Unions, NCLB, Liberals, Oh My
April 13, 2007 03:45 PM
There's a discussion of teacher unionism and NCLB over at TPM Cafe that might in fact benefit from an actual union perspective -- although some of the commenters clearly get it.
Ganesh Sitarman writes of unions: "they’re afraid of legitimizing the principle of accountability in education." Huh? That ship sailed well more than a decade ago. Al Shanker was the guy with the champagne bottle who knocked it off the dock and into the water. The issue before us isn't the principle of accountability, it’s the specific nature of the accountability system that we will use and what we will do with the information our accountability system gives us. Right now NCLB is making a lot of teachers miserable without giving them much in the way of new tools to get the job done. From what we hear from teachers this is doing more to delegitimize the principle of accountability in education than anything we might ourselves do. AFT has some specific proposals to fix NCLB. It’s fair to critique those proposals in terms of whether or not you think we go far enough down whatever line you want us to travel, but it’s not fair to just make stuff up about us.
Jason Spitalnick writes that "easily obtained teacher tenure" is a problem. I agree with him completely. I don't know what this really has to do with unions though, given that management has years to determine if a teacher should be tenured. As for differential pay. I’ll refer to my post from the last time the blogosphere had a snort on this issue. Do I think we’ll be able to substantially (and I mean substantially) improve teacher pay without making changes to the nature of compensation? No. Are there proposals I’m against? Yes. Are there proposals I think are workable? Yes. Does everyone in the labor movement agree with me? No. But many do and some have an even more expansive vision on this issue. Spitalnick himself might recall that it is the Mayor of New York and Joel Klein that ended the Chancellor's District there, undoing New York City's experiment with differential pay.
Update. Kevin Carey Sara Mead thinks I'm accusing Spitalnick and Sitarman of "union bashing." Here I'm accusing Spitalnick and Sitarman of muddying waters by writing about unions without actually knowing what the positions are that the unions are taking. Carey Mead is right that there is a lot to agree with in what the TPM bloggers are writing about NCLB though. And having "Mr. This Week You Will Blog Only About Masters Degrees'" Blog suggest I'm being narcissistic is kind of funny.
