You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Union Wind Blows

-By Larry Sand

Twenty years of schooling in Los Angeles and you’re lucky if you can get any job, let alone one on the dayshift.

Bob Dylan penned the words in the headline (sans the union part) almost a half century ago but having been quoted by many, they live on. The latest example of the lyrics’ relevance can be applied to a new 58 page report commissioned by United Way and several civil rights’ groups, produced by the National Council on Teacher Quality and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation…and the reactions of a teachers union boss.

Teacher Quality Roadmap: Improving Policies and Practices in LAUSD was published last week, and there were no major surprises in it. Education reformers have been aggressively campaigning for similar changes for many years, and various recommendations from this report are already in force in other states. (While dealing specifically with Los Angeles, its findings could be readily applied to the rest of California. Local school districts do have some power, but education policy decisions are typically made at the state level.)

Among other things, the report, which included interviews with over 1,500 teachers and principals, recommended changes to the current union contract and to state laws regulating staffing, evaluations, tenure, compensation and work schedules. Some of the prescriptions include using criteria other than seniority if layoffs are necessary and utilizing standardized test scores as part of a teacher’s evaluation and when making staffing decisions. Additionally, it was suggested that teachers be denied permanent status until they have been in the classroom for four years instead of the current two.

The report also suggested giving principals considerably more power, stating they should be able to hire any teacher of their choosing, and at the same time make it easier for them to get rid of incompetents. As things stand now, perverse incentives may lead principals to overlook the failings of poorly performing teachers which, over time, make it difficult to get rid of them: “The online evaluation system includes a pop-up warning telling principals who have selected ‘needs improvement’ for 3 or more of the 27 indicators to contact Staff Relations and present documentation to reinforce the ratings.”
The report was particularly tough on seniority, claiming that California is one of only 12 states that mandates layoffs be conducted in order of reverse seniority. In other words, under the existing system, layoffs are made by last hired, first let go, regardless of the quality of the teacher.
Since many of the recommendations are in place elsewhere, why not California?

Other states either have weaker state teachers unions than the California Teachers Association, or they have governors and state legislators who refuse to cave to unreasonable union demands. Conversely, we have the most powerful state teachers’ union in the country, as well as a governor and legislature that for the most part regularly kowtow to the organization that helped put them into office.

While CTA has not formally responded to the report yet, United Teachers of Los Angeles President A.J. Duffy did, and his wind blew in a very predictable direction. Here are just a few of his reactions with my comments following in parenthesis:

  • He criticized the study, calling it misguided and performed by non-educators. (What he means is that the union wasn’t consulted and therefore the study is bogus.)
  • He sniffed, “Many must-place teachers are fine teachers,” (These are teachers that no principal wants but nevertheless must be given a teaching job as per the union contract.)
  • He thinks that teachers should be encouraged to go back to school to “improve the quality of education for our kids.” As such, he faulted the study’s finding that too much money ($500,000,000) is wasted giving raises to teachers who take post-graduate coursework. (Studies have shown that teachers who take post-graduate courses are not more successful after taking these classes, but get salary increases anyway.)
  • He charged that it is wrong to talk about reforming the evaluation and tenure systems without talking about how teachers are trained. (Yes, many of our schools of education are atrocious, but this has nothing to do with tenure – two years in the classroom should not guarantee a teacher a job for life.)
  • He called the salary recommendations ludicrous. (Performance pay is a bête noire for the union crowd. Any deviation of the current salary schedule whereby teachers get an automatic yearly raise, essentially rewarding a teacher for not dying over the summer, is off-limits.)
  • “Educational equity and teacher quality are important and we should all be talking about them,” he said. “But it should not be about an attack upon teachers unions.” (The teachers unions are the biggest obstacle to any meaningful education reform. Should we just get together, sing Kumbaya, blow kisses at each other and ignore the 500 lb. gorilla in the corner?)
  • He said, “The people that put this report together are non-educators who believe that a market-driven approach is the only way to improve public education and we believe that is absolutely the death and destruction of public education.” (Since private school teachers are not organized, privatization is particularly irksome to unionistas.)
  • He insisted that UTLA leaders are willing to agree to some changes, including revamping the evaluation system, but still vehemently opposes any use of student test scores to determine which teachers are the most qualified. (Reformers want to use standardized test scores as a part of teachers’ evaluations because they are an objective measure.)

Less than three weeks from being termed out as UTLA boss, A.J. Duffy is going out in a windstorm of union predictability. Incoming president Warren Fletcher has been very quiet throughout all this, giving some optimists hope that a new regime will be more accommodating to badly needed change. I would alert those folks to another song which came out 40 years ago this month. The Who’s “We Won’t Get Fooled Again” included the lyric, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

Yup, you still won’t need a weatherman; an unfavorable, unified wind will still be blowing in an all too predictable direction.
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Larry Sand began his teaching career in New York in 1971. Since 1984, he has taught elementary school as well as English, math, history and ESL in the Los Angeles Unified School District, where he also served as a Title 1 Coordinator. Retired in 2009, he is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues – information teachers will often not get from their school districts or unions.

CTEN was formed in 2006 because a wide range of information from the more global concerns of education policy, education leadership, and education reform, to information having a more personal application, such as professional liability insurance, options of relationships to teachers’ unions, and the effect of unionism on teacher pay, comes to teachers from entities that have a specific agenda. Sand’s comments and op-eds have appeared in City Journal, Associated Press, Newsweek, Townhall Magazine, Los Angeles Times, San Diego Union Tribune, Los Angeles Daily News, San Jose Mercury News, Orange County Register and other publications. He has appeared on numerous broadcast news programs in Southern California and nationally.

Sand has participated in panel discussions and events focusing on education reform efforts and the impact of teachers’ unions on public education. In March 2010, Sand participated in a debate hosted by the non-profit Intelligence Squared, an organization that regularly hosts Oxford-style debates, which was nationally broadcast on Bloomberg TV and NPR, as well as covered by Newsweek. Sand and his teammates – Terry Moe of the Hoover Institution and former U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige, opposed the proposition – Don’t Blame Teachers Unions For Our Failing Schools. The pro-union team included Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. In August 2010, he was on a panel at the Where’s the Outrage? Conference in San Francisco, where he spoke about how charter school operators can best deal with teachers’ unions. This past January he was on panels in Los Angeles, San Diego and San Mateo in support of National School Choice week.

Sand has also worked with other organizations to present accurate information about the relationship between teachers and their unions, most recently assisting in the production of a video for the Center for Union Facts in which a group of teachers speak truthfully about the teachers’ unions.

CTEN maintains an active and strong new media presence, reaching out to teachers and those interested in education reform across the USA, and around the world, with its popular Facebook page, whose members include teachers, writers, think tankers, and political activists. Since 2006, CTEN has experienced dramatic growth.


Copyright Publius Forum 2001