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1) California's Real Retention Problem. Put on
the helmets and faceguards and set up the spit shield, folks. I'm about to
launch an epic rant.
The culprit is
A Possible Dream: Retaining California Teachers So All Students Learn,
the 132-page report on teacher retention by Ken Futernick, the director of
K-12 Studies at California State University's Center for Teacher Quality.
Dr. Futernick's study, and the breathless newspaper stories it produced,
demonstrates once again that Californians are incapable of retaining what
they just read, what they read yesterday, and what was claimed last week.
Long-time EIA readers will recall I have addressed the
shortfalls of teacher retention research and reporting in the past (Item
#2 here,
Item #2 here,
Item #1 here, and
Item #1 here). The Futernick report repeats previous errors and adds new
ones. Other inadequacies fall at the feet of the press and the headline
writers.
The
usefulness of education research has been questioned in the press
recently, but we have to question the quality of the press when research is
delivered. Here are some headlines for you:
California faces massive shortage as one in five teachers quit
Teachers leaving profession in droves
Teachers dropping out too
And then, of course, comes the second wave – the
editorial boards start citing the story,
like this one.
It wouldn't surprise me if the California Teachers
Association had two press releases ready for this report – one to denounce
it and one to praise it – depending on how it was spun. After all, the
subhead was "22% of California teachers leave after their first four years
in the classroom."
Twenty-two percent in four years? What happened to
"half of all new teachers leave in the first five years?" But no one
published a headline that read, "Number of teachers leaving profession is
half of previous claim." Since
no one checked this, or
this, or
this, no comparison was made. Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth,
CTA President Barbara Kerr released a statement saying the study "confirms
much of what CTA has been saying for a long time."
To his credit, Futernick focuses on those he terms
"dissatisfied leavers," or those teachers who leave because the pay and
working conditions are bad.
If teachers retire, move out of state, decide to have
children, or make any one of a dozen other personal decisions related to
work and career, there isn't much a school district can do about it. "If it
were the case that 90% of the leavers cited retirement or other personal
reasons for leaving, then little could be done to reduce teacher turnover
rates," Futernick admits, although he never explains why 90% is acceptable
and 47% is not. Indeed, no researcher who has addressed teacher retention
rates bothers to justify, or even state, exactly what the proper retention
rate should be. Should all teachers be retained? No, of course not, you'd
say, but we need to retain teachers to fight this crippling California
teacher shortage. If Futernick is correct, we have lost 22 percent of our
teachers in the last four years, and with growing enrollment we will never
maintain an adequate supply of new teachers to replace them. Well, let's
look at that.
According to NEA figures, four years ago California had
6,141,363 students and 294,818 teachers. Four years later, it had 6,423,824
students and 321,237 teachers. So while the student population increased 4.4
percent, the teacher workforce increased 8.2 percent. If there's a teacher
shortage, it's probably because we've already hired everybody, regardless of
need.
As for future enrollment, it's amazing how quickly
we've all forgotten the
falling enrollment stories we have been reading. Or how you can even
find a
California teacher union official writing a sentence like, "We are
building and opening new schools at the same time we are experiencing
chronic declining enrollment."
Even though the numbers are better than what we've been
previously fed, there is still reason to believe they are inflated. Exhibit
1 on page 16 is the graph that shows 53 percent of leavers cited
dissatisfaction with compensation or the conditions where they were teaching
as a reason for leaving. But the graph is filled with qualifying language.
The 53 percent is reached by combining the teachers who said that factor
affected their decision "a lot" and those who said "somewhat" (the other 47
percent said "not at all"). Nowhere in the report or the appendices do we
learn how many said "a lot" and how many said "somewhat."
The title of the graph notes the percentages include
those who have left "or plan to leave" the profession, with a parenthetical
"or current school." Using Richard Ingersoll's distinctions, the latter
group is defined as "movers," not leavers. And who knows how to quantify
those who "plan to leave?" State officials and district administrators are
often baffled when they discover those who "planned to retire" end up
remaining on the job.
