The Teachers' Unions' Last Stand

MICHAEL MULGREW is an affable former Brooklyn vocational-high-school teacher who took over last year as head of New York City’s United Federation of Teachers when his predecessor, Randi Weingarten, moved to Washington to run the national American Federation of Teachers. Over breakfast in March, we talked about a movement spreading across the country to hold public-school teachers accountable by compensating, promoting or even removing them according to the results they produce in class, as measured in part by student test scores. Mulgrew’s 165-page union contract takes the opposite approach. It not only specifies everything that teachers will do and will not do during a six-hour-57 ½-minute workday but also requires that teachers be paid based on how long they have been on the job. Once they’ve been teaching for three years and judged satisfactory in a process that invariably judges all but a few of them satisfactory, they are ensured lifetime tenure.

Next to Mulgrew was his press aide, Richard Riley. “Suppose you decide that Riley is lazy or incompetent,” I asked Mulgrew. “Should you be able to fire him?”

“He’s not a teacher,” Mulgrew responded. “And I need to be able to pick my own person for a job like that.” Then he grinned, adding: “I know where you’re going, but you don’t understand. Teachers are just different.”

That is the kind of story that makes Jon Schnur smile. Schnur, who runs a Manhattan-based school-reform group called New Leaders for New Schools, sits informally at the center of a network of self-styled reformers dedicated to overhauling public education in the United States. They have been building in strength and numbers over the last two decades and now seem to be planted everywhere that counts. They are working in key positions in school districts and charter-school networks, legislating in state capitals, staffing city halls and statehouses for reform-minded mayors and governors, writing papers for policy groups and dispensing grants from billion-dollar philanthropies like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Bill Gates, along with Education Secretary Arne Duncan; Teach for America’s founder, Wendy Kopp; and the New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein could be considered the patron saints of the network.

Over the last several months, Schnur and the well-positioned fellow travelers on his speed dial have seen the cause of their lives take center stage. Why the sudden shift from long-simmering wonk debate to political front burner? Because there is now a president who, when it comes to school reform, really does seem to be a new kind of Democrat — and because of a clever idea Schnur had last year to package what might otherwise have been just another federal grant program into a media-alluring, if cheesy-sounding, contest called Race to the Top. It has turned a relatively modest federal program (the $4.3 billion budget represents less than 1 percent of all federal, state and local education spending) into high-yield leverage that could end up overshadowing health care reform in its impact and that is already upending traditionalDemocratic Party politics. The activity set off by the contest has enabled Schnur’s network to press as never before its frontal challenge to the teachers’ unions: they argue that a country that spends more per pupil than any other but whose student performance ranks in the bottom third among developed nations isn’t failing its children for lack of resources but for lack of trained, motivated, accountable talent at the front of the class.

Schnur, who is 44, became interested in education when, as an editor of his high-school newspaper, he read a draft of an article from a student who had transferred from a Milwaukee public school to his school in the suburbs. “She was savvier than any of us on the editorial board, but the draft was just so terribly written,” he told me. Schnur added that “the more I got to know her, the more I became obsessed with why public education hadn’t reached people like her.” After graduating from Princeton, he worked in the Clinton campaign and then landed an education-policy job in the Clinton administration.

Schnur recalls that when he met Barack Obama before his Senate campaign in 2004, and heard him talk about education, “I figured this guy could be the great education president — in 2017.” When Obama moved up the timetable, Schnur joined his 2008 campaign as a policy adviser. Six months later, he was working as a counselor to Education Secretary Duncan. As the Obama administration prepared to spend $80 billion in education aid as part of the economic stimulus program, Duncan and Schnur diverted $4.3 billion to the contest aimed at encouraging cash-strapped states to overhaul their public schools. Schnur came up with the name and pushed the overall spin of the contest, and it was clear from conversations with people in the school-reform movement that he is the one person who seems to know everything happening on all fronts, from the White House to legislative chambers in Albany or Sacramento to charter schools in New Orleans. Joel Klein, for example, said he talks to Schnur about once a week.

The winners of the Race would be those states that submitted the best blueprints for fulfilling the reform agenda, which includes allowing school districts to take over failing schools, improving curriculum standards and encouraging school innovation (which means, in part, allowing charter schools to flourish). But what the reformers have come to believe matters most is good teachers. “It’s all about the talent,” Secretary Duncan told me. Thus, the highest number of points — 138 of the 500-point scale that Duncan and his staff created for the Race — would be awarded based on a commitment to eliminate what teachers’ union leaders consider the most important protections enjoyed by their members: seniority-based compensation and permanent job security. To win the contest, the states had to present new laws, contracts and data systems making teachers individually responsible for what their students achieve, and demonstrating, for example, that budget-forced teacher layoffs will be based on the quality of the teacher, not simply on seniority. (Fifteen states, including New York and California, now operate under union-backed state laws mandating that seniority, or “last in/first out,” determines layoffs. These quality-blind layoffs could force a new generation of teachers, like those recruited by Teach for America, out of classrooms in the coming months.) To enable teacher evaluations, another 47 points would be allocated based on the quality of a state’s “data systems” for tracking student performance in all grades — which is a euphemism for the kind of full-bore testing regime that makes many parents and children cringe but that the reformers argue is necessary for any serious attempt to track not only student progress but also teacher effectiveness.

