[Educationforall] The wrong partner for our schools

[Jim Miller]

FYI,
AFT local 1931 walked out of the speech in protest and voted against
Weingarten for President.  J


-----Original Message-----
From: Antonio Perez [mailto:papasconchesse at hotmail.com]
Sent: Thu 7/22/2010 10:56 AM
To: EFA
Subject: [Educationforall] The wrong partner for our schools
 

http://socialistworker.org/2010/07/22/wrong-partner-our-schools



The wrong partner for our schoolsLee Sustar looks at the implications of the
"partnership" between American Federation of Teachers President Randi
Weingarten and Microsoft chairman Bill Gates.
July 22, 2010Bill Gates addressing the AFT convention in Seattle (Lee Sustar
| SW)AS BOSS of Microsoft, Bill Gates steamrollered competitors, intimidated
regulators and used his company's quasi-monopoly status to foist deficient
software on business and consumers alike.
Now, America's richest man is using those skills to design a system to
evaluate schoolteachers, and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President
Randi Weingarten is his willing--make that enthusiastic--partner.
The question is: Will more militant elements in the AFT--including the newly
elected leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union--challenge the union's
direction?
At the AFT convention in Seattle earlier this month, Weingarten welcomed
Gates as a keynote speaker, despite his long and destructive record in the
attack on public education that passes for school reform. The Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation spent more than $4 billion to push school districts
across the U.S. to break up large schools and replace them with small ones,
foster the proliferation of charter schools, and push teacher evaluation
programs linked to standardized test scores:
As Leonie Haimson of the organization Class Size Matters wrote at the
Huffington Post Web site:
In recent years, the Gates initiative has turned districts upside-down, at
first establishing as many small schools as possible, creating thousands of
new administrator jobs, eating up classroom space, and compelling the
neediest kids who were excluded from the new small schools to travel long
distances to attend even more overcrowded large schools in worse conditions
than before, relegating those schools to failure.
The small schools created in their place, with several schools sharing one
building, were forced to fight fiercely over scarce space, losing science
labs, art rooms, libraries and intervention spaces in the process...Watch
out, America! You have nothing to lose but your public school system, at the
hands of the richest man in the country who, like a spoiled child carelessly
playing with toys, breaks one after another.
While Gates went out of his way to be deferential to the delegates at the AFT
convention, he let slip his disdain for public schools at a recent charter
school convention in Chicago. "Charter schools are especially important right
now because they are the only schools that have the full opportunity to
innovate," he said.
Gates has put his money where his mouth his, last year pouring $60 million
into charter school operators in Los Angeles that were angling to take over
public schools.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
WITH PARTNERS like Gates, the AFT and the National Education Association
(NEA) don't need enemies. So why is Randi Weingarten so eager to collaborate
with him?Essentially, Weingarten is trying to use Gates as a shield to
protect the union from right-wingers in state legislatures who have seized on
federal Race to the Top (RTTT) legislation to try and gut teacher tenure and
other job protections.
RTTT, pushed hard by the Obama administration, combines a few carrots with a
big stick. States score points in a competition for $4.3 billion in federal
funds if they pass legislation that lifts caps on charter schools and imposes
strict evaluation criteria and merit pay schemes. This has handed a powerful
new weapon to enemies of teachers unions as budget-starved states scramble
for money to pay for public education.
The most notorious case is Florida, where the state legislature passed a law
that would have made teachers at-will employees with virtually no job
protection. It took a veto by Republican Gov. Charlie Crist--who was
pressured by teachers' unions--to prevent that measure from becoming law.
By partnering with Gates, Weingarten apparently hopes to deflect
Florida-style attacks and implement a system of professional evaluations that
the AFT would help to shape. According to this logic, Gates may lack
education bona fides, but what state politician or school board hack would
dare oppose a man worth $53 billion?
So with Gates in her corner, Weingarten believes that the union can, as she
puts it, "lead and propose" on teacher evaluation and other education reform
issues while fending off the union-busters.
In fact, the Gates-Weingarten partnership on teacher evaluation was in full
swing long before the AFT convention delegates approved a resolution
codifying the union's approach.In his speech to union members, Gates gave
glowing approval to recent AFT contracts like the one negotiated in New
Haven, Conn., that severely undermines job protections for teachers. He also
hailed the AFT's stance on a new law in Colorado that ties teacher tenure to
strict performance guidelines. "Critics who've long complained that teachers
unions don't care about student outcomes have been forced to reconsider,"
Gates said.
But if you think that Gates has become enlightened enough to embrace a
