Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind (22 page)

There’s an old joke about doctors. What do you call a doctor who graduated in the bottom of his class in medical school? Answer: Doctor. The point of the joke is obvious—just because your doctor has his M.D. doesn’t mean he’s competent.

The same is true of teachers. Most teachers are good, but there are a few bad apples in every barrel. And unfortunately, teachers unions make it extremely difficult for school districts to separate the good apples from the bad, and to turn out the bad apples. Poorly performing teachers generally remain in the classroom for their entire careers, wasting the time, talent, and effort of countless American children.

Teacher quality is a leading driver of student achievement, concluded consulting firm McKinsey & Company in a report on why some
nations have more successful K–12 education systems than others.
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The report noted that “students placed with high-performing teachers will progress three times as fast as those placed with low-performing teachers.” The report also explained that students placed with low-performing teachers for several years in a row tragically face an “educational loss which is largely irreversible.”

Good teachers can even improve students’ future earnings. As the Hoover Institute’s Eric Hanushek concluded, excellent teachers can significantly increase students’ lifetime earnings, whereas low-performing teachers can decrease their earnings.
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Firing the bottom 5 to 10 percent of teachers based on their classroom performance and replacing them with average ones would improve student achievement significantly.
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In fact, the world’s best K–12 education systems intentionally weed out the lowest-performing teachers based on their classroom performance.
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But in the United States, teachers unions stand in the way and prevent this from happening.

Teachers unions represent all teachers and protect the job security of good and bad teachers alike. As one school principal said of Randi Weingarten while she was head of New York City’s powerful teachers union, “Randi Weingarten would defend a dead body in the classroom. That’s her job.”
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And she sure does it well, now as the head of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).

Teachers unions make sure that teachers who have taught for a few years are given tenure, making it almost impossible to fire them. Even in the case of serious wrongdoing, separating teachers from their government paycheck and benefits requires a lengthy, union-ordained legal process that can take years and can cost the school district hundreds of thousands of dollars. And it is virtually impossible to fire teachers who are merely incompetent—they are usually just left in the classroom, boring your children half to death.

When teachers are laid off, the last teachers hired are the first to be fired. This “last in, first out” firing policy doesn’t take teacher merit and classroom performance into account, just seniority. This means that a young teacher who wins teacher of the year will be fired before all teachers hired before her, even the bad ones. It sounds fair to teachers unions at least.

When teachers unions negotiate teachers’ contracts, they demand single salary schedules and limits on class sizes, as well as tenure and “last in, first out” layoff policies, as we have seen. Even in those districts in which unions don’t have collective bargaining power over teachers, teachers unions still promote these same inefficient policies using their political influence.
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The single salary schedule requires school districts to pay teachers based on their level of education and their years at the desk. They aren’t paid more for good performance or because their teaching area is in high demand. Physical education teachers are paid on the same scale as physics teachers. As a result, the single salary schedule generally drives teachers who have more in-demand skills right out of the teaching profession, and it creates shortages of specialists in math, science, and other subjects. As a scientist, would you rather work at Lockheed Martin and be paid based on your skills and performance, or work as a teacher and be paid based on seniority and on the same scale as teachers with less marketable skills?

But, you say, at least the single salary schedule pays teachers with more education more salary. Don’t we want to encourage teachers to get graduate degrees to improve their teaching? Well, there’s a problem with that idea: teachers get the bump in pay regardless of whether their graduate degree relates to anything that they actually teach in the classroom. If your degree is in modern dance but you are a math teacher, why should the extra degree entitle you to a raise? Plus, research shows that having a master’s degree or additional professional development credits does
not
make teachers more effective in the classroom.
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Teachers unions also have been unrelenting in their demands for
smaller class sizes. A recent report shows that the ratio of student-to-educational staff (both teachers and assistants) nationally has dropped from 18-to-1 in 1960 to less than 8-to-1 currently.
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Sounds great, right? Except that our children are just as poorly educated as they were before, even though the drop in class size has more than doubled the “labor intensity” of public schooling.
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Out of the 112 studies researching the impact of class size on student performance, 103 studies concluded that smaller class size did not improve student performance at all.
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So reducing class size doesn’t appear to benefit students much at all, and existing teachers would certainly prefer education dollars be spent to increase their own salaries or on other priorities. But making class size smaller has driven up teachers union membership substantially because of increased teacher hiring.
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So the main beneficiary of smaller class sizes seems, once again, to be the teachers unions, who have more teachers to unionize and collect dues income from.

The union rules against firing tenured teachers are so extreme that many school systems have to warehouse hundreds of teachers who can’t be trusted in the classroom but have to be put on paid leave for years until they can be fired. Seriously. “Rubber rooms”—offices that suspended teachers report to each day pending disciplinary and termination hearings—would seem to be the stuff of urban legend. Only they were real.

Required to report there every day during regular school hours, except for school holidays and vacations, suspended teachers found ways to pass the time. Some practiced yoga, some painted, some got into fights with other teachers to quell the boredom.

