Union Busting by Liberal NY Governor

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

New York Governor, Andrew M. Cuomo, proposed legislation last week that would impose a new teacher evaluation system for New York City if the teachers’ union, UFT, refuses to accept the conditions of Mayor Bloomberg’s evaluation plan.

Last month, Cuomo punished New York school children by withholding $250 million from their city’s school budget because the mayor and the UFT failed to come to an agreement by his arbitrary deadline. When this failed to achieve his desired goal, Cuomo said that he would write into this year’s state budget the authority for the state to take over the evaluation system, according to the New York Times. If Bloomberg and the UFT fail to come to an agreement by May 31, the state’s education commissioner, John B. King Jr. will impose a plan by June 1 and the city would have to implement it by September 1, 2013. The sticking point between UFT and Mayor Bloomberg was the mayor’s refusal to let the deal expire at the end of 2015, even though most other state school districts had only 1-year deals (see Labor Notes).

The UFT leadership has already accepted many of the most onerous conditions of the “reform,” including the use of student test data to evaluate teachers, despite the fact that this data is an unreliable and inconsistent way to assess teacher quality (see here and here). However, this irresponsible and stupid concession was made during negotiations between the union and the teachers’ employer during collective bargaining. By imposing changes to the evaluation system, the state, which is not their employer, effectively preempts and strips away teachers’ collective bargaining rights.

Yet the union itself is also to blame for rolling over as quickly as it did on the use of student test data. Teachers unions throughout the state should have resisted evaluation reform from the get go, not only in words, but through strikes and other job actions. By the time Cuomo started threatening the UFT most of the other NY teachers unions had already accepted similar reforms. Illinois has gone through a similar process and its teachers unions have also all buckled to the authority of the law.

The argument in support of accepting state evaluation reform laws—it is the law, we are law abiding teachers (and our union can’t afford the jail time, injunctions and fines for resisting it)—is completely irrational and absurd. If workers always obeyed unjust laws, we would not have weekends, child labor and worker safety laws, or even the legal right to form unions and go on strike. The idea that teachers must obey laws is rooted in teachers’ inaccurate self-identification as selfless nurturers and do-gooders, rather than as workers, with the same needs as any other worker (e.g., material security, protections from arbitrary and vindictive treatment, workplace safety). Lastly, the legal costs associated with resisting unjust laws may be far less than the vast sums unions spend to buy fickle, untrustworthy politicians.

Blockhead NY Teachers Demand Harsh Treatment

Meanwhile, a group of blockhead (i.e., naïve workers who trust that their bosses have only their best interests in mind) NYC teachers have taken to the airwaves to demand the state impose a teacher-evaluation system, the New York Post reports. This particular group of blockheads are members of Educators 4 Excellence (E4E), which has created a 30-second ad calling on Albany to impose a new system on the recalcitrant union, the New York Post reports.

E4E, which has branches throughout the U.S., is an astroturf (i.e., fake grassroots) organization with corporate ties (they receive funding from the Gates and Carnegie Foundations) and members who are not even teachers. Consider that the New York ads are expected to cost more than $250,000—not something that the average teacher is capable of financing.

E4E wants the new evaluations to include multiple observations, “student growth data” and student surveys. Their first demand is reasonable. Observations of teachers in the classroom are the most accurate and direct way to assess teacher competence. However, few administrators have the time to do this often enough and many lack sufficient training to do it well. Without substantially increasing education funding, this is unlikely to change. Furthermore, administrators have an inherent bias, as they can manipulate the evaluations to punish or rid themselves of teachers who are outspoken critics of their policies, union activists or advocates for students and families. To have truly effective observation-based teacher evaluations, states need to train and fund objective, outside evaluators to do the job.