By late March, when the first round of the Race ended, it was clear that Schnur’s spin had worked “better than any of us imagined,” he says. Thousands of local news stories across the country speculated about how particular states were faring, some of them breathlessly referring to the “March Madness” as governors, state legislators and bureaucrats rushed to consider reforms that might improve their chances. Forty states and the District of Columbia entered the first round. Fifteen, including such union strongholds as California, Ohio and Michigan, passed laws or revised regulations aimed at boosting their chances. Before Duncan had dispensed a nickel, the country had seen more school reform than it had in decades. And still more is being debated as the deadline for a second round of proposals looms next week and states, including New York, Connecticut and New Jersey, hustle to do more to boost their scores.

When the starting gun for the Race went off, four forces that had been building came together and gained strength from one another.

First there’s the rise of the reformers who seem to be in daily communication through e-mail and blogs. The standard profile is someone who went to a prestige college, joined Teach for America for a two-year stint and found the work and the challenges so compelling that he or she decided education should be more than a layover before a real career. So they did more teaching or became involved running a charter school or a reform group, then kept moving up the ladder as sympathetic political leaders, including Democrats (most in this network also seem to be Democrats), took over cities or states and looked for people to overhaul school systems. One exception is Schnur. “I was in Wendy’s class in Princeton in 1989, so I couldn’t do T.F.A. because it didn’t exist yet,” Schnur says, referring to Wendy Kopp, who founded Teach for America in 1990 based on a senior thesis she wrote envisioning a Peace Corps-like cadre of young college grads.

Although Schnur is a cheerful, modest type, there is a strain of self-righteousness that runs through the reform network. Some come off as snobs who assume any union teacher is lazy or incompetent and could be bested by young, nonunion Ivy Leaguers full of energy. And others see tying teachers’ pay to their students’ improvement on standardized tests as a cure-all. But most — especially those who have taught and appreciate how hard it is — understand that standardized tests are far from perfect, and that some subjects, like the arts, don’t lend themselves to standardized testing. They know that most teachers want to be effective and that data-based performance assessments should be combined with classroom observation and other subjective measures not only to hold teachers accountable but also to help them improve their performance.

The second force at work is a new crop of Democratic politicians across the country— including President Obama — who seem willing to challenge the teachers’ unions.

Third, there’s the boost given to school reform by high-powered foundations, like the Gates Foundation, which have financed important research and pilot reform projects, and by wealthy entrepreneurs, who have poured seed money into charter schools.

And fourth, there’s the charter-school movement, which has yielded an increasingly large and vocal constituency of parents whose children are among the more than 1.5 million students attending more than 5,000 charter schools.

Put those forces together with the Race, and you have education reform moving into prime time. Parents marched and lobbied in Tallahassee, Albany and Los Angeles, demanding that their school systems be reformed the way Obama’s instructions for winning the Race said they should. Newspaper editorial boards of all political stripes joined in their cause; “Union Lackeys” was a typical title of a Las Vegas Review-Journal editorial about recalcitrant Democratic legislators.

If unions are the Democratic Party’s base, then teachers’ unions are the base of the base. The two national teachers’ unions — the American Federation of Teachers and the larger National Education Association — together have more than 4.6 million members. That is roughly a quarter of all the union members in the country. Teachers are the best field troops in local elections. Ten percent of the delegates to the 2008 Democratic National Convention were teachers’ union members. In the last 30 years, the teachers’ unions have contributed nearly $57.4 million to federal campaigns, an amount that is about 30 percent higher than any single corporation or other union. And they have typically contributed many times more to state and local candidates. About 95 percent of it has gone to Democrats.

Before they successfully organized in the 1950s and 1960s, teachers endured meager salaries, political favoritism, tyrannical principals and sex discrimination against a mostly female work force. It’s that sense of needing to stick together against real or potential mistreatment by management, plus a sincere — and accurate — belief that most teachers do teach for reasons beyond simply making a living, that drives Mulgrew and other union leaders. There’s also the reality that their own power comes from making sure that the all-for-one-one-for-all contract that they negotiate remains the determining factor in a teacher’s professional life.

