Newsweek takes on teachers unions

Oh, liberal Newsweek throws a bone to the Obama administration's decision regarding teachers unions, "to take them on," but while reading this article about firing bad teachers, I had to remind myself that I was reading Newsweek.

For much of this time—roughly the last half century—professional educators believed that if they could only find the right pedagogy, the right method of instruction, all would be well. They tried New Math, open classrooms, Whole Language—but nothing seemed to achieve significant or lasting improvements.

Yet in recent years researchers have discovered something that may seem obvious, but for many reasons was overlooked or denied. What really makes a difference, what matters more than the class size or the textbook, the teaching method or the technology, or even the curriculum, is the quality of the teacher. Much of the ability to teach is innate—an ability to inspire young minds as well as control unruly classrooms that some people instinctively possess (and some people definitely do not). Teaching can be taught, to some degree, but not the way many graduate schools of education do it, with a lot of insipid or marginally relevant theorizing and pedagogy. In any case the research shows that within about five years, you can generally tell who is a good teacher and who is not.

It is also true and unfortunate that often the weakest teachers are relegated to teaching the neediest students, poor minority kids in inner-city schools. For these children, teachers can be make or break. "The research shows that kids who have two, three, four strong teachers in a row will eventually excel, no matter what their background, while kids who have even two weak teachers in a row will never recover," says Kati Haycock of the Education Trust and coauthor of the 2006 study "Teaching Inequality: How Poor and Minority Students Are Shortchanged on Teacher Quality."

Nothing, then, is more important than hiring good teachers and firing bad ones. But here is the rub. Although many teachers are caring and selfless, teaching in public schools has not always attracted the best and the brightest. There once was a time when teaching (along with nursing) was one of the few jobs not denied to women and minorities. But with social progress, many talented women and minorities chose other and more highly compensated fields. One recent review of the evidence by McKinsey & Co., the management consulting firm, showed that most schoolteachers are recruited from the bottom third of college-bound high-school students. (Finland takes the top 10 percent.)

In most states, teachers are given tenure after two or three years, which makes them almost impossible to fire because of strong teachers unions. The magazine takes a look at government-school districts and discovers that New York City, which employs 30,000 teachers, just two were dismissed in 2008. Just 0.1 percent of teachers were fired in Chicago over a three year period, and President Obama's education secretary, Arne Duncan, was in charge of those schools. The Obama daughters attended private schools.

It could be worse--Denver fired no teachers over the same time period. I'm not praising firing for the sake of firing--I've been canned, it sucks, but it's hard to believe that New York employed only three bad teachers.

Related posts:

T-Paw proposes Minnesota teachers reapply for tenure every five years

Teachers union blocking education progress in Detroit

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