BretWagner.com

I go to work every day because I enjoy it. I look for­ward to it. The day that stops, I’ll promptly leave.

My employer appre­ci­ates my work. Approves of the effort I put in when work­ing with cus­tomers and cowork­ers. The day that stops, they’ll promptly ask me to leave.

No restric­tions. No threat of legal action. No drawn-out process.

That is employ­ment at will.

Edu­ca­tion needs this pol­icy in place at schools.

I’ve writ­ten about the lemon-dance — a prac­tice cre­ated by the stran­gle­hold unions place on school lead­er­ship to pro­vide ‘jus­ti­fied cause’ for release, result­ing in end­less com­mit­tee hear­ings and draw­ing out the teacher release to unnec­es­sary lengths.

Employ­ment at will works well in sit­u­a­tions where there is mutual trust between employer and employee. I sug­gest that if you are think­ing that such a pol­icy won’t work in edu­ca­tion, then per­haps the prob­lem is with the institution’s lack of mutual trust between lead­er­ship and teach­ers. I’ll be quick to admit I’ve seen exam­ples of awful lead­er­ship at schools, but this is the minor­ity. The major­ity of school lead­ers I’ve worked with have stu­dent inter­ests first, and would cheer the oppor­tu­nity to work in an orga­ni­za­tion that sup­ports employ­ment at will.

Why not insti­tute employ­ment at will for teach­ers? Why should it be dif­fer­ent for pub­lic education?

Let me just get this out there before I go too deep — I think teach­ers unions rep­re­sent an impor­tant and valu­able aspect of pub­lic edu­ca­tion. I agree with about 80% of what they stand for, and appre­ci­ate what they’ve done for teach­ers’ pay and ben­e­fits in the past 40 years.

How­ever, a num­ber of stan­dard prac­tices in teach­ers unions are inef­fec­tive, self-defeating, and just plain wrong.

Take tenure, for exam­ple. Pub­lic school teach­ers through­out the coun­try are cov­ered by tenure, a set of legal pro­tec­tions that makes their dis­missal for incom­pe­tence or malfea­sance a com­pli­cated and expen­sive process. The result: few dis­missals of incom­pe­tent teach­ers, and an inabitl­ity to reward excep­tional teach­ers and keep them in the classroom.

Another archaic prac­tice — step and lane increases. These are awarded to teach­ers who’ve earned degrees beyond their bachelor’s. In many cases, these increases are auto­matic. While in many indus­tries, addi­tional pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment is rewarded with pay increases, they are not automatic.

Why make them auto­matic in pub­lic edu­ca­tion? Pro­po­nents argue these increases reward the effort. How­ever, mak­ing them auto­matic defeats the spirit of these increases — mea­sured per­for­mance gains in the classroom.

My biggest rant on teach­ers unions is that unions pro­tect inef­fec­tive teach­ers. These teach­ers rep­re­sent dis­ci­pli­nary prob­lems, man­age­ment prob­lems, and stu­dent per­for­mance prob­lems. These teach­ers need the union to pro­tect them from the school lead­ers that might have the power to remove them from the class­room except for the hand-tying result­ing from the unions. What’s more, I believe these inef­fec­tive teach­ers rep­re­sent a small per­cent­age of over­all teach­ers — less than 10%. But they rep­re­sent sig­nif­i­cantly higher costs to the schools, dis­tricts, and taxpayers.

Until teach­ers unions under­stand that pro­tect­ing the inef­fec­tive in their ranks is self-defeating, they will con­tinue to face an adver­sar­ial rela­tion­ship with those pro­mot­ing pro­gres­sive edu­ca­tion pol­icy like pay-for-performance, char­ter schools, vouch­ers, and school lead­er­ship autonomy.

What I pro­pose is a new way of orga­ni­za­tion– a union whose mem­ber­ship ranks are filled with teach­ers meet­ing per­for­mance guide­lines and objec­tive guide­lines for qual­ity. Addi­tion­ally, school lead­er­ship with the abil­ity to per­ma­nently remove inef­fec­tive teach­ers, pre­vent­ing them from con­tin­u­ing the lemon dance.

Some peo­ple are always in the mid­dle of the bell curve.

Take any pop­u­la­tion any­where on the planet and mea­sure just about any­thing, and the dis­tri­b­u­tion of the pop­u­la­tion almost always comes out as a per­fect bell curve. Weird? No. Just nor­mal (Gauss­ian to the sta­tis­ti­cians out there). 

Pub­lic edu­ca­tion in Wis­con­sin has tra­di­tion­ally been very strong. High demand for scarce open teach­ing posi­tions should mean that the best are teach­ing our students. 

How­ever, when you exam­ine more closely the socioe­co­nomic back­grounds of those mak­ing up the bal­ance of stu­dent pop­u­la­tions in Wis­con­sin schools, many come from strong two-parent fam­i­lies with mid­dle class incomes, with high expec­ta­tions for per­for­mance in the classroom.