Student surveys can provide useful data to help teachers improve their practice, but they are terribly biased and fraught as a method for evaluating teachers. At the lower grade levels, children lack the maturity, experience and language skills to articulate whether their teacher was any good. They are certainly capable of describing whether their teacher was nice or mean, but they are not necessarily capable of determining whether they learned what they were supposed to learn. At the higher grade levels, students can use surveys vindictively to punish teachers who were strict or who refused to give them undeserved grade boosts, or to reward teachers who made it easy for them.

Even Union Run Charters Suck

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

The State University of New York’s (SUNY) Board of Trustees is voting today on whether or not to close the UFT Charter School in East New York, Brooklyn.  UFT Charter School, which is run by the New York Teachers union (UFT) with UFT President Michael Mulgrew on its board of trustees, has been charged with a number of academic, financial and management failures, the New York Post reports.

SUNY reviewers recently concluded that the school’s overspending has resulted in a $2.8 million deficit. Despite their overspending, staff members have complained about chronic textbook shortages and the K-12 school’s performance at the middle grades has been poor. However, the reviewers left open the possibility of renewing the school’s charter because their test scores at the K-5 and high school levels were good. The school has also been accused of violating the Open Meetings Law for discussing budgetary and school status issues privately and for violating the rights of special-education students.

While labor activists have criticized the typical anti-union approach of most charter schools and had high expectations for the UFT Charter, critics are looking at its failures as proof that a unionized workforce is not beneficial to students. However, the failures of UFT Charter School are due to mismanagement, not the fact that the teachers are unionized. Any administrator or boss can be incompetent, autocratic and secretive, even if they have union credentials or backing.

Furthermore, the very context and rules for charter schools encourages the kinds of problems of which UFT Charter has been accused. Because they do not have to follow many of the rules governing traditional public schools (including reduced oversight by their districts) and because they have been anointed by so many politicians and reformers, some charter school administrators and managers are no doubt emboldened to push their authority even further than already permitted. Yet despite their glorification, charter schools are also under scrutiny (by investors, regulators and critics) and hence pressure to prove that they are more successful than traditional public schools. This can lead to cheating, pushing out (or not accepting) students who might lower their test scores (e.g., English language learners, special education and low income students) and other abuses.

Finally, as most critics of charter schools know, charter schools perform no better, on average, than traditional schools, while many perform much worse. This is likely due to a number of factors, including the competency of the schools’ leadership and their educational philosophies and structures. However, the single most significant factor influencing students’ academic success is their socioeconomic backgrounds, not their schools or teachers. Therefore, a charter school like UFT Charter, with its large numbers of low income students, has a challenging (if not impossible) task, regardless of who is at its helm.

Ultimately, the UFT Charter case tells us nothing about the pros and cons of having a unionized charter school. The teachers are not to blame for the school’s failures. What this case does tell us is that inept/corrupt leadership comes in all shapes and styles (including union-made) and even competent leadership, alone, is insufficient to solve that nation’s educational problems, so long as the socioeconomic factors influencing student achievement continue to be ignored.

NY Mayor Buys LA School Board Race, Starts Arms Race With UTLA

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

One might well wonder why New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is spending $1 million of his own hard-(hardly)-earned cash to influence the Los Angeles school board race (the largest donation yet in this hotly contested race). Yet it is not just Bloomberg—several other billionaire outsiders have also ponied up large sums to help their favorite candidates win and it is not because they care about the wellbeing of LA’s children. Los Angeles Unified (like New York) is a battleground school district in the quest by wealthy investors and entrepreneurs to siphon off tax dollars from public education and crush their biggest enemy—the unions. What goes down in LA, they hope, will soon follow throughout the country, aiding their ability to weaken or destroy public sector unions, while increasing their share of the profits.

Bloomberg’s donation to Coalition for School Reform was meant to aid incumbent L.A. school board president Monica Garcia, in District 2, challenger Kate Anderson, in District 4, and Antonio Sanchez, who is fighting for an open seat in District 6. Each of these candidates has been a strong supporter of Superintendent Deasy’s reform agenda and two (Garcia and Anderson) have been vocal critics of the teachers union, United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA).

