Dropout Nation

Your editor would like to say that the National Education Association’s recent suggestions for overhauling traditional teacher training and compensation will actually lead the union to take meaningful action. After all, the plan, on its face, isn’t exactly objectionable. Requiring aspiring teachers to work for a year in classrooms under the watchful eye of a high-quality master teacher would certainly do plenty to improve teacher training; it also dovetails with recommendations made earlier this year by National Council on Teacher Quality and also demands the nation’s university schools of education to step up their game in giving their trainees real world experience.

The union’s recommendation for creating new teaching career paths — including positions such as master teachers — also makes sense. While such ideas have been bandied about for the past decade, it is still worth pursuing as part of the much-needed overhaul of traditional teacher compensation. And its pronounced support for largely abandoning reverse-seniority layoff rules is a real and important concession for which the union should be applauded.

The NEA’s recommendations are worth considering. But there are problems.

For one, the NEA plan’s emphasis on using peer review in evaluating teachers may be a modest improvement over the useless systems of scheduled observations that are now in place throughout the country. But peer review is only good at addressing observable aspects of teaching such as managing classrooms and lesson plans. It cannot address the more-important unobservable aspects of teaching: the ability to improve student achievement over time. Peer review also doesn’t move away from the subjective biases of the reviewers. What one group of teachers may think is high-quality teaching may not actually be so once one looks at test score data; it also assumes that teachers know exactly what to look for themselves, a stretch given that teaching, as currently structured in most districts, is a solo activity in which instructors have plenty of autonomy.

The NEA’s recommendation that aspiring teachers should pass a test that examines their skills in areas such as classroom management also seems to make sense at first — until one realizes that the better solution is to improve the quality of aspiring teachers admitted into ed schools in the first place. As teaching guru Martin Haberman has pointed out, this can be done rather easily. Simply seeing how an aspiring teacher interacts with a child of a different socioeconomic background would weed out those who have no capacity to empathize with children. Embracing Teach For America’s approach of looking for candidates with strong entrepreneurial drive — the ability to be self-starters who can face down challenges — would also make sense. And simply looking at the subject-matter competency of an aspiring teacher before letting them into ed school programs would weed out plenty of men and women who would be better off in other fields. None of these suggestions, by the way, have made their way onto the NEA’s list of reforms.

Meanwhile the NEA’s recommendations for new teaching career paths neglects the need for other changes. As Dropout Nation pointed out in September, the actual work of teaching remains in the same state as the medical profession was in the 19th and early 20th centuries. As doctors in those periods were expected to be jacks of all trades instead of being allowed to become dedicated specialists working efficiently in hospitals and practices, teachers — especially those at the elementary school level — are expected to be general practitioners when it makes more sense for them (and for schools) to become master specialists in aspects of student learning. But as Los Angeles Times revealed last year in its value-added analysis of elementary teachers working in the L.A. Unified School District (and as noted in Dropout Nation‘s own report on Shirley Avenue Elementary in suburban Reseda), few teachers are strong in both teaching reading and math; most are either strong or barely treading water in one of the two subjects. Recommending additional specialization, something that researchers Brian A. Jacob and Jonah Rockoff largely recommend in a Brookings Institution report released in September, is something that the NEA and its teacher quality panel should have done.

All that said, at least the NEA’s plan is a starting point. Whether or not it even gets mentioned by the union beyond some of national President Dennis Van Roekel’s talking points is a different story. Why? Because the biggest obstacle to the NEA advocating for these plans is the union itself.

As with so much with the NEA when it comes to teacher quality, the union has generally been all talk and even less substance. As Dropout Nation has noted over the past couple of months, the NEA helped kibosh the one provision within the now-moribund Harkin-Enzi plan for reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act that was its saving grace: Requiring states to use student test score data in teacher and principal evaluations. The union’s longstanding opposition to overhauling traditional teacher performance management — including the use of value-added assessment of test score data in evaluating teacher performance — along with its defense of last hired-first fired provisions its recommendations now decry pretty much show that the union talks out of both sides of its proverbial mouth.

Meanwhile the NEA hasn’t exactly shown that it is abandoning the ed school lobby that helped foster this state of affairs in teacher training in the first place. Since 2005-2006, the union has handed off $2.3 million to the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, which is charged with elevating standards for ed school training, and has been a generous supporter of the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education (which represents the interests of ed schools).  The NEA has also spent plenty on supporting the very ed school professors who are a culprit for why America’s teachers are so poorly trained. Essentially, the union hasn’t used its vast financial resources to either reward the ed school crowd for reforming their recruiting and training efforts — and has been less interested in punishing them for their failures.

Then there’s the union’s self-preservation problem. Talking about overhauling teacher training and compensation makes the NEA look good, but actually pushing for such reforms would actually hurt the union’s bottom line. After all, if the NEA truly embraced its own reforms and supported even more-progressive efforts (including more-rigorous evaluations based on student performance and ending tenure), it would mean fewer aspiring teachers coming into the ed schools, fewer teacher trainees entering classrooms, and, given that just one percent of teachers regardless of seniority are currently dismissed, more teachers (regardless of experience) losing their jobs. This isn’t tenable for a union which has lobbied for more teachers and smaller class sizes for the past four decades — and definitely not tolerable for a union that has made near-lifetime employment and seniority privileges a critical component of teacher compensation.

More importantly, if the NEA actively pushed for even these largely cosmetic reforms, it would have to tacitly admit that its old-school model of employee-management relations — which it, along with the American Federation of Teachers, borrowed from the industrial trade unions — no longer makes sense. This is especially true because we are in a time in which the success of teachers in improving student achievement can be easily measured, and in which evidence shows that the very traditional teacher compensation systems the NEA defends are both ineffective in spurring student achievement, and worthless in attracting aspiring teacher to — and keeping them in — the profession. The fact the NEA still supports rewarding teachers for being certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards in spite of the growing evidence that such certification doesn’t equal improved student outcomes (and doesn’t bring more high-quality teachers to urban classrooms) still shows that the union remains hidebound to failed past practices.

This isn’t to say that the NEA can’t, at some point, embrace systemic reform in a meaningful way. But doing so would require the union to abandon traditional public education practices that have sustained its business and philosophy. This, along with embracing systemic reforms in other aspects of education, would also force the union to abandon the interests of their most-influential of their rank-and-file base: Baby Boomers each of whom average a salary of at least $54,400 a year (and more if they have advanced degrees), near-lifetime employment, defined-benefit pensions that can pay out as much as $2 million over a lifetime, and nearly-free healthcare both during working careers and into retirement. These members, including NEA leaders such as Van Roekel, are loathe to lose the benefits and privileges for which they have long worked. And as a result, the union can’t really be a force for the kind of changes that will help all children succeed in school and in life.

The consequences of this unwillingness to go hard on systemic reform are borne by American public education as a whole — and not just the kids who are stuck in failure mills with laggard teachers. Younger, more reform-minded teachers who now make up the majority of NEA rank-and-file members, are hamstrung by practices that put low-quality teachers on the same footing as high-quality counterparts, deny them the kind of rewards and recognition they rightfully deserve for improving student achievement. and create cultures of mediocrity in which good-to-great work and innovative efforts are likely to be ostracized less-talented colleagues. It also makes it harder to bring talented collegians into the profession. After all, why would a talented math student go into what is perceived to be an unsophisticated low-paying profession when sectors such as tech (and even high-paying blue-collar jobs) offer reap greater financial and reputational rewards?

Ultimately, the NEA will have to walk the proverbial talk in order to win anyone over. And do more than offer some useful talking points for Van Roekel’s next greetings.