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1) Curtain Falls on NEA's Kumbaya
Chorus. You've seen the headlines:
"Teachers'
union criticizes Obama on schools stance" (Associated Press)
"NEA
Attacks Administration's Education Reform Plan" (Washington Post)
"NEA
Knocks Administration on 'Race to the Top'" (Education Week)
They are referring to the
comments NEA submitted to the U.S. Department of Education regarding the
Race to the Top fund eligibility criteria. NEA has finally noticed that the
Obama administration's proposed education reforms are in direct conflict
with the union's agenda.
At
Flypaper, Jamie Davies O'Leary calls this the "least
surprising news
ever" (emphasis in
original) and who can argue? But stating it so flatly underplays the
unceasing cloud of swamp gas that emanated from NEA headquarters ever since
candidate Obama first mentioned performance pay in front of union delegates
in 2007.
Obama had more than two years of
opportunities to
pull a John Kerry and back off from his statements. I, for one, expected
him to. But he hasn't, and he continues to repeat exactly what reforms he
has in mind. NEA, for its part, emphasized how the union and Obama were
essentially in agreement and how such differences were inevitable and
unimportant.
The day before the 2008 election,
I wrote: "As we have seen with Gray Davis and various other Democratic
governors across the country, NEA and AFT may not react well when the time
comes for Obama to say 'no,' when they see his primary job as saying 'yes.'"
I kept beating that drum this year.
March 11: "I think President
Obama's notion of performance pay falls well short of replacing the
traditional salary schedule. But after hearing him speak on the issue
several times, I am persuaded he does actually mean performance
pay, and he is in fact at odds with NEA on the matter. Despite the union's
public statements that they're all on the same page ('He means national
certification. No, really!'), either the President or the NEA will be forced
to blink on this one."
March 16: "Now we have President
Obama, and in his first major education policy speech last week, he once
again mentioned performance pay, plus supported lifting charter school caps,
decried America's 'educational decline,' demanded accountability, and called
for getting 'bad teachers out of the classroom.' NEA issued talking points
on the speech the same day, and they emphasize that 'President Obama's plan
calls for proposals we've been advocating for quite some time.' This will
come as news to former President Bush."
March 23: "Subject matter
differential pay has the potential of causing more divisiveness between NEA
and the Obama administration than does performance pay. A lot of school
districts may talk about performance pay, but most will be happy to continue
without the bother of creating a new system. Districts everywhere would like
the freedom to pay more to hire teachers in shortage areas, which would
require very little change."
July 2: "It's hard not to root for
Obama and Duncan, who continue to pitch the 'let's collaborate and come up
with something that works' message. The problem, it hardly needs repeating,
is that we don't all agree about 'what works.' And some people don't care if
it works or not, as long as the checks keep coming.... The real test will
come when there aren't enough carrots and
NEA files suit against the sticks. Being Democrats buys Obama and Duncan
time and the benefit of the doubt. It doesn't buy them invulnerability."
That's an awful lot of restating the
obvious, but NEA's only response was
to claim the press was distorting the issue. At the very least, the
union owes Education Week's Stephen Sawchuk an apology for hammering
him after
he wrote about NEA's spin this way:
"I can't speak for anyone else in the
field, but here's my take: Right now there are few specific policy proposals
on the table from this administration, and we're pretty much getting a
love-fest between Obama and the NEA as a result. But what happens when the
administration starts putting out stuff the union doesn't like? What happens
when the Teacher Incentive Fund application gets released? What happens when
the ED puts out a plan for renewing the NCLB Act?"
Evidently the press isn’t supposed to
report on differences between NEA and Obama until the union says it's OK.
Now that the palpable rifts have been
acknowledged, perhaps we'll see more analysis of where NEA and Obama part
company and why. I'll limit myself to one particularly pungent paragraph in
NEA's Race to the Top comments:
"Achievement is much more than a test
score, but if test scores are still the primary means of assessing student
learning, they will continue to get undue weight. This is especially
problematic because the tests widely in use in the United States, since NCLB
narrowed the kinds of tests in use, typically focus on lower level skills of
recall and recognition measured with multiple-choice items that do not
adequately represent higher order thinking skills and performance. These are
unlike the assessments that are used in high-achieving nations that feature
essays, problem solutions, and open-ended items and more extensive tasks
completed in classrooms as part of the assessment system. The rules proposed
here are likely to lock in these kinds of measures of lower level skills
rather than opening up the possibilities for more productive forms of
assessment. Furthermore, achievement must also take into account
accomplishments that matter in the world outside of school, such as: Are you
prepared for college or trade school? Can you form an opinion about
something you read and justify your opinion? Are you creative? Are you
inventive? Can you come up with a variety of solutions when you're faced
with a problem?"
Based on what evidence does NEA believe
students perform better on measures of "higher order thinking skills" than
on the much-disparaged "recall and recognition?" I find it more likely that
"essays, problem solutions, and open-ended items" will give us
indications of poorer performance than multiple-choice tests do.
Were standardized tests ever done away
with as a measure of student and/or school performance, I suspect it
wouldn't be long before NEA was clamoring for their return.
2) NEA Affiliates in Ohio and South Carolina Have Staff Contract
Problems. September 1 marks the first day of the 2009-10 fiscal year for
most NEA affiliates, which also means collective bargaining agreements
between some state affiliates and their own employees come to an end. It's a
rare year when NEA doesn't have staff contract problems somewhere.
This is not a rare year.
Executives of the South Carolina
Education Association declared an impasse in negotiations with its staff
union, though they have
shown some willingness to remain flexible.
Meanwhile, the
Professional Staff Union of the Ohio Education Association is prepared to
strike on September 1 if a new contract is not reached. The union struck
in 1997, and went right to the deadline before reaching agreement in 2006.
For those of you new to EIA, it will pay
to dig into the report I wrote in 2004 about
collective bargaining between NEA affiliates and their employees.
3) Contract Hits.
Wherein we highlight a contract provision from the current agreement between
the National Education Association and its largest staff union. This is
Article 24, Section 4, subsection (a):
"An employee's personnel file shall
contain only the following documents:
(i) application/resume;
(ii) personnel action and job
performance information;
(iii) benefits forms;
(iv) test scores;
(v) position description(s);
(vi) confidential pre-hire references;
and
(vii) other information as may be agreed
to by the employee and NEA or the Union and NEA."
(emphasis added)
4) Last Week's Intercepts.
EIA's blog,
Intercepts, covered these topics from August 17-24:
*
Counterpunch on NEA and Obama.
So much for collaboration.
*
Florida Union Embraces Evaluating Schools Solely on Test Scores. One
small catch.
*
Heads I Win, Tails I Win. Works for me.
*
Friday Farrago. A mélange of newsy goodness.
*
Jinxed! It's been a rough week for computers at EIA.
5) Quotes of the Week.
"What a difference a year makes." – National Education Association President
Dennis Van Roekel, introducing U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to
union delegates in San Diego on July 2, 2009.
* "We
find this top-down approach disturbing; we have been down that road before
with the failures of No Child Left Behind, and we cannot support yet another
layer of federal mandates that have little or no research base of success
and that usurp state and local government's responsibilities for public
education." - from NEA's Race to the Top Comments, August 21, 2009. |