Nonetheless, almost all the states that submitted first-round applications proposed school reforms that a year ago would have been seen as pushing beyond what the teachers’ unions would allow. Some moved further than others either because the lure of the Race to the Top money trumped the unions’ opposition, or because political leaders and educators were able to persuade union leaders to get on the train instead of standing in front of it.

"That President Obama did this is a total game changer,” says Pastorek, the Louisiana schools superintendent, who is a Republican working for a Republican governor, Bobby Jindal. “If he really sticks to this, education will never be the same.”

Newsweek: Bill Gates and Randi Weingarten debate education reform

Happy New Years to everyone! Great Q & A here for this week's post between Bill Gates and Randi Weingarten (President of the American Federation of Teachers). Talk about a lopsided contest...

Our schools are lagging behind the rest of the world. Why is that? How did we fall so far behind?

Gates: Well, it’s the big issue. A lot of other countries have put effort into their school systems. So part of it is the competition is better. The Chinese, who have a 10th of our wealth, are running a great education system. There are some things we can learn from other systems. They have a longer school day in most countries, and a longer school year in most countries. And some of them have elements of their personnel system that are worth learning from.

Weingarten: What we’re seeing is that the United States, instead of moving ahead, is actually stagnating. We’re basically in the same place we’ve been, and these countries have moved forward. They’ve spent a lot of time investing in the preparation and support of teachers. Many of them teach a common curriculum, very similar to the common standards that Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation have been supporting. And they create the tools and conditions that teachers need to teach, and they have mutual respect and accountability. So kids have a role in terms of education, parents have a role in terms of education, teachers have a role in terms of education, and policymakers do as well.

Gates: I agree with all that, except we spend more money by every measure than any other system. Any way you look at it we spend by far the most money. So that is a dilemma. What are we going to do to get more out of the investments we make? Are there practices in terms of helping teachers be better that we can fit into our system? What can you do to help the teachers be better? You know, a quarter of our teachers are very good. If you could make all the teachers as good as the top quarter, the U.S. would soar to the top of that comparison. So can you find the way to capture what the really good teachers are doing? It’s amazing to me that more has not been invested in looking at how does that good teacher calm that classroom? How does that good teacher keep the attention of all those kids? We need to measure what they do, and then have incentives for the other teachers to learn those things.

Weingarten: Football teams do this all the time. They look at the tape after every game. Sometimes they do it during the game. They’re constantly deconstructing what is working and what isn’t working. And they’re jettisoning what isn’t working and building up on what is working, and doing it in a teamlike approach. We never do that investment in public schooling. What’s happening in Finland is they do that investment in the graduate schools of education before people become teachers. They recruit a very select group of people who become teachers. Now it is also true that Finland has a 5 percent poverty rate and the United States has a 20 percent poverty rate. But there’s this notion of really figuring out what the best teachers do and trying to scale that up.

Bill, you mentioned that the top quarter of our teachers are very good. But that’s probably the case in Finland, too. It can’t be the case that every teacher in Finland is some amazing teacher.

Gates: They actually run a personnel system, which is kind of an amazing thing. You have a review, and you’re told what you’re good at and what you’re not good at. If over a period of time you’re not improving, then you move to another profession. So, Finland, Korea, Singapore—they run teacher personnel systems. In the U.S. we have one of the most predictive personnel systems mankind ever invented—try to remember how many years you’ve worked, and you will know your salary.

Weingarten: Our schools have to be fundamentally different today than they were 100 years ago, 50 years ago. And yet our schools are still organized for the industrial age rather than the knowledge economy. We need to work together to try to figure out a good evaluation system that’s based upon multiple measures and says to a teacher, this is what you’re doing right, and this is what you’re not doing right, and based upon a lot of different things, how do we improve? And if we can’t improve, how do we find a way to counsel you out of the profession? That’s what we’re trying to do.

You say “counsel people out of the profession.” Is that something you can’t do now?

Gates: Under the Colorado law or under the Washington, D.C., system, if the measures show you as being ineffective, I think it’s two years in a row, then you’re up for review, and despite your seniority you can be let go.

Weingarten: Actually, in almost all places if you don’t do well under an evaluation system, you can be let go. The tenure process is supposed to simply be a fairness process. The reality is that managers don’t do their jobs.

Gates: There is no evaluation. For 90 percent of the teachers in America there’s no feedback. Now, we don’t need to argue about how it got that way. Was that the management? Was it the union? That is the way it is. And there aren’t many professions like that. So that’s got to change. It’s got to change in a way that’s a positive message for teachers, and that’s not high overhead, and that’s not capricious. A lot of people moved ahead just using the [student] test scores [to measure teacher performance], which I would claim is better than doing nothing. But it’s not as good as what we’re trying to craft together, where you have these other measures, like videotaping classrooms, peer interviews, and student interviews.