My bottom line is this: Even if we accept Futernick's
numbers at face value, it means that each year California retains 94.5
percent of teachers (which, according to Futernick is a higher retention
rate, yes, higher, than the national average). Of the ones who leave,
almost half were perfectly happy with their pay and working conditions. That
leaves an annual 2.8 percent who are "dissatisfied leavers." Find me another
California enterprise that can boast such a low percentage, then we'll
discuss the teacher retention "crisis."
2) Covering Teachers Unions: Close But Not a Full
Cigar. A much better report for your education reading pleasure was
released by the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media. Titled
From Contracts to Classrooms: Covering Teachers Unions, the 40-page
study is a primer for education journalists on the ins and outs of reporting
about teachers' unions. Well, not exactly, but we'll get to that in a
minute.
Largely written by Joe Williams of
The Chalkboard, with enlightening contributions from others in the
field, the report is filled with excellent tips, quotes, anecdotes and
shortcuts – just the right kind of approach to interest a new journalist a
bit overwhelmed by the prospect of digging through collective bargaining
agreements and contract negotiations. But there are tidbits for the rest of
us, too:
* "When new reporters take over the education beat at
newspapers, it is often the union leaders or their representatives who are
first to reach out, inviting them to lunch and offering the lowdown."
* "Press leaks, almost always from the union, usually
mean things have gone sour around the [bargaining] table."
* The 1959 quote from AFL-CIO President George Meany -
"It is impossible to bargain collectively with government."
By far the best sections are those by reporters
offering up their personal experiences in covering teachers' union issues.
Particularly good is a piece by Scott Reeder (see
Item #7 here), whose series on teacher tenure in Illinois sparked heated
union response, which he then coolly debunked in a subsequent story. Another
eye-opener was the submission of former Philadelphia Inquirer
education reporter Dale Mezzacappa, who states bluntly that teacher
collective bargaining, "which was to address injustices, instead added to
them."
There are advice-filled sections on local politics,
collective bargaining, teacher pay, pensions, seniority, charter schools,
work rules, grievances, contract language, and tenure. In fact, there is so
much useful information it seems a bit petty to mention that for a report
subheaded "Covering Teachers Unions," it contains virtually nothing about,
well, covering teachers' unions.
Covering teachers' unions requires more than knowledge
of the issues that interest them most. Teachers' unions are businesses, with
mission statements, governance structures, affiliates, staffs, budgets, and
public relations departments. They have organizational imperatives and
interpersonal conflicts. What goes on inside a teachers' union has at least
as much impact as what goes on inside a school board. Every education
reporter has been to multiple school board meetings. How many have attended
even a single teachers' union meeting?
The Hechinger report does advise reporters to read or
subscribe to union newsletters, and that's good advice, but reading them
requires a mindset worthy of a Kremlinologist. For example,
here's a story released by the Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC)
about a speech given by Executive Director Dan Burkhalter to the union's
representative assembly.
At first glance, there is nothing remarkable about it.
It's full of the same corporate buzzwords you might read in a similar speech
by a local business. But read a few thousand union speeches and newsletters
and you will find the unusual in Burkhalter's words – the need for the union
to work together, mention of "turning against ourselves," having a
management team rather than "a group of department heads," needing to
"redefine the relationships between WEAC and the UniServs as partners," the
"need to be better at building coalitions."
These are all oblique references to the fact that
Burkhalter has been taking major heat from local affiliates and state staff
over
his unexplained ousting of two senior managers in January. Even if you
didn't know this, Burkhalter's speech alone hints at some kind of internal
division that needs to be addressed, and when covering teachers' unions,
hints are all you will get officially. No union in the country sends out a
press release
when one of its locals sues it.
Why does this internal stuff matter? Who cares if a
WEAC bigwig forces out some employees? Because internal politics often
drives external activities. Burkhalter's speech promises to "aggressively
engage opinion-makers in the media." So when Wisconsin's reporters and
columnists suddenly start getting calls from WEAC, they don't have to wonder
what caused the sudden spurt of interest.
The Hechinger report will lead to much better reporting
of education labor issues, but it spares teachers' unions themselves the
kind of scrutiny they deserve.