While Bloomberg’s $1 million has been the largest single donation, Coalition for School Reform (CSR) has also raised more than $1.5 million in smaller donations, according to the LA Times, from other billionaires ($250,000 each from veteran free market education “reformer” Eli Broad and former Univision chief A. Jerrold Perenchio). CSR also includes Megan Chernin, who runs a nonprofit formed by Deasy to raise funds for LAUSD schools and who used to head L.A.’s Promise, which managed three LAUSD charter schools. A smaller donation of $10,000 was made by Steven Prough, the current head of L.A.’s Promise.

The coalition has also received six-figure donations from Lynda Resnick, creator of POM Wonderful juice, and journalist Jamie Alter Lynton, who is on the board of Deasy’s nonprofit and who is married to Michael Lynton, chairman and chief executive of Sony Pictures Entertainment. Lynton has used her journalism connections as a bully pulpit to criticize UTLA and its defense of due process rights for its members. Former New York City schools Chancellor Joel Klein has also ponied up $25,000 to support the cause.

The Coalition for School Reform is a pro-charter and pro-accountability outfit that Mayor Villagairosa set up to fund his pro-privatization candidates back in 2011. In that election, the coalition raised over $1 million from right wing billionaire Phillip Anshutz (a “reactionary that makes the fascist-friendly Koch Brothers look moderate” wrote Robert Skeels), as well as billionaires Eli Broad, Jerrold Perenchio and others. Skeels, an education and social justice activist who writes for Schools Matter and Solidaridad, is also running against Garcia, but has raised his comparatively infinitesimal funding entirely through small donations and community organizing.

So who are the candidates the coalition is supporting in this current election and what is their agenda? Let’s start with current Board President Monica Garcia, a raving union-buster, who said that if she were president of UTLA she would go on a rampage and fire all “ineffective” teachers and eliminate seniority. This only shows that she has no clue how school districts actually operate (e.g., the district is the boss, with the power to hire and fire; the union is the employee of the teachers, with the responsibility to defend their interests and no ability to fire teachers). More significantly, it implies that she despises teachers, presuming great numbers of them to be incompetent, or at least an expensive burden, who should be replaced en-masse by lower-paid and more compliant novices.

The coalition’s candidate for District 4, one of LAUSD’s more affluent districts, is Kate Anderson, an attorney who once worked for Munger, Tolles & Olson, a high-powered law firm with members who are currently working in President Obama’s cabinet and who have served (or who currently serve) as CEO’s and directors of large investment firms, like Salomon Brothers and Berkshire Hathaway. One of the coalition’s priorities for District 4 is “stand[ing] up to special interest groups that make it impossible to remove poorly performing teachers.” In other words, they are counting on Anderson to attack collective bargaining and weaken the union by eviscerating teachers’ due process rights. Anderson’s supporters include Ben Austin, founder of Parent Revolution, the astroturf group behind most of LAUSD’s Parent Trigger battles, and another charter school advocate and profiteer.

Anderson, like Garcia, has publicly expressed ignorance about how the school district operates, calling into question her credibility as a future board member. She was quoted in the L.A. Weekly saying “I’m really frustrated by the lack of a teacher evaluation system. . .” though LAUSD does in fact have a teacher evaluation system, one that was negotiated by the district with the union and signed into a contract by both parties. Like Garcia, she, too, is disdainful of teachers, saying “We need a system that. . . when appropriate, helps teachers gracefully exit from the system.” This is essentially a euphemism for, “we need a more efficient way to get rid of teachers.” It is probably safe to presume she is referring to expensive veterans, union organizers, student advocates, charter school critics, and others who stand in the way of CSR’s privatization schemes. Ironically, Anderson’s opponent, Steve Zimmer, is a Teach for America alumnus who is supported by both UTLA and several charter schools.

