The Differentiation Dilemma
Over at Eduwonk, Andy Rotherham does us all a service by uncovering a May 20 memo from National Education Association Executive Director John Wilson to state affiliate officers that slams Teach for America recruits. Andy calls the memo “startling in its tendentiousness.” After debunking Wilson’s claims, he comes to the conclusion that “this little crusade is ideological, not substantive.”
Stephen Sawchuk of Teacher Beat picked up the ball and further debunks Wilson’s claims, then asks why NEA is so down on TFA.
The memo certainly is tendentious, but if Andy is actually startled by it, and if Stephen is actually unaware of NEA’s motives, then I haven’t been doing my job.
NEA is a labor union. Its power and influence derive entirely from its being a single organization purporting to speak with one voice for all of its members and, by extension, all of America’s teachers and, by extension, the entire American public education system. NEA chose its own monolithic image, and its opponents also see it as monolithic.
But NEA isn’t monolithic. No organization made up of more than 3 million individuals could possibly be. Not all of its members are teachers. They come from different social, religious, political and economic backgrounds. They are of different ages. They teach different subjects in different geographic areas and they have different needs and desires.
The union can only function as it does if those differences are subsumed. Ideally, the members accept that the organizational model provides the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people. Each exception or accommodation for individuals or small factions weakens the model a little bit.
Of course there are educational arguments to be made against any proposed reform you can name: merit pay, charters, tenure, alternative certification, et al. But it isn’t the educational arguments that really matter to the union; it’s that each reform requires the system to differentiate among the union’s members.
If you think I’m overstating this, watch an individual teacher ask for a pay raise and see who balks first – the superintendent or the local union president.
Merit pay (and tenure reform) means some teachers receive something that others do not, and the distinction is not made by the mathematically indisputable – years served and graduate credits received. Recruitment bonuses for math and science teachers leave out English and social studies teachers. Charters operate under different rules from traditional public schools, and the rules aren’t even the same from one charter to the next. TFA teachers don’t have the same certification process as traditional teacher recruits.
Most education observers don’t realize how much of a restraining factor this is. An excellent example is the California class size reduction program. The state provided billions in funding to reduce K-3 class sizes to a maximum of 20 students. It was the union’s dream come true – reduced workload for K-3 teachers, plus the requirement to hire tens of thousands of new teachers, virtually all of whom became union members.
Except it wasn’t all rosy. Competition for those K-3 slots became fierce. Teachers who never taught primary grades in their entire careers took those positions. Teachers who remained in intermediate grades complained loudly that they still had to operate with the same prep time despite having 60 percent more students than their K-3 colleagues.
Another example is NEA’s policy to support bonuses for nationally certified teachers. Yet there is substantial internal opposition to the policy, mainly because the money will never spread to most members. So even when the union gets what it wants, it must assuage the minority who didn’t get what it wanted.
NEA’s state and local affiliates have enough freedom to go their own way, but even if they were so inclined, they are under pressure to consider everyone else. The reasoning is: If Denver agrees to performance pay, there is nothing to stop other Colorado districts, or even other states, from pushing for it with their less willing unions. If an NEA state affiliate embraces the TFA system, it undermines opposition elsewhere. Better just to oppose it or ignore it.
Andy stumbles across the correct arithmetic without realizing it when he says of TFA, “…the 4,100 teachers they are preparing for this fall is a trivial number in relation to the overall teacher workforce…” Exactly. The 4,100 teachers are such a trivial number that there is no reason for the union to make a special distinction for them. The fortress NEA constructed to protect teachers only works if teachers remain inside the walls.
I make no judgment as to the relative merits of TFA recruits. But in the unlikely event that every study concluded that TFA recruits were educationally superior to their counterparts, NEA’s response would not be to bow to the inevitable. Its organizational imperative would be to oppose the program on whatever grounds it could generate.
Friday, May 29th, 2009
