It isn’t shocking that the American Federation of Teachers’ Chicago affiliate and its bellicose leader, Karen Lewis, decided to stretch out its week-long strike by at least another few days. After all, Lewis is struggling to get the collective bargaining deal struck by the union and the city approved by dissatisfied Baby Boomers and other rank-and-file members (who were expecting pay raises of 30 percent over the next four years and no use of student test score growth data in evaluations); it is hard to get agitated forces to approve a deal that in substance is little different than the contract Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel offered just before the local launched its work stoppage. That Lewis’ own ambitions to succeed Randi Weingarten as national AFT president is also at stake, along with the union’s general penchant for demanding more (despite economic and fiscal reality) also makes the move not all that surprising.
From where your editor sits, the recalcitrance of Lewis and the union offers another opportunity for Emanuel to make a strong case for advancing systemic reform (and for developing a new system of public education in the nation’s third-largest city along the Dropout Nation offered last week). And one can easily support the mayor’s move to ask a court to end the strike (even if, in all honesty, another day of the walkout proves the need for the reforms Emanuel is offering).
While the AFT Chicago local continues to behave like an overgrown spoiled child, one must step back and be amazed by how little the union and its leadership think of the potential of the children – – especially those from poor and minority backgrounds – – in the care of the rank-and-file (when those instructors are actually teaching). This was made clear long before the work stoppage, when the AFT local fought bitterly against Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s effort to increase the time students gained instruction by a mere 39 minutes a day (which would have brought the work hours of Second City teachers in line with peers in 15 other big-city districts). The Chicago AFT’s continued opposition to ending reverse-seniority (or last in-first out and last hired-first fired) layoff rules, which end up hurting poor kids and high-quality teachers with less seniority alike, also bore out this fact.
But the failed and impoverished thinking became crystal clear last Monday when the union launched the work stoppage in part because it opposed the use of Value-Added analysis of student test score growth data for at least 30 percent of the results in the city’s new evaluation system (which the city had to develop as part of meeting the requirements of a new Illinois state law passed last year at the city’s behest and with the support of the AFT’s state affiliate).
Despite the fact that the Value-Added data plays such a small role in the evaluation system that laggard teachers could still keep their jobs so long as they did well on the students tests they created themselves (which would account for 10 percent of evaluations), student surveys, and the subjective and generally unreliable classroom observations that would have made up the rest of the performance management system, the union decided that there was no way it would find this to be acceptable. The fact that the union didn’t like the possibility of 6,000 of its dues-payers (or 23 percent of the teachers it represents) losing their jobs (and cost the union millions in dues) was certainly a clear revelation of the vulnerabilities the union faces with its adherence to an increasingly obsolete industrial-era union model. But it isn’t just about lost money. As Lewis made clear in her statement, the AFT thinks that using student test performance data is “no way to measure the effectiveness of a teacher” because it doesn’t believe that the data can’t separate out ” poverty, exposure to violence, homelessness, hunger and other social issues beyond our control.”
Such a statement isn’t exactly surprising. In fact, this thinking (along with the rather head-shaking argument that student test data is an “inappropriate tool”) is one of the usual reasons offered up by teachers’ union bosses and other education traditionalists in their opposition for using objective data in measuring teacher performance. Yet it is also one that is false. One of the most-useful aspects of Value-Added is that it allows researchers, states, and school districts to separate the level of growth in student performance attributable to the work of teachers in classrooms from poverty and other aspects of student environments outside of schools (as well as the natural growth in learning one would expect from children over time if they weren’t taught by anyone at all). In fact, this effort to separate teacher impacts on student achievement from other impacts is one of the reasons why Value-Added was developed in the first place. Certainly it isn’t perfect; but then nothing involving human hands ever is. But over the past three decades, researchers such as Stanford’s Eric Hanushek (an innovator of Value-Added), Dan Goldhaber at the University of Washington, and Jonah Rockoff have proven that Value-Added not only does a generally good job of differentiating between the aspects of student achievement for which teachers are responsible and that for which other forces should be attributed. As Rockoff, along with Raj Chetty and John Friedman of Harvard University demonstrated earlier this year in their study, it is also clear that teachers who improve student achievement as measured by test score growth also helped those students achieve success in college and in life. Essentially, the argument made by the Chicago AFT doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
Meanwhile the AFT’s complaint that two out of every 10 of its members could eventually lose their jobs belies their proclaimed concern for improving teaching and curricula for Second City students. More importantly, it reveals that the union has no interest in holding  the laggards among its rank-and-file for their shoddy performance — or in elevating the teaching profession it and its fellow affiliates declare it supposedly defends. After all, if the Chicago AFT truly wants an evaluation system that will be fair and objective, it would have demanded that Value-Added make up an even larger percentage of the overall evaluation, support student surveys making up the rest, and ditching classroom observations altogether. As the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching project noted this year in one of its studies, student test score growth data and student surveys such as the Tripod regime are more-reliable in measuring teacher performance than even the most-rigorous classroom observations. By refusing to accept reality — and by essentially declaring that teacher performance shouldn’t measured at all – Lewis and the Chicago AFT leadership are denigrating the good and great teachers of all ages who want and deserve honest evaluation and proper recognition of their work.
