House Education Committee Remarks for 3-2-2011

Bills 1108 and 1110

We English teachers like booklists. Here are the five best I have read relevant to current issues in School Reform. All are currently in print, I think:

• The Death and Life of the Great American School by Diane Ravitch
• The Flat World and Education by Linda Darling-Hammond
• The Manufactured Crisis by David C. Berliner and Bruce J. Biddle
• Enhancing  Professional Practice:  A Framework for Teaching by Charlotte Danielson
• Paying Teachers for What They Know and Do: New and Smarter Compensation Strategies to Improve Schools by Allan Odden and Carolyn Kelley. Professor Odden is Co-director of  Consortium for Policy Research in Education at University of Wisconsin, Madison

These bills are a mixed bag: there is some good here, quite a lot of bad, and some very ugly. On balance, I do not support them in anything like their present form.

Two separate, unrelated issues

If I had to give one reason, it would be that the bills, like similar ones in other states, conflate two separate issues: the current fiscal crisis, which is, we hope, a relatively short-term problem, and the improvement in quality of our schools, which should be an on-going concern, long-term for all stakeholders.

Permanent “solutions” to a temporal emergency

Hopefully, the fiscal crisis will eventually work itself out. It is more than a bump in the road; it is a major sink-hole. But I would like to think that the road has not gone away and we will be back on paving by-and-by. In the meantime, we are in damage control mode. If there is a smaller pot of money, school boards and union locals will have to negotiate for less. That is the way it works. Will budgets be pared by salary and benefits roll-backs? By reductions in force? By some combination, or by something else? Once the Legislature has decided on the education allocation and it has been apportioned to the districts, these will be negotiated locally. This has always worked, and I am confident that it can work now. I am surprised that Superintendent Luna, of all people, seems not to understand this. Some years ago, I sat across the negotiations table from him.

What bothers me is that a temporal problem is being addressed with permanent structural changes. A system, a way of doing business,  that I have seen evolving in the 40 plus years that I have been in Idaho, and that has served all stakeholders pretty darned well is to be thrown under the bus. Not only is this wildly disproportionate, it is misguided because it will not solve any of our real-world problems. The money is there or it is not. Nothing in these bills changes that. We must play it as it lays.

Is this the new normal?

I am also bothered that, as I listened between the lines of Superintendent Luna’s presentation yesterday, the subtext seemed to be that current problems represent the “new normal.” I suppose it could be that, if the Idaho Legislature makes a conscious decision that it will be thus, henceforth.

Bills do nothing to solve problems

Even so, these bills do nothing to remedy the fiscal problems we are faced with. Instead, they use our fiscal problems as an excuse to contrive political and politically-motivated “solutions” to things that are not problems and never have been: ideologically driven solutions in search of problems.

Will restricting the scope of negotiations save any money? I have heard no convincing explanation of how it might. In fact, salaries and benefits, the two money items remain negotiable. Now detractors of collective bargaining will be able to argue that teachers are a mercenary bunch, interested only in their own pockets, because salary and benefits is the only thing they ever negotiate. Yes, there is probably some political advantage to be gained here, but will it actually help any budget?  I fail to see how.

Zero sum fallacy

I suppose that there are policy makers and administrators who indulge themselves in thinking that if only they had enough control, if only their control were absolute, then all sorts of wonderful things would follow. Just think what I could do then. There would be no end to it. Some would call this magical thinking, but that is unkind. What I see here is a logical material fallacy: the zero-sum fallacy. The only way I can empower myself is to disempower you, and conversely, anything that empowers you somehow disempowers me.

So, how do we improve our schools? By getting rid of bad teachers, the conventional wisdom goes. But the union will not let us get rid of anyone (myth). So we abolish continuing contract (non-solution to any real problem). Here too is the zero-sum fallacy. If I can empower myself by disempowering you, good things must necessarily happen. But I remember sitting in Dean Chatburn’s personnel class some 25 years ago and hearing him say that any principal who claims that he is unable to fire bad teachers is unwilling to do what is necessary and is making excuses. The mechanism and the rules are laid out both in statute and contract. As principal, you must be observant (not just the formal observations) and know exactly what the teacher is doing that he shouldn’t or isn’t doing that he should. Then you document, document, document. It is especially important to work with teachers the first three years mentoring and observing. It is easier to say “This just isn’t working out” before the teacher goes on continuing contract than to demonstrate just cause later. I have never forgotten that advice from a veteran superintendent.

