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The debate I wrote about yesterday, between the teachers-union wing of the Democratic Party and the pro-charter-school education-reform wing, is in some ways a symptom of a even deeper divide between two competing approaches to public education today.
On one side, you have people who think that the most important determiner of educational success is demographic. I've heard from a lot of teachers these past two weeks who have voiced this feeling: Low-income students come to them from broken homes and dangerous neighborhoods with poor reading skills and a slack work ethic, and it's just not fair to expect teachers to achieve high-quality results with those students.
On the other side, you have people who say that talk like that is nothing more than a convenient excuse for continued educational failure, a way to perpetuate an unaccountable school system. They say there's lots of evidence, especially coming out of some new and innovative charter schools, that we can make a huge dent in the problems of poor kids using extended class hours and intensive teaching methods.
There are two new advocacy groups that more or less represent the two sides of this debate. On one side you have a group of scholars and social scientists who call themselves the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education. They call for increased spending on early-childhood education, health care, and other social supports instead of an emphasis on school reform alone.
On the other side, you have the Education Equality Project, led by Joel Klein, the New York City schools chancellor, and the Rev. Al Sharpton. They call for legislative changes that would enable the people who are creating those successful experiments: more charter schools, the kind of teacher-pay reforms I wrote about last week, increased school choice.
These two groups announced their formation on consecutive days in June, and ever since, they've kind of been at one another's throats.
There are many people I admire on both sides of this divide. Geoffrey Canada, the subject of my new book, signed on to the Education Equality Project; James Heckman, the economist whose work I hold up in the book as the most persuasive evidence that the Harlem Children's Zone could have a transformative effect in the lives of poor children, signed on with the Broader, Bolder Approach. Wise scholars like Glenn Loury and Christopher Jencks and William Julius Wilson are on the Broader team; innovative superintendents like Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee and Michael Bennet are on the Equality side.
There doesn't seem to be much common ground.
So, I'm going to suggest a compromise.
To those in the Broader camp: Let's admit that our public schools could be serving poor kids much, much better than they are today, and that in order to do that, they need a radical overhaul right away. Let's agree that the best charter schools, like KIPP and Achievement First and Green Dot, have found a whole new way of educating disadvantaged children, and that it works. So, why not embrace looser contracts like the one proposed in D.C. and the one adopted in Denver. Help persuade teachers to give up some job security in exchange for more pay. Help the school systems get rid of poor-performing teachers—not just a few of them, but a big swath, the whole bottom tier. And to replace them, let's create alternative certification programs and encourage unconventional career paths that will attract the kind of committed young overachievers who actually want to teach in the most challenging classrooms but can't stand the thought of slogging their way through a couple of years of education school.
To those in the Education Equality camp: Let's admit that alone, even the best charter schools can't fix the crisis in the nation's worst urban neighborhoods. Let's agree that if we truly want to be data-driven, we should accept the data that say that the most effective time to intervene in a poor child's life is in infancy, before that child ever gets into the school system. So, why not apply some of your intelligence, passion, organizational talent, and financial resources to building out-of-school supports like prekindergartens, parenting programs, and family counseling? Let's figure out how to take the accountability methods and organizational structures you've brought to middle schools and apply them to preschools. Let's figure out how best to provide poorly educated and overstressed parents with new strategies for preparing their kids for school. Let's build a new kind of no-excuses school, one that is integrated with an early-childhood program and a strategy to improve the surrounding community.
It may be wishful thinking, but that's where I believe Obama is trying to push his party. And I do think it's a path toward a real solution to some of the problems that seem most unsolvable—not only in our schools, but in our inner-city neighborhoods as well.
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Today's paper brings the news that Michelle Rhee, the superintendent of the D.C. public schools, has come up with a Plan B to use if the D.C. teachers union refuses to accept her proposed new contract.
Plan A, as I wrote last week, was a contract under which teachers could give up tenure in return for large pay increases. Plan B, essentially, is a system in which teachers lose tenure and don't get large pay increases. Rhee says she and the state superintendent could also change the licensing requirements for the district's teachers so as to require them to demonstrate classroom performance—the kind that would have earned them big bonuses under the contract—merely to keep their jobs.