Weingarten: When I taught, the way in which we got evaluated is what I used to call the drive-by evaluation. Somebody would come in for 20 minutes with a checklist and that would be your evaluation. So it was clearly a snapshot. The tests are a snapshot. Neither one of them gets you to this point where you can use an evaluation system to help teachers continually improve and to help kids learn. But that work has to get done collaboratively. School systems by and large do not work collaboratively. They basically work on conflict. Conflict is the status quo in education. In Pittsburgh and in Hillsborough County, Fla., two of the places where the Gates Foundation has heavily invested, you see a culture of working together to make these changes.

Randi, you’ve talked about moving from the industrial age into a knowledge economy. But aren’t unions just relics of the industrial era? Does the concept of a union itself make sense in a knowledge economy?

Weingarten: Of course it does. You look at the different countries that are vastly more successful than we are, and they’re all unionized.

Gates: Yeah, but you won’t find any other country that has the work rules that we have. Go read the American Federation of Teachers New York work rules. It’s a mind-blowing document. They [other countries] don’t have anything like this. There is nothing that says you only have to work this many minutes on this, you only have to work this many minutes on that. In any of the top-10 countries you won’t have anything like that. We’re the only one without a real personnel system.

Weingarten: A lot of that is because the status quo has been this conflict. We have to break out of that. If you create a collaborative environment where teachers are trusted, you break out of the mold of the industrial economy, and the factory model, which is what a lot of these contracts are. Also, in places where the schools are working, people never look at the contract.

Should we have a national curriculum in the United States?

Gates: There’s actually a state-driven move to share standards. There is a resistance to it starting at the national level and being imposed by the national level. But that’s OK, because what happened is a few states took the lead and got together and said, hey, we want to share. And now we have 43 states, plus the District of Columbia, that have committed to use these standards, and that was not imposed by the federal government. Actually, it looks like we’re on a path where five years from now a lot of the states—and 10 years from now, almost all the states—will have a common curriculum. I think this is going to be a good thing. It’s going to drive some efficiency. This curriculum’s not just a standard where they arbitrarily pick things. It’s actually a better curriculum.

Weingarten: In the past we have focused on wide and not deep. What these other countries do is they focus on deep. So if you actually look at some work in Japan or in Singapore on mathematics, kids really understand fractions. They don’t just memorize what a fraction is. They don’t just say one half equals 50 percent and that’s memorized. They understand how you get there. What our new common standards do is they are deeper and fewer. They’re designed, again, around the idea of what do we need to do to help kids in the 21st century, in the knowledge economy? And what do we need to do if a kid goes to school one year in New York but next year in Washington, D.C.? How do we make sure that there are some really core concepts that are common so that we are taking into account the mobility of children?

What about this notion of giving tenure to teachers? That seems ridiculous.

Weingarten: Well, tenure is a proxy for fairness and a proxy to ensure that teachers are not treated arbitrarily and capriciously. But it shouldn’t be lifetime job security, and I think that when you start thinking about how to have good evaluation systems that actually align with the due-process system, then you have the best of both worlds. We do not have an epidemic of bad teachers. But we don’t support our teachers the way countries that outcompete us do. These other countries spend a lot of time figuring out how to prepare and how to support teachers and how to align teachers’ work with what kids ought to do.

Gates: No, we spend more on professional development than they do. We spend more on salaries than they do. We spend more on pensions than they do. We spend more on retirement health benefits than they do. But we have less evaluation than they do. In many districts you have to give advance notice before anybody can come into your classroom. That’s part of the contract. So there are some real differences in terms of the personnel system in these other countries.

Bill, when you talk I can hear the frustration in your voice. Does this stuff drive you crazy?

Gates: The only thing that drives anybody crazy is the results for the students, which right now nobody’s happy with. And so everybody wants to change. But how quickly they want to change, and what they want to change, everybody has their own ideas. I have a graph that shows spending from 1970 to now, and it goes up and up, while achievement is basically flat. Over the next period of time we need achievement to look more like that spending line. And unfortunately, because of fiscal realities, we’re going to have to fight for spending on K–12 to even stay flat.

To me, Bill’s graph seems to demonstrate the effect of organized labor on any industry. You could say the same thing happened in Detroit.

Weingarten: Well, it is the effect of organized labor and others in creating a middle class in this country. Ultimately we have to figure out how to maintain a middle class and yet also how to ensure consistent, high quality. That’s really the challenge that we have to do for workers, and that’s the challenge we have to do for kids.

Gates: These things take time. Even in the best case, if you improve teachers today, the country doesn’t see the benefit of that for 15 years or so. So to be in this business you have to have a long-term view. You know, when [New York] Mayor [Michael] Bloomberg decided to get involved in the schools, he knew that the benefits were going to be way, way out there. So you can’t be too impatient.