and the common perception among employees that management is clueless. This is especially true of engineers, who believe that they can do anything because they can do engineering, and engineering is just following clear-cut rules with things that obey those clear-cut rules. Most of the time.
Some mandatory, unpaid overtime in engineering is no longer done because it was technically illegal. If employees are effectively hourly employees, then in most cases they cannot be forced to work unpaid overtime. In many cases, despite claims to the contrary by management, engineers were effectively hourly employees. There were court cases almost 20 years ago that resulted in some engineering firms' having to pay backpay to employees that were called management but were in fact hourly employees.
Let me preface this by saying that I consider merit pay an issue that would only provide a modest improvement in the quality of teachers at the schools. That said, I think comment:
I think those who talk about merit pay just gloss over the fact that we are not making widgets from standized materials that are the same every time they come into our "factory." What would performance assessments be based on?
is an example of the type of argument that falls flat with the general public for one reason: This is true for most people who don't work in a factory (ie. the non-union members of the public). Unless you are a salesman, there are often few pure metrics that can be applied many professions. A large segment of the public lives with the reality that future raises will be dependent on their supervisor's evaluation and judgment of their performance (This has been true for every job I've ever had). Overall, we seem to manage just fine. While there are obvious shortcomings to this (capricious managers), I have a hard time believing that some protections can't be negotiated that will minimize them. Certainly the Union can come up with a scheme that allows some evaluation basis for raises and still provides protection against capricious supervisors. However, the few times this issue has come up in my area, the union seemed opposed to any type of merit considerations whatsoever.
John Novak: Now, I'm not going to change your mind, and I'm not trying to. But, I am trying to get you to understand why you're really really unlikely to change mine-- it flies directly in the face of my entire life experience.
And it's more or less the same reason you won't change my mind. We've gone around about this enough times, that I don't expect either of us to budge.
It's still worth putting the basic position out there, for the people who haven't already read this discussion umpteen times here. I think there are at least two or three.
John Novak #30 said, 'And frankly, in the face of some of the stories I could tell you, "integrity of the process," rings pretty hollow at best.'
In this country we believe (or at least we did before GWB) in the rule of law. None of us are claiming that unions always do a good job of preserving the integrity of the process, but it's still an important thing to have.
Schoolteachers in this country are particularly vulnerable to pressure from administrators, school boards, and parents. Of course everyone benefits if particularly bad teachers are fired, but since (as others have pointed out) there are no universally accepted metrics for teacher quality, it's easy to claim that any given teacher is a "bad" teacher, including the ones that most of us would consider good teachers. So there have to be procedures for ensuring that teachers are not fired capriciously, or can be reinstated quickly if they are fired capriciously. Unions are not necessarily the only way to achieve this goal, but I invite you to describe a system that will give consistently better results without prohibitive costs. Courts (at least the way they are presently constituted) are not a realistic solution: teachers who cannot afford lawyers (i.e., most of them) get screwed, and the costs to the school district in any successful suit are potentially ruinous.
LOL!
(So far I'm still laughing. I think you can guess my age.)
Bruce, 31,
What doesn't have warts? The biggest one I can think of for unions is that they're sometimes poor at acting as a proxy for workers[1].
Yes, but very often these discussions degrade right into the absolutely pro-union camp and the absolutely anti-union camp. (And we know which of those I'm closer to.)
Prior to Tony at #19, this discussion was (barring a sidebar about whether the ABA is a union or not) not much in the way of subtletly, but mostly a straight up unions are good/unions or bad argument itself.
1) Don't you think it's possible that you're looking at your father's performance through rose-colored glasses? (No insult intended or implied, but we must be impersonal and rigorous about this.)
2) Even if we presume that your father really was good at his job, don't you think it's possible that you have a biased view of how unions normally work if your only experience with them involves a competent leader?
"A large segment of the public lives with the reality that future raises will be dependent on their supervisor's evaluation and judgment of their performance (This has been true for every job I've ever had). Overall, we seem to manage just fine."
