Waiting for Union Reform

I had the privilege of seeing Davis Guggenheim’s superlative new documentary, Waiting for “Superman” last night with Iveta. The film gives powerful evidence of the unique, critical importance of great teachers in achieving globally competitive student performance, and it confronts a major sociopolitical issue, teacher’s unions, and the ways these unions now block any kind of useful reform in U.S. education. I recommend you visit the website, donate, and of course tell all your friends to see the movie.

I also recommend you think hard about real solutions to the U.S. high school education crisis, as I have below, and recommend them to your congressperson.

American HS teacher’s unions need to be reformed, as soon as possible. We could mandate the ability for new merit-rewarding unions to emerge in competition with the two existing large and corrupt ones, the NEA and the AFT, but I firmly believe that would be too little, too late. America has been falling behind educationally for 50 years now, and if we don’t do something drastic, we won’t turn around our educational system. It has too much inertia.

For more on the broad scope of this sad story, read The Teacher’s Unions, Lieberman, 1997, Power Grab, Moo, 1999, Conflicting Missions?, Loveless, 2000, The Worm in the Apple, Brimelow (most popular book of these), 2004, and most recently, The War Against Hope, Paige (former U.S. Education Secretary), 2009. No Child Left Behind in 2001 was an important step forward as it mandated comprehensive tests, which told us how poor our children’s writing and reading and arithmetic performances are, but the teacher’s unions have fought any changes in the way we teach. The only clear successes we’ve seen have emerged from the best of the charter schools, like the 80+ KIPP Schools around the country. We have the data we need. Now it’s time to act.

The only clean solution I see is a Federal one, to outlaw collective bargaining for new teachers, and replace it with a new system of contract, merit-based teaching for all incoming, next generation teachers. The current system would be maintained for the existing teachers, they could switch to the new system if they wanted, and current system teachers with the most seniority would be given economic incentives for early retirement. Poor performing “lemon” teachers that were hired under the old system wouldn’t be fired, but they wouldn’t be allowed to teach. Up to 5% of the worst could be voted out of the classroom by the principals and their teacher peers every year. Obama, are you listening?

Collective bargaining and teacher job security are in deep, fundamental conflict with our desire to recruit and reward the best teachers. We need to choose one of these priorities, we can’t have both. Teaching must become a desirable, high paid job, like we see in Korea and other countries that value education, and it must also become a short term job, where typical teachers are expected to stay for 10 years, and great teachers for a maximum of ten more, where they mentor other teachers. Perhaps 10% of the workforce can stay longer than that, and be over 50 in age, but no more, by law.

The majority of high school teachers today should be young. Teaching young kids takes a lot of energy, and keeping up with our modern, accelerating technological world requires the rapid learning of youthful teachers. Japanese culture has a phrase, Gakkyu hokai, which translates to “classroom breakdown”, where bored, tech-savvy youth, as young as elementary school, simply stop paying any attention to their teachers once they realize that they know virtually nothing about the new digital world the kids inhabit. Gakkyu hokai is a problem with all first world classes today, and it will only get worse. Young, tech-savvy teachers can solve that, and be the analytical, numerate, and literate mentors and coaches the kids need.

HS teachers should be able to start in their mid 20′s, shortly out of college. Any B.S. or higher degree, and a year of training, should be sufficient to get into the trainee pool, and teacher trainees should be aggressively weeded out in the first five years. While hiring a minority of older, second-career teachers would bring wisdom and life experience to the teaching pool, typical track teachers would finish their maximum 20 year stint by their mid-40′s, so they can easily start a second career. They would have had high salary during their time as teachers. If they made it to over 10 years, they’d get a quarter pension, and if they made it to 20, a half-pension. But they would need to get back in the workforce at that point.

Teaching isn’t a lifetime job. Learning is a lifetime job. We need teachers who are literate, numerate, lifelong learners, accomplished-in-themselves, and willing to teach for the love and challenge, not the security. If they have tech, entrepreneurship, trade, or other useful skills going in, they should get serious bonuses. We want caring, exceptional teachers who the students want to emulate, across the board.

How much longer can we wait around, and watch our next generation of children get demolished by our existing educational system, which has turned into a job security program for a very large and well funded group of untouchable, unfirable, unaccountable adults? Our nation’s future is at stake.

Update: I’ve since discovered that Governor Jim Gibbons (R-Nevada, whose tabloid personal life caused him to lose his primary this year) last year proposed eliminating collective bargaining for teachers. Geoffrey Lawrence of the (conservative) Nevada Policy Research Institute has a nice writeup in favor of this policy. It focuses on the big issues: tenure, which must be eliminated, the blocks against youth and experienced non-teachers joining the teaching pool and competing with traditionally-educated teachers, and problems with current teacher certification, which is irrelevant to teaching quality as presently structured. We need broad powers to create alternative forms of teacher certification, pay systems based on merit, short-term teaching contracts, and the ability to fire lemon teachers.

Meg Whitman (R-CA candidate, who I do not endorse) has also proposed eliminating collective bargaining, but for government jobs. That seems to me unsupportable. Collective bargaining should be a right for any position that lasts longer than 20 years. It doesn’t make sense for a 4-year political term, but it does for a lifelong governmental job, and every profession needs lots of such jobs.

Imagine that all the state and federal regulators of teachers, and all the public university professors studying teaching quality were also on 20-year short-term contract positions, like the H.S. teachers in our proposal. That would cause a lack of institutional memory and would seriously hamper our ability to oversee, improve, and better regulate the teaching industry. We need lots of intelligent regulations, constantly being adjusted in any modern system. There may be government jobs we are willing to restructure to than 20 years, and for those jobs, we might significantly reduce union oversight. Until our society gets significantly more productive, and AI’s get significantly more advanced, a critical core of lifetime jobs seems necessary in any industry, and such jobs form the majority of many, but not all, professions.

In summary, in critical job categories that have seen decades of poor performance, such as H.S. teaching, it seems to me our nation needs the flexibility and ability to either repeal or reform most or all collective bargaining rights, and to institute a new system. We would likely phase it back in later, but for now, it’s time to call collective bargaining for H.S. teachers what it has become: a gross obstruction to critically-needed teaching reform.

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