In response to the large donation by Bloomberg, UTLA has asked for outside funds from the state and national teachers unions to help it support its own favorite candidates for the L.A. school board and has said it planned to spend several million dollars on the election.  As of last week, the NEA was unwilling to get involved, but the California Teachers Association and AFT have left the possibility open, according to the LA School Report. Regardless, it is unlikely that UTLA will be able to keep up the coalition’s spending, as it has no billionaire supporters.

The third candidate being pushed by CSR is Antonio Sanchez, another Villaraigosa ally, who also once worked for the County Federation of Labor, making him seem like a pro-union (rather than pro-privatization) candidate. Indeed, the Daily News reports that several unions have endorsed Sanchez, including UTLA and SEIU. However, despite his labor credentials, Sanchez supports much of Villaraigosa’s “reform” agenda, according to the L.A. School Report, saying that he wants to “break” the divide between unions and school choice and accountability advocates. This ought to give UTLA pause, as “breaking the divide” means getting the union to accept harmful concessions. For example, Sanchez supports the use of student performance data in teacher evaluations.

“Breaking the divide” between teachers’ unions and “reform” advocates is one of the main goals of CSR and its billionaire funders. As the reform movement sees it, the unions’ opposition to evaluation reform, Value Added Measures (VAM) and charter schools is irrational, selfish and meritless—and something that can be whittled away with persistence and finesse. They have good reason to believe this. UTLA—as well as CTU, in Chicago, and UFT, in New York—have all acquiesced to the use of student performance data or actual test scores to evaluate their teachers, despite the fact that such data is inconsistent, unreliable and correlates more strongly with students’ socioeconomic backgrounds than with teacher quality.

Who’s Hurting NY’s Kids? Cuomo's Attack on Collective Bargaining

“Do not punish our schoolchildren for the obstructionism of the U.F.T.,”

These were the words of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, referring to Governor Cuomo’s decision to cut hundreds of millions of dollars of funding to New York schools because the city and its teachers union, United Federation of Teachers (UFT), failed to come to an agreement on teacher evaluations by the arbitrary January 17 deadline imposed by the governor.

Bloomberg is insinuating, of course, that the teachers (or their union) have caused schools to be penalized and, consequently, for children to be harmed, but it was the governor who imposed the arbitrary deadline and who holds the purse strings. It is Cuomo who is holding the students hostage until their teachers and their bosses come to an agreement. And it is their bosses in the Department of Education and Mayor Bloomberg himself who have made unreasonable demands on teachers and risked failing to meet the governor’s deadline by doing so.

There is an uglier story here, one that is being replayed across the country. New York state has been trying (and succeeding) in imposing changes to teacher evaluations so that they are based on student test scores and the UFT, like many unions (including UTLA in Los Angeles and CTU in Chicago) has been willing to accept it, even though student test scores are an unreliable measure of teaching ability (see here and here) that can result in good teachers receiving bad evaluations and bad ones slipping through the cracks. The sticking point between UFT and Mayor Bloomberg was Bloomberg’s refusal to let the deal expire at the end of 2015, even though most other state school districts had only 1-year deals (see Labor Notes).

Bottom line:

• UFT is sabotaging kids by accepting any level of student test scores in their evaluations
• Bloomberg is sabotaging them by making absurd demands on the teachers that are well beyond the already absurd demands being place on them by other New York districts
• Cuomo is not only holding the schools hostage until the teachers buckle, but he is also shredding the teachers’ contract and undermining their right and their ability to collectively bargain with their employer, which happens to be the city of New York, not the state of New York 

Teachers are Terrorists and Corporate Shills

Politicians are notorious for saying stupid, embarrassing and downright insulting and hurtful things in the quest to promote their political agendas. Michael Bloomberg’s recent comparison of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) to the National Rifle Association (NRA) ranks right up there with some of the stupidest—but here are a few other ditties (just in case you missed them):

Teachers Unions are Terrorist Organizations

In 2004, Education Secretary Rod Paige called the nation's largest teachers union, the National Education Association (NEA), a "terrorist organization" during a White House meeting with state governors.