The problem with this is that in a company the managers are not as emotionally effected as students/parents are by teachers. The metric that will get parents and students to give good evaluations is good grades. Putting teacher evaluations in the hands of the parents would result in a system that asymntotically (sp) approaches everyone getting perfect scores. From my recent experience (I graduated undergrad in may, my younger brother is a undergrad freshmen, and my little sister is still in HS and I grew up in a middle-upper class area) the 'product' that the parents expect from school isn't an education (in fact a good number of them are stock brokers, lawyers (sorry kate), and business types who seem to actively disdain education), it is a ticket to Havahd [[or other top tier school of your choice]].
The notion that school boards are a source of wisdom is also useless. On the school board at home there are a bunch of people with the view "I don't have any kids in school so why should I pay any school taxes?". If they had their way they would probably only keep teachers on for 2 years and then replace them.
I think the main point with evaluations is that education is a complicated thing with out any clear notion of what is a good job (it seems to have a definition similar to pornography ["I know it when I see it"]). Once you let in the evaluation process you lose control of it and it will in all likely hood be subverted for purposes entirely orthogonal to maximizing education [see our current administration, yes there are republicans in your communities]
If people are concerned over burn outs still drawing salary, I have a novel method of dealing with this. Why not hire a few more teachers and not burn people out?
An unrelated horror story about a math teacher in my county at home: There was a male math teacher who was likely what people around here would consider a good teacher, as in he expected his kids to learn math. Two of his female students developed a dislike of him and lied to the administration that when they went for help after school he molested them. This predictably destroyed his teacher carrear. After several years in the courts the girls finally admitted they had made it all up and all the charges were dropped, but still.
Has anyone else seen the calculation as to what would happen if we paid teachers as well as baby sitters at a bit over minimum wage? It goes something like 8hrs*20kids*$7/(kid*hour)*5days/week*35weeks/year = $196,000/year
Also consider that the costs incurred by a company from replacing an engineer are (I presume) a good bit higher than those of a school to replace a teacher. When you hire a new engineer they need to be trained up on what the company is doing costing you productivity of both them and everyone who helps train them up (I assume this is similar to the time cost involved in new students joining experimental groups). A teacher comes certified to teach a subject and can basically be dropped in to the class room and sent off on their own. (kind of like they do with grad students as TA's in the sciences at universities).
"As an instructor at the university of Maryland, the number of parents who complained that their student (who didn't put enough effort into the class) got too low a grade was WAY too high.:
at the university level? wtf
sorry this got rantty.
Yes, but very often these discussions degrade right into the absolutely pro-union camp and the absolutely anti-union camp. (And we know which of those I'm closer to.)
Hrm. But, I mean, for example: I'm absolutely pro-union, in every useful sense. That's not to say that I agree with everything every union does, and think they're totally perfect. Does any rational person commit that blindly? I'm absolutely in favor of having a police force! That doesn't mean that I agree with everything they do (in the case of the police, there's tons to disagree with).
Given a union, I'm almost certainly in favor of having it. Much like I'm in favor of having a police force. In both cases, if they're acting badly, I advocate fixing them, not getting rid of them.
There are unionized engineers. When I interviewed at GE, the folks at HR told me about the union and included a union brochure in my packet o'stuff. Also, I know that DC 37 in NYC represents city engineers who do road and subway design work. They were all pissed at the trend towards outsourcing that started in the 70s. Having a union just means that when things go awry, there is an extra layer between you and the company.
The teachers went through this whole professionals versus employees thing in the 30s. Given politics and parents, not having a union leaves the whole school thing wide open for corruption and cronyism. Look at what happened in NYC with the neighborhood school boards and the 1968 strike. The big issue was whether the neighborhood boards could control hiring and firing of teachers. The boards lost on that, but everything they won on became part of the spoils system to the detriment of the students.
To #23, Brian
While I will readily admit that I have performed neither an extensive nor a detailed study on the specific issue, there is some information in the general press about relative qualifications of different professions. In terms of qualifications, in order to legally practice, the medical and legal professional associations require both an advanced degree in their field and passage of a state standardized exam. The percentage of doctors and lawyers who practice without both of these qualifications is quite low, if not negligible.