3) The New Charter School Math. The Chester
Upland School Board in Pennsylvania wants to cap charter school enrollment
because "charters are draining money from the regular school system." This
is not an unusual claim, but it's an unusual story because the statistics
that disprove the claim
are in the story itself.
At a recent public meeting, board Chairman C. Marc
Woolley revealed that charters are costing the district $25 million out of
an $84.6 million budget. Any program that eats up 29.6 percent of your
budget has to be a concern. Except, of course, when that program is
educating 38 percent of the students in the district. Charters are, in fact,
a bargain.
Charters don't drain money from traditional schools.
They drain students. The difference is that the school district
continues to receive a percentage of funding for students they no longer
have the responsibility to teach.
4) Short Bites. Story updates and other quick
items of interest:
* Members of the
Southwest Allen County Schools Teachers Association
voted to remain affiliated with NEA and the Indiana State Teachers
Association. Vote totals were not released (see
background here).
* The Ohio Education Association proposal to open
membership to school employees of private entities (see
Item #5 here) was not only defeated, but crushed, by a delegate vote of
1027 to 164.
* An alert EIA reader (thanks, Ben) directed me to
Maplight.org, which has a unique way of measuring political clout in
California. Besides details of contributions to candidates, the site also
computes a special interest group "pass rate" and a "kill rate" for
legislation. The
teachers' union page, at least for the 2003-04 session, tends to support
the notion that unions are average on offense and
formidable on defense.
The teachers' union supported 163 bills in that
session, but only 75 became law – a 46% pass rate. But their kill rate was
perfect. They opposed 44 bills. None became law.
5) Arbitration to Delay Armageddon. The St.
John Parish School Board in Louisiana instituted new technology to better
track employee attendance. The biometric system scans thumbprints as
employees report for work.
According to the
L'Observateur, "two personal grievances were brought to the board by
Herman Clayton and Sandra McCrae based on religious beliefs that the
scanning of the swirls and whirls of a thumbprint are 'God's number' for you
and that to participate in this action is to bring the end times into
being."
The two employees refuse to use the scanner and have
not returned to work for the last six weeks. The newspaper adds that Ms.
McCrae believes that to put her thumbprint into the scanner "will allow the
devil access to her unique number given to her by God."
The local union has also protested the scanner because
it was a change of working conditions not bargained with the union. The
issue will go to arbitration.
6) Last Week's Intercepts.
EIA's blog,
Intercepts, covered these topics from April 23-30:
* Melting
Brains Across the Pond. Time to put on your tin-foil hats.
* NYC
Rubber Rooms Could Be a Gold Mine. Public school teacher reality show.
* Strike
Shuts Down Vancouver Teachers Union HQ. How unions respond to employee
problems.
7) Quote of the Week #1.
"All teachers are
underpaid." – National Education Association President Reg Weaver. (April 26
NEA press release)
Quote of the Week #2.
"Teachers shouldn't be
forced to join a group they might philosophically disagree with." – remark
attributed to Columbia Public Schools board member Michelle Gadbois.
Columbia teachers are currently represented by an affiliate of the non-union
Missouri State Teachers Association. Gadbois, a former NEA member, supports
dual representation in the district. (April 26
Columbia Tribune)
Quote of the Week #3.
"In the old Soviet system,
unions were no more than an extension of top-down, one-party Communist
control. Teachers paid dues because they were compelled to do so and had no
control over their leaders or how their dues money was spent." – Texas
Federation of Teachers Secretary-Treasurer John O'Sullivan. (April 2007
Texas Teacher)
Quote of the Week #4.
"Too often, union leaders
like to have unquestioning, uninformed members who don't raise too many
questions about what they're doing." – Deborah Lynch, candidate for
president of the Chicago Teachers Union. (April 26
YouTube video interview)
Quote of
the Week #5.
"What happened
on the plantation when the slaves had enough?" – Baltimore Teachers Union
President Marietta English, unhappy with the district's contract proposal. I
realize Ms. English's overheated question is meant to be rhetorical, but it
doesn't even make sense in that context. What "happened on the plantation
when the slaves had enough" was either nothing at all, or a violent revolt,
violently put down. (April 25
Baltimore Sun) |
