BretWagner.com

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.