In New York City, these holding pens for errant teachers cost New York City taxpayers an estimated $30 million to $65 million annually for the seven hundred or so teachers assigned there at any one time. Some teachers were on leave for sexual harassment, corporal punishment, or insubordination; some were even suspended for sexual misconduct in the classroom.
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Bad publicity about rubber rooms led Mayor Michael Bloomberg
to officially abolish them in New York City in 2010.
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But union contracts still require school districts to give teachers years of expensive and extensive due process before they can be fired, about two to five years in New York City. The city is still putting errant teachers on paid leave for years, and the city is now sending them back to the classroom, giving them administrative duties, or sending them home instead of penning them in rubber rooms.
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Of course, teachers aren’t the only ones we put in the rubber rooms. By leaving bad teachers in the classroom, we’re essentially relegating our children to thousands of rubber rooms across the country in our public schools. As we have seen, America’s public schools could be greatly improved by simply taking our worst-performing teachers out of our classrooms. With this change, American students could jump ahead of most countries in the world in mathematics,
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instead of falling below students in almost all Asian and Western European countries as they do now.
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But teachers unions are consistent in their position that this must never happen, and so far they are winning on this point and many other points.

In 2008, Michelle Rhee, then chancellor of the Washington, D.C., public schools, looked at D.C.’s schools and saw that they were a full-scale nuclear disaster area.
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She recognized that many teachers performed so poorly that they didn’t deserve to keep their jobs. So she offered D.C. area teachers unions a deal: teachers could choose one of two new compensation options, the green tier or the red tier. Under the green tier, teacher compensation would jump dramatically, increasing almost 100 percent, with much of the pay increases financed by private sources. But in return, the teachers would have to give up their tenure for a year, and at the end of the year, they would need the recommendation of their principal to continue teaching or face dismissal. Under the red tier, teacher compensation would jump a little less, and teachers would have to waive seniority rights that would help them keep their jobs in the case of layoffs ahead of more junior teachers. “Tenure is the holy grail of teacher unions,” Rhee told the
New York Times
. But it has “no educational value for kids; it only benefits adults. If we can put
veteran teachers who have tenure in a position where they don’t have it, that would help us to radically increase our teacher quality. And maybe other districts would try it, too,” she said.
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That’s right where AFT president Randi Weingarten stopped her. Weingarten, who is militant in proclaiming that what’s best for the unions
must
be best for kids, says that seniority is “the best mechanism we have. You have cronyism and corruption and discrimination issues… We don’t want to see people getting laid off based on how much they cost.”
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But, of course, cronyism is the name of the game for the teachers unions—and teachers
should
be laid off if they are not producing enough value for their cost.

Weingarten, whom Newsweek called “well dressed and well educated” and who herself makes $425,000 a year as a union official, criticized Rhee as someone who “does not view teaching as a career… She sees it as temporary, something a lot of newbies will work very hard at for a couple of years, and then if they leave, they leave, as opposed to professionals who get more seasoned.”
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And faced the possibility of real tenure reform, Weingarten and the Washington Teachers Union president took the green-tier/red-tier proposal right off the table and didn’t put the proposal to a vote of their members. The ultimate agreement between Rhee and the unions left teacher tenure basically intact, while “weakening seniority and job security” somewhat and providing much more modest teacher raises than Rhee’s original green tier would have provided.
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Reform does not come easy in school systems controlled by the teachers unions. In addition to resisting changes to teacher tenure, the teachers unions fight pretty much any form of school choice, including voucher programs and charter schools which would implicitly allow parents to judge the quality of their teachers and schools. The teachers unions oppose these programs essentially because they allow students to escape from unionized public schools, reducing the number of unionized teachers needed and the amount of teachers union dues generated.
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Teachers unions often seem to want to take all choice away from parents over their children’s education. In fact, it sometimes seems that teachers unions officials think they’re
our
parents, and we children don’t know what’s good for us. When Louisiana’s Republican governor Bobby
Jindal talked about the possibility of vouchers which would allow parents greater choice over where to send their kids to school (and would partially subsidize private and parochial school tuition), a Louisiana teachers union official dismissed the idea. The union official said, “If I’m a parent in poverty I have no clue because I’m trying to struggle and live day to day.” The implication seemed to be that poor parents can’t make meaningful decisions about their kids. Jindal responded, “To me that is incredibly offensive and exactly what is wrong with the top down approach.” And as one mother of three children stated, “Nobody knows my child better than me. I can’t imagine not having a choice.”
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Teachers unions are well aware that making the fight over the future of our children allows them to claim the high road, but this is a public relations and bargaining tactic. A Michigan teachers union bargaining manual makes this point perfectly clear. The manual instructs its members to phrase their demands in terms of the children, stating, “In terms of a bargaining message, the public responds most positively when we talk about children, quality in the classroom and the future.”
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The manual suggests that the right type of slogan might be, “It’s not about dollars and cents; it’s about our children.”
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If only it
were
actually about our children!

It’s not just that bad educational policy drives out the most worthy teachers who can be paid more elsewhere. It’s not even that math and science teachers make the same kind of money as teachers of ceramic arts. Or that young “teachers of the year” get fired before tenured rule breakers sitting in rubber rooms. It’s that teachers unions are exercising considerable influence over what our students are taught.
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