Toughness, Revolutions, Chavez, Merit Pay, and More

Blogs, Letters & Testimonials

August 2, 2007

I was away from the computer for much of the day yesterday trying to sweeten my offer to buy the Wall Street Journal, but I was unfortunately not successful. Some other guy outbid me, rather wildly.

But there’s a lot going on in the world and in other blogs that I wanted to jump in on very quickly:

1. Sara Mead is urging those of us who are frustrated with the Democratic presidential candidates and their unimpressive education talk to “Stop B****ing and Start A Revolution.” She raises a lot of good points (stay tuned for some news in the future about some partnerships between DFER and some groups like she’s talking about) and a lot of the meetings/fundraisers we’ve been holding with teachers/school leaders and politicians are a step in that direction as well. But I think Sara based her post on a wrong assumption: I don’t think many of us crankpots are blaming the teachers unions at all for making the candidates so lame. It’s not the unions’ fault that Democratic leaders are so generally wimpy on education reform. (My hunch is that the unions would benefit tremendously if candidates and their consultants were more willing to engage in education debates.) And I think that, unlike the direction that Sara seems to be heading, Democratic donors who care about improving schools have a particular obligation to speak up, or else they will continue to be treated like chumps by the party and its candidates for office. I like Andy Rotherham’s Toughness Doctrine: If we can demand that our politicians be tougher on International issues, why can’t we demand that they better engage in the discussion of how to point our public education system in a direction that works for the kids who are being failed right now.

(Sara’s larger point about the need for a revolution is important, though, as are her points about what needs to happen to make that happen. I keep thinking about what Saul Alinsky used to say about the tipping point that the “have a little/want mores” cause when they team up with the “have nots”. There’s the recipe, I think.)

2. There’s an important story in today’s New York Sun that deals with the question of the best public use of public space. No one should be allowed the continued use of public school space to educate kids if they can’t make a compelling case for why they deserve it. That goes for charter schools too. As more and more successful programs emerge (in chartering and in the traditional system) it makes it much more difficult to justify allowing crappy schools to exist in public buildings.

3. Since I jumped into the whole Cesar Chavez debate about unionization and charter schools, I wanted to alert DFER readers who don’t normally stop in at the UFT’s site that Leo Casey offered a response that is worth reading. Am hoping to offer a tangential (yet admittedly slightly off-topic) response when I have a moment in the next day or so. I agree with a lot of Leo’s points (though I still think he is playing the propagandist role by slipping bullshit phrases like “anti-union” into descriptions of Cesar Chavez Charter Schools even though he still hasn’t offered a shred of evidence to support it – but I suppose that’s Leo’s job) but his post also highlights what is emerging as an interesting generational shift in education and policy. This isn’t anti-union or pro-union, just “simple truth-telling” as Leo puts it.

4. Rick Hess, who has gotten pretty damned good at putting on thought-provoking conferences on ed reform, has a good one lining up for October on “The Supply Side of Education Reform and the Future of Educational Entrepreneurship.” See you there. There’s even free booze at the end of the day, it appears from the sked.

5. James Forman is asking about merit pay proosals on his blog, and how they should look. My answer is the kind of punt that I’d never have allowed a source to get away with when I was newspapering, but so be it.

My gut tells me that, under present conditions in most public education systems, merit pay would be a total disaster. It’s not just the obvious issues about idiot principals screwing it up and playing favorites, giving payraises to the Kindergarten teachers who will sleep with them, etc. but most district human resources offices seem to have enough trouble getting paychecks out under lockstep pay schemes. Hard to imagine it not getting completely screwed up.

Like James, I think the obstacles are important here. It’s not that I don’t think merit pay should be in place, I just think it needs to happen sequentially along with a whole bunch of other things. These include, but are not limited to various attempts to change the meritless culture in schools:

a) We’ve got to get much better principals who understand the difference between running a tight ship and overseeing a fiefdom.

b) We need to develop better evaluation systems which serve to promote continuous improvement rather than just filling files that can be used at arbitration. Having to simply choose between “satisfactory” and “unsatisfactory” in teacher evaluations, for example, not only creates an environment where excellence becomes irrelevant it shortchanges the most effective teachers who are getting the job done for their kids in extraordinary ways. Before we can pay for extraordinary performance, we need to learn how to better recognize it and make it something that all of us (teachers, parents, and students) can strive for in our respective roles.

c) We need to consider all of the details James mentions – parent surveys, value-added assessments, schoolwide measures of achievement, judgment of the principals, etc. How much weight we give to any/all of it would largely depend on how successful we are at shoring up all the existing loose ends (the overabundance of principals who aren’t up to the task, our seeming inability to engage with parents in meaningful ways, and ending a grievance-based culture which prizes compliance over real professional growth, etc.)

In the short term, I have a lot more faith in forms of incentive pay – whether by subject area, or more importantly,by creating incentives for our most accomplished educators to use their skills where they can do the most good. Here you don’t have to fix the entire system first to pull it off, and teachers unions themselves have accumulated a lot of knowledge about how to work out some of the kinks. (The former NYC Chancellor’s District had some interesting stuff, I thought.)

Is this stuff too nuanced for presidential candidates to talk about? I think it is too important for them to NOT talk about. If we want excellent schools for our kids, we’ve got to start talking about ways to make excellence, itself, something that is recognized (and rewarded) in our school systems.