Schools and Universities Should Be Blown Up

Since the teachers are a bunch of terrorists, it is justifiable to blow up the places where they hang. In line with this sort of thinking, right-wing education privatization cheerleader and Fordham Foundation President Chester E. Finn Jr. said that the best way to reform public education is to “Blow it up and start over,” while his counterpart, Reid Lyon, former Chief of Child Development and Behavior Branch at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, suggested we blow up the teachers’ colleges.

Deadly Disasters are Great for Capitalism (Er, Children)

Current Education Secretary Arne Duncan said that Katrina was the best thing that could have happened to the New Orleans schools. What he meant was that disasters are fantastic ways to rally popular support for otherwise unpopular ideas, in this case, a massive scheme to convert the entire district to charter schools and destroy the unions.71% of New Orleans children are now attending charter schools, the highest rate in the nation. All employees, including teachers and custodians, were fired and forced to reapply, and all union contracts were canceled. Many of the unionized teachers were replaced by Teach For America interns.

Michael Bloomberg: Teachers Unions are Like the NRA

“It’s typical of Congress, it’s typical of unions, it’s typical of companies, I guess, where a small group is really carrying the ball and the others aren’t necessarily in agreement. . . The N.R.A. is another place where the membership, if you do the polling, doesn’t agree with the leadership.” (NY Times)

The comparison is grotesque and offensive because it likens teachers—who see themselves as defenders of childhood innocence and purity (e.g., Sandy Hook) to gun nuts and corporate shills—who are seen by many as the defenders of psychotic, murderous rampages (e.g., Sandy Hook). Yet if we ignore the offensiveness of Bloomberg’s statement, perhaps substitute AMA or Bar Association for NRA, one can see that there is some truth to Bloomberg’s comments. Most unions are like these organizations in that they invest heavily in lobbying, buying politicians and attempting to buy legislation. It is true that rank and file union members are often alienated from and disagree with their leadership. And it is true that the leadership of unions often put their own needs, interests and agenda above those of their members.

Evaluation Deal is Major Defeat for NY Teachers—Harbinger for Others?

A statewide deal was announced last week setting the stage for performance-based evaluations for New York teachers, with state officials finally settling a lawsuit brought by the state teachers union. 700 local districts throughout the state will still have to negotiate the fine points with local unions.

The new framework bases 40% of a teacher’s evaluation on student performance, with 20% being based on student progress on high stakes standardized exams.  The other 20% would also consider test scores, but would be measured using a union-supported method. The plan also makes it easier to fire teachers after two years of “ineffective” ratings.

According to the Wall Street Journal, all sides considered the deal a victory, with UFT President Michael Mulgrew saying that the new appeals process provides a "much greater degree of fairness."

VAM Evaluations Are Bad For Students as Well as Teachers

Regardless of the merits of the new appeals process, any use of student test data to evaluate teachers should be considered a defeat for teachers, as well as students and their schools.

First of all, the test scores and students’ progress on them are most strongly correlated with students’ socioeconomic backgrounds, not teacher quality. Consequently, teachers who have more affluent students will tend to get better evaluations, increasing the diaspora of quality veteran teachers from challenging, low income schools, where they are most needed, but least likely to get good evaluations and keep their jobs.

Secondly, there is no accurate, consistent or commonly accepted method for using student test scores to measure teacher quality. Various accounting methods tend to cause wildly fluctuating Value Added Measures (VAM) from year to year. Thus, an excellent teacher could easily get a “false negative” and get fired as a result, which would also be unfair to students, as well as the unjustly fired teacher.

Thirdly, the tests themselves are terrible waste of time and resources, sapping states and districts of much needed revenue for instruction and teacher retention. They do little or nothing toward improving the quality of schools or students’ educational outcomes. They take away class time from authentic learning, critical thinking and problem solving. They encourage teaching to the test and discourage creativity and curiosity.