On the other hand, elementary and secondary schools are populated with a host of non-credentialed instructors, (where emergency credentials are simply a mechanism to legalize the failure of the profession as a whole to maintain itself and its standards--though I want to be clear here that I am not saying the problem is completely internal or the utter responsibility of the teaching profession at large with other large economic forces at work) where a woefully high percentage of them don't even have a degree in their field of study (in some cases over 40%), much less an advanced one.
In terms of performance, I could start by pointing to international student performance statistics, where US students have fallen to abysmal depths from our once premier position, in some cases to somewhere around 48th place among the industrialized nations in terms of math and science scores, whereas our health care metrics are still in the top 5.
So yes, I think the standards are very different, and the levels of performance and qualifications are very different between professions as a whole, and I think there is good evidence on both the macro and the micro scales to support that claim.
In terms of motivation, at some level, all motivation can be looked at in terms of economics, though many aspects of benefits vs. costs are not necessarily monetary. Nonetheless, economic principles can be used to help understand otherwise confusing situations. (I would recommend reading Tim Harford's book entitled "The Undercover Economist" for a fun read in that direction. See my blog for a review) As a consumer, as long as a service provider is sufficiently motivated to produce an acceptable product whose value outweighs the cost I must pay, I will continue to buy it. Where their motivation arises to me is less important than whether they are effective or not.
To #24, JM
I think you may be confusing my statement that there needs to be assessment and quality control and mechanisms for improvement and reform with a call for a specific set of criteria.
In our work with many different schools through WISE [The Westminster Institute for Science Education], we stand in a unique position to observe from within the wide range of varied schools we are supporting. From that perspective, it is very clear that different schools have different emphases, strengths, and weaknesses and it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to craft any reasonable universal standard, or to have the standards of one school dictate the priorities of another. (I yet hope, though, that some notion of an informed competitive standard can be used as a foundation along with an aspiration for excellence.)
But regardless of what standard a school initially adopts, a bigger question is whether that school has a culture and organization which is open to, and really drives the notion of assessing itself, and using that assessment to improve and to drive and manage change, and through change, growth.
Even poor schools which adopt this philosophy improve from year-to-year.
The kinds of questions you are asking are exactly the type of questions and conversations that are necessary and critical to helping each school figure out how to assess itself, and apply that assessment to improve, preferably through an open dialog between all the school constituents.
Most schools, however, have developed cultures and organizations which actively resist both assessment and change, and therefore have no real chance to improve at any real rate. All too often, I have seen the union practices which fight against any sort of assessment add glue to the quicksand. And without assessment, reasoned change and improvement cannot happen without SOME information to guide it.
Does risk attend change? Certainly. Is any assessment method perfect? I've never seen a perfect one. Does any school, even of the most successful ones, get the assessment and improvement goal right either first, or even a majority of the time? Not necessarily.
But the ones who start the process and stick with it, refining it over successive years, doing more of what works, and reconsidering and reforming what doesn't, are the ones that consistently improve and over the long term, prosper. (From your comments, it sounds like you are in a productive environment in this regard. How could you imagine your environment supporting you better?)
Just HAVING assessment and using it to incrementally improve as best as perhaps otherwise limiting circumstances allow is more important than the specific form of assessments that you begin with, as long as we are open to changing and improving the assessments as well. Even if we start with a limited or misguided rubric, it can improve. Without change, nothing can improve.
I definitely agree, though, that as a nation we need a better articulation of national needs in education, and preferably in a format that could be actionable at the school level. And I also agree that change without purpose is misguided.
I am hopeful that there is a growing realization that simply teaching children to perform well on tests is not a solution to our educational challenges, and that our educational system at large could benefit from a shift towards purposely fostering creativity and innovation, and towards educating students (in science math, technology or otherwise) in the processes as much or more than the historical emphasis on pure subject matter, memorization and rote testing.
(This is, incidentally, the mission of our new Westminster Institute for Science Education Institute. ) Where do you teach? Is there something we might do to help?
To Philip #42:
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I will respond to you later today. I have several classes and meetings coming up. I teach at Shenendehowa High School East in Clifton Park, NY. I teach Physics. I have also been a science administrator and an assistant principal in the past.