Contracts can be re-negotiated annually

Negotiating is, by definition, a two way street. Nothing in a master contract is forever. Every year, at the outset of the new negotiating season, the first order of business was to review the contract for anything that needed to be revisited. If both parties agree, and I don’t remember a time when it was not, it is on the table. How much more flexible can you get? To suggest that the union is able to impose its will on a hapless board is disingenuous.

Collective bargaining isn’t what it used to be

Once upon a time, the negotiating process was more overtly adversarial. Both parties showed up with their pre-prepared position statements. They read them. Each rejected the other’s position in toto. Then the same stiff-legged dance repeated the next week. It is a wonder that anything got agreed upon. Perhaps it is still done this way in some districts, but we worked long and hard over several years to make the negotiations table a place that real dialogue could take place on issues of concern to both parties, to good effect, I think. The emphasis isn’t so much on winning as it is on defining and solving problems. Not only is collaborative negotiating more civil, but it works better. Superintendent Luna seems not to remember this.

Consequences?

I fear that as the scope of collective bargaining is constricted, as fair employment practices are undone,  as years of progress are rolled back, board/employee relations will become more, not less contentious. As conflict resolution takes place less in civil deliberation, strikes and litigation will be more, not less common. But most significantly, real, meaningful change will be harder, not easier, to achieve.

Pay-for-performance

Alternative compensation is essentially anything that departs from the traditional salary schedule which has proved to be so durable mostly because it is fiendishly difficult to come up with anything that actually works better. Alternative compensation can be many different things and combinations of things. Pay for performance, aka merit pay, is one approach to alternative compensation. There are many others. When you read Allan Odden’s book, or visit the CPRE website, or attend a CPRE conference, you begin to appreciate the wealth of possibilities. For two years, I served on a committee that explored possible alternative compensation systems for our district. As it worked out, the problem was that whatever we came up with that would achieve our ends would cost more, not less than the status quo. We disbanded when we decided that alternative compensation is best pursued in a fat year, not a lean one. If it is initiated to save money, it will likely fail. You will hear this caveat repeatedly at CPRE conferences.

According to CPRE, alternative compensation plans work best where the teachers can buy into them because they were negotiated into existence by the District and the union. Plans that are created by the district and handed down by fiat tend not to work very well, create more problems than they solve, and ultimately fail. The Denver plan has worked. The Steamboat Springs plan, unilaterally imposed by the board, soon failed.

Evaluating performance

How will it actually play out in practice, where the rubber meets the road? That is the question. If we are to be paid on the basis of performance, what constitutes performance? How is it to be defined, and who decides that? Student growth? Of course. How do we measure that? Test scores? What tests? What about subjects for which there are no tests? Let me give an example of my concerns.

The ISAT tells us something about those subjects it tells us something about, but it’s not a complete picture of much of anything. It is a pretty limited instrument. Let’s consider writing. As an English teacher, I consider it my job to teach kids to write coherent, reasonably correct English prose. The ISAT is a multiple choice bubble sheet test that asks questions about writing and error-based proofreading. The student does no actual writing. For about 30 years, we had the Idaho Direct Writing Assessment. The student wrote a real essay on an assigned topic. The papers were read and graded by a team of English teachers with specialized training for the task. If validity, in test terminology, is how well that test actually measures what it purports to measure. Essay, bubble sheet. Bubble sheet, essay. Common sense tells us that writing an essay is the more valid test of writing achievement. Yet, the IDWA has been dropped in favor of the ISAT. If I were being evaluated on my students’ growth in writing, I would have little confidence.

By the way, my district had a comprehensive teacher evaluation instrument, based largely of Danielson’s Frameworks, negotiated right into the contract. I am sure that many other districts do also.

I am convinced that not only will these two bills not accomplish their stated aims, they will prove counterproductive.