pro-teacher approach, take a closer look at that Colorado legislation.
The 40,000-member Colorado Education Association (CEA), the statewide
affiliate of the NEA, mobilized against the legislation that teacher-bashers
in the legislature designed to conform to RTTT guidelines. But the Colorado
AFT, which represents just 2,500 members in the entire state, backed the
bill, which passed with bipartisan support and the backing of Democratic Gov.
Bill Ritter.
The Wall Street Journal summarized the law:
Tenured teachers rated "ineffective" two years in a row would be stripped of
tenure protection and would revert back to the same probationary status as
beginning teachers. They could earn back tenure after three years of
satisfactory evaluations. The new bill also mandates that student achievement
be the primary driver in every evaluation.
By weakening tenure so drastically, the law could enable administrators to
fire high-seniority teachers after a couple years of poor evaluations, which
will in part be determined by student test scores. The CEA was particularly
concerned that the measure will weaken, if not eliminate, due process in
teacher terminations. Thus, the Colorado law--which is becoming a model for
other states--could bring back the kind of arbitrary dismissals that spurred
the massive expansion of teachers' unions in the 1960s.
One major problem with the Colorado law, argued CEA spokesperson Deborah
Fallin, is that it doesn't define what an "ineffective" teacher is, leaving
the details to a state commission. "The members who are contacting me are
angry. I have actually never seen them more angry," said CEA President
Beverly Ingle.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THE AFT's move to undercut the NEA in Colorado highlights the problem of
partnership in general and deals on teacher evaluation in particular. Once a
teachers union accepts the premise that the teacher evaluation system is
"broken" and that the union should take responsibility for judging and
removing "ineffective" teachers, it drives a wedge into the foundation of
collective bargaining.
Of course, the AFT does call for fair and effective evaluations that aren't
reducible to test scores, and that are overseen by specially trained
professionals. And teachers have every right to take the lead in improving
the quality of teaching by demanding funding for professional development,
mentoring programs, adequate prep time for classes and, crucially, smaller
class sizes that will help them meet students' individual needs.
But in the age of budget austerity and mass teacher layoffs, the likelier
outcome is the weakening of teachers unions.
In Illinois, for example, the AFT's statewide body, the Illinois Federation
of Teachers (IFT), was at the table when legislation on teacher evaluation
was drafted as part of the state's application to RTTT. But the IFT and its
counterpart, the Illinois Education Association (IEA), were able to win some
concessions, including a provision that the law can't be imposed without
funding from the federal government or other sources to support it.
Nevertheless, the Illinois law will impose a four-tiered evaluation system
that ties teacher evaluation to test scores and other measures of student
progress to be announced.As IEA member Fred Klonsky noted on his blog,
"Illinois has instituted one of the most severe and disturbing proposals for
linking individual teacher tenure and evaluations to TBA measures of student
performance. The fact that individual student performance is never the result
of an individual teacher's work is apparently not a consideration."
The same point can be made in regards to the teacher evaluation systems and
merit pay agreements devised with the AFT's--and Gates'--support.In
Pittsburgh, school officials are using a $40 million grant from the Gates
Foundation to help support teacher training and fund bonuses in a new merit
pay scheme. Under a contract signed earlier this year by an AFT local, the
Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers, veteran teachers hired under previous
contracts will be given the option to forego normal step pay increases for
the chance to win bigger pay raises. Those hired after July 1 of this year,
however, will be on a merit pay system from the outset, as thePittsburgh
Post-Gazette reported.
Such an agreement marks a major retreat for the AFT, which has historically
opposed such widespread merit pay systems on the grounds that they undermine
workplace solidarity and allow administrators to promote favorites and punish
union activists.
Then there's the crucial question of how to fairly evaluate teachers--an
issue that the Pittsburgh contract doesn't resolve. In other words, the AFT,
in a partnership with Gates and Pittsburgh school officials, has launched a
major transformation in labor relations without first securing job
protections for union members.
Similar issues surround the AFT's deal on teacher evaluation and school
reform in New Haven, which is regarded as a "model or template" by
Weingarten.Here also, labor-management committees are tasked with devising a
framework for evaluation. But once a tenured teacher receives a negative
evaluation by November 1 of any school year, he or she has only 120 calendar
days to improve before being terminated. Crucially, the agreement stipulates
that "evaluations and their consequences are not subject to the grievance
procedure of the contract."
The AFT leadership insists that such a process can be implemented fairly. But
the inescapable fact is that the union is providing administrators with the
tools to push tenured teachers out the door.
