In the welcome message posted on
Education Week, the new home for his blog,
Alexander Russo says something profound:
"The main argument of this blog can be boiled down to the following: Too often,
educators don't understand politics, politicians don't understand education, and
education journalists don't understand -- or find ways to capture -- the
interactions of these two different worlds. Everyone suffers as a result."
He's exactly right, if he's saying what I think he's saying. Fortunately, today we have a couple of instances where we can apply his observation.
Education Sector has released an
exceptional report by Marguerite Roza that quantifies the costs of various standard provisions in collective bargaining agreements that have little or no connection to improved student achievement or even efficient distribution of resources. Items like automatic raises for experience, university credits, and paid professional development end up totaling almost 19 percent of all education spending, without any indication that they are giving us what we're after: better schools.
Roza suggests more flexibility is needed:
"Money spent on seniority-based raises and generous health plans for more
veteran teachers might be better used for raising minimum salaries to recruit
younger educators who meet high teaching standards. Resources spent meeting
mandatory class-size targets or hiring a prescribed number of classroom aides
might be better used to hire teachers to provide after-school tutoring to
low-performing children."
Nothing in Roza's 15-page report should startle you, if you follow education research. But this is where Russo's Law of Suffering comes in.
The relative worth of class size reduction, performance pay, national board certification, vouchers, teacher quality, national standards, the single salary schedule, charter schools, collective bargaining, NCLB, and any other influence on our education system is constantly fought over, but it is almost always beside the point next to the parallel political fight that has
nothing to do with the relative worth of those influences.
Asked by the
Washington Post's Jay Mathews to
comment on the Education Sector report, NEA President Reg Weaver said, "Research has shown us time and time again that low salaries drive committed people from the teaching profession." He added: "Simply put, we need lawmakers to fully fund public education."
Obviously, that's not a critique of the report, but a commercial for NEA's political agenda.
NEA released its own publication yesterday (
forewarned in November, Item #4) with
226 pages worth of complaints about the No Child Left Behind Act from its members all across the country. Some of these tears and lamentations have nothing to do with anything in NCLB, but they are heartrending nonetheless. What's more heartrending is that NEA could fulfill its political and litigation agenda in every way concerning NCLB this year, and these teachers will be able to write the same stories again next year, perhaps blaming a new culprit.
Over the years, I've talked to a lot of political folks who think once the legislative battle is won, the fight is over and they can move on to the next legislative battle. I've talked to a lot of education policy folks who think the power of empirical evidence is enough to get their chosen reform enacted. I've talked to a lot of education reporters who don't understand me when I tell them things like the battle over charter schools is not about charter schools, but about collective bargaining and union membership.
I don't have any answers, but Russo is correct to state that understanding the interactions between these two separate, distinct, and often totally unrelated worlds is an absolute requirement to assess the status of public education and the future of reform.
