Today was just another ridiculous example of the many, many possible examples, of the long reaching, ridiculously powerful, yet inept arm of the Teacher's Unions. Every Thursday, we have early out days at school. As a kid, early out days were a God-send, since it meant that we had a few hours less of school and we could spend more time out being kids. I never once thought about what the teachers were doing on early out days. Now I know all to well.
Normally our school lets out at 4, but on early out day we're done at 1 (Strangely enough, despite the severely shortened class periods, these are often my most effective days). Then, from 1-4 we're supposed to have Professional Development meetings (PD). Every other week we have a school level PD, and on the off weeks we have district level PD's. Now, the PD's in and of themselves are a completely different topic for me to write about, so I won't go in to length about how fabulously productive they are (imagine those last four words laced heavily with sarcasm), but district ones like today really get me going.
Last year our district spent some ~$4 million on a program called AEMP, which stands for Academic English Mastery Program. This program was actually very interesting to me, for about the first 3-4 meetings that I attended. But then after going to these first few meetings without actually producing anything or taking anything away that I could use in my classroom, it dawned on me that it was a colossal waste of time. However, I was still required to attend every month. So I just started taking my laptop and lesson planning for the entire meeting. Time, un-wasted. And then the year ended and I figured I was done with AEMP.
Wrong. AEMP has made its way back onto the district payroll somehow, and today I had a big fat, three and a half hour chunk of my day wasted, literally hearing almost word-for-word the exact same presentation that I heard last year. Now with the stage set, let's get back to the Union. You might be asking yourself at this point "Jonathan, what in the world does this all have to do with the Union?"
Let's take a step back, and look at the entire situation. At the end of the last academic school year, SFUSD had to make around $114 million in budget cuts over the next two years. But somehow they found the money to re-fund AEMP, and I'm willing to bet that a portion of that money came from a proposition that was pushed through in San Francisco, called Proposition A.
Proposition A was a land parcel tax in the amount of $198 per taxable land property in San Francisco that was dedicated towards the school district to be used to develop higher skilled staff by means of district mandates, initiatives, professional developments, and aimed at attracting higher quality teachers by raising salaries, providing incentives to teach at designated "hard-to-staff" schools as well as "hard-to-staff" subjects. Now, I can't really complain about this particular tax, because I am a direct beneficiary, teaching both a difficult subject at a nearly impossible school. But that's beside the point, which is, that thanks to this wonderful tax getting pushed through, I was able to waste a good 3.5 hours of my life at a PD that I HAVE ALREADY HAD TO SIT THROUGH ONCE BEFORE! And the tax was able to get pushed through in large part because of the lobbying that took place by.... you guessed it - the Union! So if I go far enough back, I can place a large part of my misery today squarely on the shoulders of the Union.
So far as I can tell, the slight increase on my monthly paycheck is really the best, latest thing that I have to thank the Union for. But, oh, wait a second - what's that? That increase is going back to fund the Union via the MANDATED monthly dues? Hmmmmmm.... does anyone see anything fishy about this situation? The Union pushes through extra funding for teachers.... but then they know that teachers are mandated by the district to join the Union and pay not only a fixed monthly fee, but an additional 1.5% on any BONUS they may receive! Like... PROPOSITION A FUNDING! So essentially, by the Union backing Proposition A, and pushing it through to the voters - they essentially guaranteed a cool half a million in Union dues, annually, for as long as Proposition A remains in effect. Well crafted!
BTW - I now know that the Union dues are mandatory, on good authority. Here's a screen shot of an email I sent off to the district office last week:
So, here's a thought. If Union dues are mandatory, and I can't get out of it, what's to stop the Union from saying "Well, $XXX per month is no longer sufficient to run our organization, let's make it $XXXXXXX per month (given that X is a variable that you can fill in with the digit of your choice)." Now, I am sure there are some legal issues involved here, but the point I want to make is - their members CAN'T LEAVE! Even if they want to, they can't! I mean, if you are unhappy with your cellular service because they raise their fees, you leave! If you can't pay the new rent amount of your apartment, you leave! If your job starts paying you too much and all of a sudden you're in a new, higher tax bracket, you find ways to adjust your income and cheat the government into thinking you've made less due to tax write-offs and charitable donations to drop down to your previous tax bracket. But no, not the Union. You don't wanna pay the dues, well, I guess you get out of teaching. But shouldn't you just be able to leave the Union? They say two things are certain in life - death and taxes. Beyond that, there's one thing certain in death, and that's that even in death, the Union will still be taking your dues. Maybe not, I made that last part up, but to be totally honest, it wouldn't surprise me if there's some pension withdrawal fee that gets paid to the Union.
