President's Perspective
Fixing NCLB — the right way
Oct 4, 2007 12:28 PM
Randi Weingarten, President, United Federation of Teachers
As we went to press, the AFT had just endorsed Hillary Rodham Clinton as its candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. We have known Hillary for a long time, first as first lady and then as our junior senator. Although the timing of the endorsement may surprise some, we considered it now because of the number of primaries that are so early. The AFT has been engaged in a seven-month process [see story on page 5]. Indeed, back in April 2007, our state union had asked our national union to give her this consideration and in August 2007 the AFL-CIO released its constituent unions to make their own decisions. The endorsement and the reasons why merit a column unto themselves. But suffice it to say for right now it is a proud moment for New York’s AFTers. — Randi
This month will mark the 50th anniversary of the Sputnik launch. It was a wake-up call that sparked a renewed interest in American education, particularly in math and science. After all, how could our Cold War enemy, the USSR, achieve space flight before we did? The race to compete with Russia opened the possibility of routine interplanetary travel, even vacation homes on the moon.
It didn’t turn out quite that way, and commuting into space remains a distant dream. That same disappointing fate awaited the educational reforms that followed.
Shortly thereafter, the civil rights movement and the Great Society anti-poverty drive accelerated the move to tie federal education funding to important national educational goals. Those ties of policy to money are now a permanent part of the school finance landscape. Since then, “crises” in education have appeared regularly, and each one is confronted by another “Education President,” who promises that the nation will meet optimistic and idealistic achievement goals by some date conveniently beyond the expiration of his presidential term. (This time under NCLB, all children must reach proficiency by 2014.)
And that brings us to the current wrangling between President Bush and Congress over the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind. It’s a critical debate because the strategies endorsed in any NCLB reauthorization will set the education agenda in every school district across the nation, just as NCLB’s first iteration has transformed classrooms for the last five years — for both better and worse, but in my judgment mostly worse.
The NCLB of 2002 promised high standards for all kids (including those often neglected, like English language learners, special ed students, poor kids and racial minorities); and the resources for schools to get there.
We shared (and still do) the twin goals of higher academic standards for all kids and accountability for schools, but we have been sorely disappointed. The reality has too often become schools that teach to the standardized test instead of teaching students how to think. It does more to label and stigmatize struggling schools than to help them improve, and it has created more paperwork and bureaucracy than real accountability.
And the promise of a lot more federal money to realize the law’s goals never materialized.
The two national unions — the AFT and the NEA — supported NCLB when it was first enacted. We did so as a way to respond to critics and to the privatizers and voucher advocates. We believed that public schools could be accountable and we could meet measurable success goals with the right resources. We knew we wanted and needed to help all children learn and be prepared for life. Back in 2000, we were beating back the Bush administration’s demands for vouchers, merit pay (based on principal whim), forced teacher transfers, elimination of paras, wholesale school closings and the denuding of collective bargaining.
Now that the law is up for reauthorization, we have a chance to fix its flaws and correct the problems that have emerged, like:
At the same time, we have to combat some of the old ideas that are rearing their heads again, along with some new threats to collective bargaining.
You can find out more about all these issues and the campaign to fix NCLB at the AFT’s special Web site, www.aft.org/
fixnclb. For this column, let me focus on just one of those problems: the mandate that districts must have an individual performance pay plan that conditions part of an individual teacher’s salary on her class’ standardized test scores.
Shaping most of the discussion on NCLB right now is a draft reauthorization bill put forth by Reps. George Miller and Howard “Buck” McKeon, both of California. Their bill would interject the federal government into local collective bargaining. It would require as a condition of getting federal funds that “performance pay” based on individual classes’ test scores is a part of teacher pay regardless of what is otherwise bargained by the local union and the school district. In reality, if any union refused to go along, parents and the district would blame it for the loss of millions of federal dollars. It is profoundly disappointing that Miller, the Democratic chair of the House Education and Labor Committee and a long-time and well-regarded friend of working people, would advocate this approach.
This proposal to mandate individual test-score-based performance pay has gained broad support from both sides of the aisle, despite a full-court press against it from the AFT and the NEA. And Miller has put the reauthorization bill on a fast track and is trying to get the House to pass it soon.
What’s so wrong about this approach, aside from the implications of the federal government to bypassing or overriding collective bargaining, is that individual merit pay is educationally unsound and harmful to students and staff alike.
While NCLB needs to be fixed, this bill would make it worse.
As a union of educators, we have never shied away from our responsibilities to educate children. We have always championed reforms that create great schools and believe that the best schools are the ones where people work together as a team — developing models and sharing successful strategies. Individual merit pay does not foster or reward that collaboration. In fact, as we’ve seen in other districts, it sets up competition and secretiveness among teachers, often encouraged by administrators.
It’s extremely difficult to identify precisely what one teacher contributes to a student’s performance and to separate his or her contribution from those of other teachers, the school, the principal and the family. Add to that the fact that students are often deliberately assigned to specific teachers. And how would you measure those teachers who are not in grades or subjects that are tested?
More important, speaking about tests, when did they — by themselves — become such reliable instruments to measure learning and growth each year? Even Mayor Bloomberg has commented that one year the tests may be easier, the next year they may be hard.
That’s why for these and so many other reasons, we are urging all our members to send faxes to their congressional representatives to defeat this proposal. Go to www.uft.org and click the link in the Action Alert box.
When the issue of individual merit pay has come up before, we have shifted the discussion to a schoolwide approach. In schoolwide “bonus” plans, every staffer shares in the award — based on the progress or performance gains of the school as a whole. That’s what two Brooklyn districts tried in the late ’90s and it is what we agreed to explore and pilot in the 2005 contract. Schoolwide bonus programs have many advantages over individually based plans:
If administered fairly and transparently, and if developed with educators and voluntarily chosen by educators, a pay plan that rewards schoolwide improvement can work.
Unfortunately, right now, the teacher’s perspective on NCLB, and on what works and what does not, is not what Washington is heeding.