In order to boost test scores, many districts have abandoned or reduced arts, music, athletics and even science to make room for increased test preparation and remediation. Many schools have even implemented test preparation and homework for kindergartners to prepare them for a lifetime of testing and drudgery.

Basing teachers’ evaluations (and thus their livelihoods) on these same tests will only encourage more teaching to the test and discourage creative, student-centered teaching, thus decreasing the quality of teaching overall. It also legitimizes the tests and their publishers, strengthening their grip on this deplorable and brazen taxpayer giveaway.

Why the Sellout?

The deal had been in the works for two years. However, the stakes grew when U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan warned the state last month that it was in danger of losing nearly $1 billion in federal Race to the Top money if it failed to overhaul of teacher evaluations.

In hard economic times, $1 billion is nothing to sneeze at. But it should not be forgotten that states and the feds have been consistently squeezing education of funding by slashing taxes on the wealthy and their corporations. The money to sufficiently fund public education could be provided, despite the recession, if there were increases in the marginal tax rate for the wealthy, combined with increases in the corporate, capital gains and inheritance taxes. Furthermore, if NY and other states simply refused to participate in NCLB testing, Common Core Standards, and other expensive “reforms,” they would save billions of dollars in expenditures on test printing, scoring and evaluating, new textbooks, making the Race to the Top (RttT) extortion racket  irrelevant.

One other little incentive for the union to sell out was Gov. Cuomo’s threat of a state-mandated settlement, including the threat of cutting state aid to districts. However, it shouldn’t matter which boss is screwing workers, the response should be the same. If VAM and test-based evaluations are bad for students and unfair to teachers, they should be opposed vigorously, regardless of who makes the demand.

Teacher Evaluation Crisis or Red Herring?

Ever since the Nation at Risk report, pundits, politicians and Ed Deformers have been decrying the crisis in public education and looking for causes and culprits under every bed. The problem is that public education is better than it was 30, 40 or 50 years ago.

While it is not without its problems, the single biggest problem is the socioeconomic disparity between students, not teacher quality. Nevertheless, the teacher evaluation system is far from perfect. But the biggest problem is not that too many “bad” teachers are slipping through the cracks. Rather, the biggest problem is that there are too few evaluators with too little training and too much bias to do the job well. In most districts, administrators are responsible for observing teachers and rarely do they have the time and training to do it comprehensively. In 15 years of teaching, I have never been observed more than 3-4 times per year (sometimes never), nor do I know any teachers who have been observed any more than this.

Yet even, if site administrators had sufficient time to observe everyone on a weekly basis, they would still have an inherent bias that potentially undermines the validity of their observations. An independent and creative teacher might deliberately choose his or her own original lessons over an administrator’s recommended ones, or publicly question or critique an administrator’s reforms, leading to biased negative evaluations. Indeed, union organizers, outspoken critics and advocates, and original thinkers are often singled out by bosses and treated unfairly as a result.

The New York City agreement allows the union to send up to 13% of cases to a three-person panel to protect against harassment by principals, according to the New York Times. While Mulgrew has spun this as a victory for UFT, it means that 87% of “at-risk” teachers will simply be tossed aside, without due process or a grievance procedure. Considering how much poverty exists in New York City schools and the heavy emphasis on student test scores, there will likely be a substantial number of good teachers who will fall into this unprotected 87%, abandoned by their own union and without the legal support they paid for with their dues.

There is one theoretically positive outcome from the settlement: the evaluation system will bring independent observers into the classrooms to monitor the weakest teachers, the New York Times reported. I say “theoretical” because, though it is preferable to use unbiased outside observers, these observers will have caseloads of 50-80 teachers, which is far too large to do the job well. Indeed, they are only required to do three observations per year. Furthermore, the “outside” observers will be provided by a private company which stands to profit off the system, creating a new bias.