Yet another Gates-AFT partnership goes further in upending the traditional
sources of union strength by creating hierarchies in the workforce.Gates gave
$100 million to Florida's Hillsborough County school system--which includes
Tampa--to implement a program that will pull 200 to 300 teachers out of the
classroom to serve as mentors to new teachers. The mentors will be paid an
additional $5,000 per year.
As in Pittsburgh, veteran teachers in Hillsborough County can opt out of
traditional step pay increases in favor of merit pay--but can have their pay
cut if they have subpar evaluations. Seniority will continue for job
placement, but cease to exist for compensation. New hires will automatically
be included under the new system. Forty percent of teacher evaluation will
depend on test scores and other measures of student performance.
These union agreements are only the beginning of Gates' efforts to reshape
teacher evaluation to suit his agenda. As he noted in his speech at the AFT
convention, the Gates Foundation is funding the videotaping of 3,000 teachers
in six school districts. "The chief goal is to work with teachers--using
technology, data and research--to develop a system of evaluation that
teachers believe is fair and will help them improve," Gates said.
Project teams will record student gains on standard state tests and another
problem-solving exam. This effort recalls the time-and-motion studies made
famous a century ago by Frederick Winslow Taylor, the industrial engineer who
helped factory bosses squeeze more output out of fewer workers in the new
mass-production industries. Now Gates wants to take a similar approach,
implementing assembly-line teaching to achieve standardized results.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
SO WHY has the AFT embraced Gates? Union President Weingarten made her
direction clear in a speech in January, when she called for a "new path" for
the union. "Labor and management must understand our shared responsibility to
our communities," she said. "Great schools, skilled teachers and
well-prepared students can only be achieved in partnership."
The problem is that Weingarten's version of partnership has been attempted by
large unions across the U.S. for the last 30 years, with catastrophic
results. Tellingly, the AFT's slogan for its approach to teacher evaluation
is "continuous improvement." That's the English translation of the Japanese
term "kaizen," the constant pressure to increase quality and productivity
made famous by Toyota.
In the auto industry, the United Auto Workers (UAW) embraced kaizen at
General Motors when the company launched the Saturn brand in the early 1980s.
At the same time, the UAW developed "jointness" programs with the Detroit
Three automakers to improve quality. The result, of course, was the continual
disappearance of union jobs, the bankruptcy of General Motors and the shift
of much of U.S. auto production to nonunion companies.
The analogy is limited, of course--schools aren't auto plants. But in terms
of union organization, the tendencies are similar. Charter schools need not
ever replace public school systems in their entirety to become a whip used to
undermine collective bargaining and teacher job protections.
The vision of Gates--and, for that matter, Education Secretary Arne
Duncan--is a public school system in which an elite group of highly trained
and well-paid teachers are aligned with administrators to recruit the alleged
best and brightest teachers for promotion, while the majority live in
constant fear of termination. That's the way almost all charter schools run
now, and the Obama administration is pushing public education as far in this
direction as possible.
Will rank-and-file teachers in the NEA and AFT resist this trend? There were
certainly sparks at the AFT convention, which has been chronicled extensively
atSubstancenews.net and the Education Notes Online blog.
The AFT saw its first contested election in decades, as the Detroit
delegation became the backbone of an opposition slate. The Detroit Federation
of Teachers is in turmoil after a disputed vote over a contract that will
"loan" $250 from every teacher's paycheck to the school board until they
leave their job. Another flashpoint is Washington, D.C., where a union
election was postponed following another controversial contract vote on a
deal that will use foundation money to fund merit pay raises.
But likeliest place for a change of direction for the AFT is in Chicago,
where the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE) slate took over the
Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) on July 1.
While not formally part of the opposition--CTU President Karen Lewis joined
the union's ruling Progressive Caucus and won election as an AFT vice
president--there were frictions between the Chicago delegation and
Weingarten's home union local, the United Federation of Teachers in New York
City.
The main disagreements were over convention resolutions on charter
schools--where the Chicagoans wanted to call for a moratorium on charters as
a form of privatization, the New York delegation insisted on restating the
AFT's support for charter schools as a matter of school choice, and
prevailed.
For the moment, the debate over charters, teacher evaluation and merit pay
may fade to the background as the Chicago teachers gear up to fight the
threat of layoffs. But the AFT's pursuit of partnership even as teachers are
under their greatest attack in decades will inevitably lead to a struggle
over the future of teacher unionism.



 		 	   		  

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