But in its arguments against improving teacher evaluations and extending school days, the AFT’s Chicago local illustrates the rather impoverished view among education traditionalists — and especially fellow AFT and National Education Association affiliates — that high-quality teaching (and the good and great professionals who provide it) are not capable of helping all children succeed in school and in life. From the perspective of Lewis and others (including Weingarten, who echoed those sentiments last week in an interview with Reuters), teachers are powerless to help children because they can’t overcome the debilitating home lives from which these kid originate. Using the educational quackery of Ruby Payne, Betty Hart, and Todd Risley to justify such thinking, NEA and AFT leaders (along with their fellow-travelers inside education circles) declare that there is little schools can do to help poor and minority kids until the ills outside the school walls are eradicated completely.
This thinking not only explains why teachers’ union bosses oppose using test scores in teacher evaluations, but also explains why they fight so hard against moving away from degree- and seniority-based pay scales, strongly defend seniority privileges that protect veteran teachers regardless of their performance in classrooms, and the very industrial model of serving the teaching profession to which they cling. They don’t believe that poor and minority kids can succeed if they are given good and great instruction, and don’t think that teachers can help the students in their classrooms. Or to say it more bluntly: NEA and AFT leaders don’t think much of either kids or the teachers their unions represent.
In the process, teachers’ union bosses fail to admit is that teacher quality is the most-critical aspect in improving student achievement, accounting for at least half of the impact of schools have on student achievement (and even greater in subjects such as math, science, and other aspects of reading because those subjects are more-likely to be taught in school than in homes). More importantly, they fail to admit the growing evidence that high-quality teaching can help low-performing students of all socioeconomic backgrounds turn their performance around. As both Value-Added guru William Sanders and other researchers have shown, a low-performing student who is taught by three consecutive high-quality teachers will see gains in their performance (while high-performing students taught by three low-quality teachers will fall behind).
Certainly high-quality teaching is only part of a formula for helping poor kids succeed that includes comprehensive college preparatory curricula, strong school leadership, full family empowerment in school decision-making, and the fostering of cultures of genius in which all children can learn. But is the most-important part of that formula. In arguing that teacher quality (and, ultimately, high-quality education) isn’t critical to lifting children, families, and communities out of poverty, NEA and AFT leaders are essentially revealing that they are not anywhere as concerned about improving the futures of the children who will become the adults (and even teachers) of tomorrow than they are about defending their worldview.
This is no surprise. I’m not going to say that NEA and AFT leaders (and their fellow-travelers) defenders donât care (or think they care) for the lives and futures of children. It is that they would rather continue to protect low-quality and incompetent teachers than help poor and minority kids get a high-quality education (and remove the dreck that good-and-great teachers also want out of classrooms). They would rather blame school leaders for not removing failed teachers than admit that the practices they defend â from traditional pay scales, to reverse-seniority layoff policies â contribute to the problem. The refusal of NEA and AFT leaders to move away from their old-school unionism to a professional association model that focuses on helping teachers elevate their profession (and weed out laggards) proves that how little they think of the very teachers whose interests the unions supposedly represent. And their dogmatic belief that poverty is the root cause of educational underachievement is a cop-out in an age in which there are great examples of schools, traditional, charter and private, who are helping kids reach brighter futures.
For kids and families in Chicago, along with others across the nation, the AFT local’s strike is another remind that eliminating the soft bigotry of low expectations at the heart of the nation’s education crisis will require beating down teachers’ union leaders who help perpetuate it.