Time Magazine is Attacked for Telling the Truth About Teachers Unions

By Mark Hemingway

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Time magazine has a cover story out that's causing a fair amount of outrage, but for all the wrong reasons. The story is headlined, "Rotten Apples: It's nearly impossible to fire a bad teacher. Some tech millionaires may have found a way to change that." Since then, some 70,000 people signed an online petition calling for a public apology over Time's supposed smearing of teachers. Time has sensibly invited a series of responses to the piece on its website.

Now the merits of corporate meddling in public education are debatable -- see Andrew Ferguson's piece on Common Core standards for more on that -- but that's not what has allegedly enraged teachers. It is not even remotely controversial that firing teachers is notoriously difficult, but the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the union orchestrating the Time backlash, lives in some sort of fantasyland where they think that it's outrageous to tell this obvious truth. In 2010, L.A. Weekly -- no one's idea of a conservative anti-teacher, anti-union media outlet -- did a little investigation of the Los Angeles Unified School District, which is the largest school district in the country:

    But the far larger problem in L.A. is one of "performance cases" — the teachers who cannot teach, yet cannot be fired. Their ranks are believed to be sizable — perhaps 1,000 teachers, responsible for 30,000 children. But in reality, nobody knows how many of LAUSD's vast system of teachers fail to perform. Superintendent Ramon Cortines tells the Weekly he has a "solid" figure, but he won't release it. In fact, almost all information about these teachers is kept secret.

    But the Weekly has found, in a five-month investigation, that principals and school district leaders have all but given up dismissing such teachers. In the past decade, LAUSD officials spent $3.5 million trying to fire just seven of the district's 33,000 teachers for poor classroom performance — and only four were fired, during legal struggles that wore on, on average, for five years each. Two of the three others were paid large settlements, and one was reinstated. The average cost of each battle is $500,000.

That's right. Out  of 33,000 teachers, only four were fired for poor performance over the course of a decade. Firing teachers is such a problem there's even a term of art, "the dance of the lemons," that refers to how bad teachers are shuffled from one school to the next as parents get wise to their professional shortcomings. After being shamed by L.A. Weekly's report, the LAUSD promised reform but the problem does not appear to have gotten better. USA Today reported earlier this year that "an average of 2.2 teachers a year are dismissed for unsatisfactory performance" in the entire state of California.

The responses published by Time from teacher representatives are both unserious and denial of an obvious problem in public education. None of them present any real facts about teacher tenure, and instead assert various other canards as being the real reason public education is failing. Here's Randi Weingarten, the president of the AFT:

    Yes, there is a real problem facing America’s teaching profession, but it has nothing to do with tenure. The problem is in recruiting, retaining and supporting our teachers, especially at the hardest-to-staff schools.

    Every time we lose a teacher, it costs us. Literally. More than one-third of teachers leave the profession before they’ve taught for five years. The National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future estimates that the high rate of teacher turnover nationwide costs more than $7 billion per year. This only exacerbates the greatest challenges facing our public schools: underfunding and inequity.

Chronic underfunding is the problem? I hesitate to call this a lie, but the other option is that one of the biggest union leaders in the country is astoundingly ignorant. We routinely see that funding is not the problem in America's worst schools. Washington, D.C. has consistently some of the worst, if not the worst schools in the country. In 2011, D.C. schools had the worst graduation rate in the nation. In 2010, Census data showed that the D.C. was spending $29,409 per pupil, and spending has surely gone up since then while school performance remains abysmal. For comparison, Sidwell Friends, the most "elite" private school in D.C. and where Obama sends his kids, now charges around $35,000 a year in tutition. With a per pupil budget comparable to D.C. public schools, Sidwell Friends has so much extra cash laying around they're hiring a barista to make the privileged children who attend the school smoothies and lattes.

As if this weren't outrageous enough, Andrew Coulson at the CATO Institute notes that D.C.'s education "spending figure is about triple what the DC voucher program spends per pupil—and the voucher students have a much higher graduation rate and perform as well or better academically." In fact, a 2010 study showed that students in the voucher program had a 96 percent graduation rate compared to 56 percent in D.C.'s failing schools. And by the way, this is the same voucher program that Barack Obama attempted to end as one of his first actions in office. That's right -- America's first black president wanted to kill program that primarily benefited D.C.'s poor black kids, because union hacks such as Randi Weingarten siphoned off millions of the tax dollars used to pay public school teachers and used that to help Barack Obama get elected. (D.C.'s voucher program was only saved after House Republicans forced the president's hand on the issue when he attempted to phase out funding.) If "chronic underfunding" is such a problem, maybe Weingarten and other teachers union represenatives should give back the hundreds of millions they spend on political candidates and opposing sensible education reform efforts.