I sur­mise that what many con­sider excep­tional is actu­ally quite aver­age. There are a hand­ful of excep­tional, trans­for­ma­tional teach­ers work­ing, with the most gifted in these schools, or the most chal­lenged (read: on the unlucky end of the achieve­ment gap). There are a hand­ful of unfor­tu­nate ‘lif­ers’ regur­gi­tat­ing the same tired les­son plans for the past 15 years. And the bal­ance are in the mid­dle, pro­vid­ing a firm, aver­age education.

Did these teach­ers choose to be aver­age, or did it just end up that way?

We know that in just about any mar­ket­place, the lag­gards get wiped out. Orga­ni­za­tions that lag behind the competition’s new prod­ucts see their sales decline. Indi­vid­u­als who don’t exert enough energy are more likely to get laid off.

It appears, how­ever, that in many areas of the pub­lic sec­tor, this rule does not apply. Par­tic­u­larly in education. 

In Wis­con­sin, step and lane increases are awarded to teach­ers who’ve earned degrees beyond their bachelor’s. In many cases, these increases are auto­matic. While in many indus­tries, addi­tional pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment is rewarded with pay increases, they are not automatic.

Pub­lic school teach­ers through­out the coun­try are cov­ered by tenure, a set of legal pro­tec­tions that makes their dis­missal for incom­pe­tence or malfea­sance a com­pli­cated and expen­sive process.  The result: few dis­missals of incom­pe­tent teach­ers, and an inabitl­ity to reward excep­tional teach­ers and keep them in the classroom.

The most fas­ci­nat­ing thing about the bell curve is that some peo­ple and some orga­ni­za­tions nat­u­rally grav­i­tate to a cer­tain section. 

So how do you get more teach­ers on the far right of the curve in the class­room and keep them there?

• Develop a tool to objec­tively evaulate teach­ers based on their stu­dents’ mas­tery of state objectives.
• Reward those teach­ers scor­ing at the high­est of these ranks with increased salary and ben­e­fits, and
• Encour­age those teach­ers with the low­est mas­tery scores to seek other employment.

We’re teach­ing the wrong things in school.

We are focus­ing too much on reward­ing what the indi­vid­ual knows rather than how they work with oth­ers and prob­lem solve in a team.

The cur­rent push for stan­dard­ized test­ing only rein­forces this mis­placed focus. States are using these stan­dard­ized tests to deter­mine who grad­u­ates, how fund­ing is dis­trib­uted, teacher pay, and what schools stay open and which close.

Using a mea­sure­ment tool to deter­mine those things is not wrong.  Schools are just using the wrong tool to measure.

Instead of test­ing, develop a project-based cur­ricu­lum that empha­sizes 21st cen­tury skills like tech­nol­ogy skills, live and career skills, cre­ativ­ity and crit­i­cal thinking.

Stu­dents need to be eval­u­ated on their abil­ity to com­mu­ni­cate ideas, work within teams, think crit­i­cally on real-world prob­lems, and demon­strate life skills such as dis­ci­pline and character.

Funny how mean­ing­ful mes­sages cross your path in two’s.

Not more than a week after dis­cov­er­ing Capt. Charles Moore TED video describ­ing his dis­cov­ery of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP), I get a call from an engi­neer at Pepsi want­ing to put together a pro­gram to recy­cle bot­tles in America’s schools.

Some back­ground… the GPGP is an end­less float­ing waste of plas­tic trash. Moore is draw­ing atten­tion to the grow­ing, chok­ing prob­lem of plas­tic debris in our seas.  You can watch his TED video here:

I think it is a bril­liant idea to engage stu­dents in social issues, and using recy­cling as a teach­able moment is a great pur­suit.  Why not cre­ate a school-wide pro­gram that engages all sub­jects including:

• Sci­ence — study how plas­tic is made, where the raw mate­ri­als come from, why it takes so long to break down, and what options exist out there to help reduce the plas­tic bottle’s impact on the environment.
• Math — you see it in the video… we are deal­ing with huge num­bers here.  Have stu­dents put the num­ber of plas­tic bot­tles thrown away each year into terms they under­stand — bot­tles per per­son, weight, time, etc. Use dimen­sional analy­sis to con­vert between units.
• Eng­lish — chal­lenge stu­dents to write an argu­ment piece on why plas­tics are great.  Then make them turn around and write another piece on why plas­tics are awful.
• Social Stud­ies — what is the social impact on garbage?  How does one bal­ance the social impact of plas­tics (which every­one should rec­og­nize as a sig­nif­i­cant and valu­able tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ment… I don’t want it to seem like I’m harp­ing on plas­tics too much) with the impact on the environment.

What other ideas are there for teach­ing stu­dents about smart use of our nat­ural resources?  Chime in on our com­ments section.