WHY TEACHER UNIONS?

Workers join unions. Teachers are professionals and don’t belong in unions. That is pretty much a common belief, especially in the media. However, a close look at teaching shows that it is, actually, ahybrid - part profession, part labor. In common with doctors and lawyers, for example, teachers must qualify through extensive and specific college courses and then pass a stringent exam. But in common, say, with retail clerks and TV technicians, teachers once hired are told where, how, when and in detail what they are to teach. Teachers dissatisfied with or fired from a specific school district must go elsewhere to find a job, to a new city or even a state, unlike the clerk, who can leave Wal Mart for Sears. Include low wages, submission to a well-paid and distant bureaucracy, and substandard working conditions, and it is obvious that though prepared and eager to be professionals, teachers are treated like workers. And workers join unions.

Why then do we hear so much negative chatter about teacher unions? Attacks on public education from right wing politicians focus on teacher unions, implying that if only the “too powerful” unions were out of the picture, education would have a chance to improve. How powerful are teacher unions? In fact, unions can only negotiate, not dictate. Even where a contract has been won, the union (and the teachers) still have no say over curriculum, textbook selection, district organization, salaries of administration, and much more. The power of the unions is, despite all the hullabaloo about them, very limited.

Teacher unions do use whatever power they have by engaging public interest and public power through political activity. Political action committees (PACs) implement a basic principle of democracy, the right of individually powerless people to collect money as a group in order to level the playing field with such big players as corporate interests and major political factions. PACs are attacked again and again for trying to “buy“ politicians and influence legislation; if teachers support candidates and issues that affect their profession, they are doing no more than every other organized sector in a democracy. As it is, though, unions spend on average only about 20% of what business spends on causes they favor.

Using whatever power they have, teacher unions play a triple role: they protect individual teachers from administrative injustice, they preserve the rights and standards of the teaching profession, and they promote the cause of education for all children. A teacher union does for teachers what any union does for its members: provides support and strength which come only with many acting as one - unity. So, precisely what is on the agendas of teacher unions? What do they fight for? Here are their chief goals.

Quality education for all, across the community: the same levels of funding for supplies, for experienced teachers, for proper buildings and equipment, regardless of economic levels.

Class size reduction as a key element of successful education.
Minimal proportion of education budgets for bureaucratic costs, which can absorb as much as 30% of a district budget; education funds must go to the classroom, where education happens.

Improvement of teacher pay, aiming for professional levels. It is commonly acknowledged that the hard work and dedication of teachers are seldom rewarded properly; only the power of many united into one bargaining unit can achieve progress.

Protection of due rights processes for teachers, whose professional activity and status should never be subject to the whims of individual administrators. Mistakenly lumped under the word tenure, “due process rights” simply means a teacher won’t be fired without due cause.

Maintenance of supportive services provided by librarians, school nurses, and counselors; their specialized professional work is not expendable.
Advancement of education goals and methods as they are recognized through professional experience: educational reform. It must originate with teachers, not be imposed by theoreticians far removed from real classrooms.

Proper funding in local and state budgets for education. Legislators too often fail to prioritize the cost of education: California, for example, pays $50,000 a year to keep someone in prison but balks at $8,000 a year to educate a child.
Inclusion of teachers in planning school district budgets and curriculum. Classroom experience knows the needs: the administrative bureaucracy is too far removed from day-to-day education activities to have total power over them.

With such goals, teacher unions are a positive force in a community, often the only group fighting to keep alive the American dream of quality education for all the nation’s kids. They need all the power they can muster to meet that goal.

MERIT PAY,NO WAY

MERIT PAY, NO WAY (or MERIT PAY, DEMERIT PAY)



Just about all adults remember an inspiring teacher who truly transformed their lives. Rewarding such a teacher - merit pay - seems fair and logical. Merit pay has a great ring to it. The idea has been around education and political circles for years, and its advocates see it as the solution to almost every problem in public education. They assume that it is possible to evaluate teacher performance objectively and fairly. But teaching is not done by robots addressing robots, and descriptions of those memorable teachers would display widely - even wildly - different characteristics. How, then, can the awardees of merit pay be chosen?
Currently, assessment of education success tends to rely upon test scores - the teacher whose students score high is successful; the teacher whose students rate lower on tests is inadequate or mediocre. Unfortunately, test scores won’t tell you how well a teacher taught, because there is no way that classrooms can be equal. Even when a school tries to group students according to academic ability, there are other factors which influence test scores: attendance, for example, or the number of English learners. And how to compare English and math classes, or chemistry and physical education? If a teacher is assigned low performance students, how compare his/her teaching skills with those of the teacher assigned to honors classes? And finally - and most important- the validity of standardized tests themselves is open to serious question.
If not test scores, then what? The usual method suggested is for the principal to evaluate the teacher. S/he is the school leader, the one who presumably knows the abilities of the faculty. But can even the best-intentioned principal visit every teacher often enough to know what happens regularly in a classroom? Moreover, if the principal actually does have that knowledge, how can s/he avoid subjective assessment? Unfortunately, every teacher has at some time been in a school where administrative evaluation was unfair, where a principal punished teachers for union activity, for voicing opinions unacceptable to the principal, for speaking up in meetings, for personal qualities that ran contrary to the principal’s values. Principals have power to change assignments; for example, we know a school where a 20 year kindergarten teacher was abruptly transferred to a sixth grade class. Sometimes, too, a principal simply overlooks the work of a teacher who does not attract administrative attention. Even where the principal tries to be fair, personal judgment would be open to question on every level. And under a principal with a little Caesar complex, merit pay would become patronage and favoritism, with teachers reduced to competition for favorable attention. The merit in merit pay would vanish; in its place would be a loss of morale and education standards.
Merit pay is clearly a practical impossibility, even if it were a desirable concept. Every teacher knows that teaching is not a science; no matter how carefully the teacher follows the rules laid down by education departments in college, adjustments must be made in the real classroom. If anything, teaching is an art more than a science, and teaching is one of the hardest of all jobs. All teachers have five years or more of college under their belts, but they seldom are allowed professional discretion in their classrooms, and it is a truism that everywhere they are seldom paid what society admits their work is worth. We have one of the best educated, most dedicated workforce in America, and it would be an insult to this national treasure to introduce a flawed system whereby a “few” good teachers are rewarded with extra money while the rest of this talented group of overworked women and men would suffer the indignity of being labeled not good enough, not deserving of merit pay.
Maybe in some ideal world merit pay would work; in ours it has no merit