The story in the Washington Post suggests that Rhee is not only aware of the city's generation gap among teachers, she also plans to take advantage of it.
Rhee's ultimate goal is clear: to weed the District's instructional corps of underperformers and remake it, at least in part, with younger, highly energized graduates of such alternative training programs as Teach for America, where she began her career. Unlike many tenured Washington teachers, those emerging from such programs are unlikely to invest their entire working lives in education. But they will, in Rhee's estimation, be more inclined to embrace her core message: that children can learn no matter what economic and social conditions they face beyond the classroom and that teachers should be held directly accountable for their progress through test scores and other measurements.
What we're hearing from Rhee and other superintendents is that urban school systems as they are currently constructed simply can't be made to work for the disadvantaged children who need their help the most. They need a complete overhaul.
In New Orleans, they had Hurricane Katrina to wash the old system away. In D.C., Michelle Rhee is trying to do it herself.
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The fight over the compensation of teachers is in many ways a fight over the nature of teaching itself. Is it a skilled profession, like law or medicine or finance, in which those who succeed in a competitive marketplace receive high compensation? Or is it a public-service job, like being a police officer or a firefighter or a civil servant, in which the exchange is job security and ample benefits for a commitment to serve the public? Right now, most teacher contracts are like civil-service contracts: You get gradual and steady raises based primarily on how long you’ve been in the job. Most of the benefits come on the back end, in retirement and in the years leading up to it.
But the “army of new teachers” that Obama has pledged to bring into the system may not be so crazy about a civil-service job.
Earlier this summer, a research group in Seattle called the Center on Reinventing Public Education came out with a new study on teacher compensation. The graph below, taken from the study, shows the results of a simulation for “what a single white woman with a technical degree from a selective college would earn inside and outside of teaching at three points in her early career.” When this imaginary woman graduated in 1994, she would have earned $3,561 more as a teacher than outside of teaching, because of a starting salary guaranteed by a union contract. By the time she was nine years into her working life, though, she would have fallen behind her peers, making $10,203 less as a teacher than if she had followed another career path.
So, how do you restructure compensation to make teaching more attractive to that archetypal selective-college graduate? Do you pay all teachers more? Provide other benefits to compensate for a smaller salary? Or do you restructure teacher pay so that high performers earn more than their colleagues?
In Washington, D.C., right now, the fight over teacher quality is being debated at the negotiating table. Michelle Rhee, the schools chancellor, has been in office only a little more than a year, but already she has become one of the most important education officials in the country. Not “important” in the sense of “powerful”—D.C. is a pretty small school system—but important because of the sweeping reforms she is trying to put in place.
Back in July, Rhee proposed a new contract for the city’s teachers. As the Washington Post reported at the time,
Under the proposal, the school system would establish two pay tiers, red and green. … Teachers in the red tier would receive traditional raises and would maintain tenure. Those who voluntarily go into the green tier would receive thousands of dollars in bonuses and raises, funded with foundation grants, for relinquishing tenure.
In other words, red for traditionalist civil servants, green for merit-pay rebels.
The bonuses and raises Rhee proposed were unusually large. Even teachers who chose the safer option would do pretty well. But not as well as the greens. As the Post noted, in the red tier, “a teacher with a bachelor’s degree and 10 years of service who makes $56,000 could receive $73,800 by 2012.” If that same teacher chose the green tier, she could be making as much as $122,500 in that year. (Currently, the average teacher salary in the country is $47,600.)
The downside of choosing the green tier: You give up tenure and spend a year on probation. If at the end of that year the principal decides that you haven’t proved yourself, you’re fired, no matter how long you’ve worked for the system.
It’s a revolutionary idea—last week, a columnist for the Post wrote that the proposed contract, if accepted, “would be a watershed event in U.S. labor history.” D.C.’s teachers are divided on whether it’s a good deal. The leader of the local teachers union seems to be leaning toward taking it, but other union officials are firmly opposed. The union local’s vice president, Nathan Saunders, told the Post in July that the deal would be “a tremendous step backwards for teachers as dignified professionals. … It is the purchase of valuable rights for cash.”
Of course, that’s kind of what being a professional entails: giving up the kind of job security and stability that you get if you’re a wage laborer in exchange for a whole lot of money.