After having read my strongly worded arguments, I'm sure you're trying to puzzle out how the Unions even still exist, in spite of all the wrongs that I've enumerated. Don't get me wrong - I truly feel that Unions played an integral role in bringing the public education system up to the level that it is today, and helped to level the playing field for teachers across the board as far as discriminatory policies go. And before you go off scoffing about the "level that it is today", even though the United States ranks ~25th in the world for public education , maybe we'd be even further down on that list without the Unions. A quick look on the Wikipedia page of the NEA (National Education Association - the nations largest professional organization) shows a fairly impressive list of accomplishments. However, their most recent, notable accomplishment really took place in 1984. The last two on that list, notice the wording. 2000's - "lobbied for changes". So in other words, nothing has yet been accomplished, but they've been working on it. But I doubt there's an educator in America who would disagree that serious changes should be made to NCLB (That's what we in the industry called it. Or so says Wikipedia). And the last one doesn't make a lot of sense if you expand the acronym of NEA to say "National Education Association". I'm not really certain what they mean in that last sentence, but I'm fairly certain that advocating equal treatment to same-sex couples is all the rage right now across the nation. But it's good to see that the NEA has decided to jump on that train.
I would think that for having an operating budget in excess of $307 million, they'd have a bit bigger list of accomplishments. Especially in the mysteriously quiet 25 years from 1984 to 2009....
To me, the evidence suggests that the age of the Teacher's Unions is over. I will wholeheartedly agree that they had their time and place, but in the current age - change needs to happen. WfS (Waiting for Superman, for those who didn't read my last post) places a lot of blame on the current state of education with the Unions, and while I don't think they're the only culprits, I do believe that the Unions need some enormous restructuring and to be cut down a few notches in power. The Unions will bring their rebuttal with the fact that the #1 public education system in the world (Finland, of all places!) have their teachers Unionized. Ok. So what? Obviously their Unions aren't standing in the way of progress the way that I really feel ours are in the current state. But that's just my opinion. Thoughts anyone?
1 comment:
I'd argue that your useless PD was less a product of the union and more a product of a lack of accountability for district spending (you could also point to high teacher turnover rates yielding redundant PDs for veteran teachers because the districts can justifiably spend money on already implemented programs simply because they can state they are doing it to support X% of teachers who have not yet had that training). I think it's also important to note that we never see any assessment of district/administrative support and effectiveness, despite the push for increased assessment of teacher effectiveness.
I'd also argue that unions are more of a scapegoat in education reform than anything else because people need a face to blame decidedly complex and nuanced systemic failures on. The mere presence of a union does not co-opt quality education (as demonstrated by your Finland anecdote), but it says something about the current educational climate in our nation that teachers' unions and district administrations are seen as enemies instead of allies in education, and it would seem that any attempts to make education more business-like or capitalistic are only going to make that rift even larger.
The options then appear to be to break the unions and turn education into a business and then find out fifteen years down the road that that's a fundamentally inequitable way to approach a fundamental right in this country, or to continue with our current stagnation of powers that's allowing inefficiencies at every level to persist to the detriment of our students.
I wish I had the answer, but instead, the only thing I know, is that the answer isn't as easy as pointing the finger at one entity and blaming them. Education is huge and diverse and multifaceted and complex to the point where we can't consider only a single vector of reform and we can't consider a single /level/ of reform. If we want to fix a broken system, we've got to look at /everything/ that's wrong, and the arguments I keep reading that crap on unions might have some merit of truth to them (I'm not convinced many of them do yet, as they usually fail to address any of the benefits of unions) but I think they need to take a more all-encompassing look beyond an easy answer. We need scrutiny and accountability /everywhere/ in education, and we're not getting it, which is why many of the problems in education have not been fixed despite decades of attempts.
On a complete different note, the visual captcha for this comment was broken, so I used the audio one, and it sounded like an unsettling numbers station broadcast. They include random background noise and voices (presumably to make it more difficult to parse digitally) that makes the entire thing very eerie -- especially at 1 AM.
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