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| 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.