As for Weingarten's point that teacher churn is a serious problem, well, she's right. But pretending this has nothing to do with tenure reform is, again, dishonest. Acknowledging the problem of "bad teachers," isn't an attack on all teachers. Getting rid of bad teachers is really a way to help the good ones. Tenure and seniority rules, which unions defend vigorously, often keep talented teachers from advancing or getting the jobs they want. Reading headlines about a "Teacher of the Year" being let go due to assinine "first hired, last fired" policies is something of a regular occurance. Keeping bad teachers around just generally creates a dispiriting environment for the teachers that are working hard and doing good work educating kids, as they quickly learn they will only be rewarded for outlasting rather than outperforming their peers. I recently had the privilege of speaking with a Teach for America participant at an inner city school. This person cited the lack of enthusiasm among some of their colleagues as a major obstacle, which is in no way surprising. There's a reason no private sector enterprise has comparable tenure and seniority rules.

But despite the mendacity of these attacks on Time, the media have largely done nothing but amplify teacher union objections by covering on the supposed "anger" and the petition -- see MSNBC, Politico, Huffington Post, et al. Now let's not pretend that an internet petition is meaningful or representative of any genuine outrage teachers feel about Time's cover. Especially when it's backed by one of the nation's richest unions. After all, organizing is what they do. And yet, the self-loathing media has largely amplified the bogus union attack on Time even though their story was uncontroversial as far as education reform stories go. The Washington Post coverage of the issue by Valerie Strauss was particularly egregious. She used the occasion to argue that Time had some Teacher vendetta because they once ran favorable cover story on D.C. education reformer Michelle Rhee:

    Rhee was the vanguard of a wave of “corporate school reform” that has used standardized test scores as the chief metric for school “accountability,” promoted charter schools and vouchers, and sought to minimize or eliminate the power of teachers unions and change the way teachers are trained. Rhee was chancellor from 2007-2010, during which she fired hundreds of teachers and principals and started a program that used test scores to evaluate every adult in the building — including, for several years, the custodians. She also collected enormous sums of donations from private philanthropists to start a merit pay system for teachers (even though merit pay systems in education have a long history of failure). The achievement gap, which she said she wanted to close, didn’t budge (and remains wide). When she quit in 2010, she started StudentsFirst, an organization that funded political candidates who promoted her style of reform.

    For obvious reasons, teachers were infuriated by Time’s cover.

    And now, they are furious about  the Nov. 3  Time cover, with the title “Rotten Apples.” The blurb under it says, “It is nearly impossible to fire a bad teacher” (which Rhee proved isn’t actually true as she fired teacher after teacher). The accompanying story is about the latest effort by school reformers to reduce or end teacher job protections (and therefore reduce or destroy the power of the teachers unions), highlighted best in a recent case titled Vergara v. California, in which a judge threw out state statutes giving tenure and other job protections to teachers. Campbell Brown, the former CNN anchor, has emerged as a leader of these new efforts to sue individual states with strong job protections for teachers.

For "obvious reasons" teachers were outraged by Time's cover? There's no meaningless internet petition to back it up, but I'm quite sure many, many public school teachers would agree that Time's cover was not offensive and that keeping bad teachers in the system is a major problem. Why is "accountability" in scare quotes? Since when does merit pay have "a long history of failure" in education? You know what has a really, really long history of failure in education? The ridiculous union rules that undercut any attempts at putting a real merit pay system in place. Is Michelle Rhee supposed to be suspect for lobbying for education reform? Because unions spend plenty of money on politics. Which brings us to Strauss's next ridiculous point: "Which Rhee proved isn’t actually true as she fired teacher after teacher." You know what happened to Rhee for being one of the few education officials willing to go to the mat to fire bad teachers? D.C.'s teachers union spent $1 million to defeat the mayor who appointed her and elect a corrupt mayor who is in the union's pocket. So yes, it's still nearly impossible to fire teachers.

And final word about Strauss, the Washington Post's frequent defender of teachers unions. This was from a column a few years ago:

    As I said earlier, where to send a child to school is a personal family choice.

    My two daughters went to a private school, too, Georgetown Day School in Washington D.C., a city with a public school system that has long had what I consider an unhealthy obsession with standardized tests. (Of course, I’m not trying to shove high-stakes testing policies down anyone’s throat.)

    The problem is not testing itself. What is corrupting public education is the high stakes that are put on the results of standardized tests.

If Strauss or anyone else wants to send their kids to a private school that costs $30,000+ a year and has the means to do so, I don't blame them. But if your personal politics are such that you have to tell yourself standardized testing is a better reason for avoiding public schools than the bad teachers and the corrupt unions that enable them, it's hard to even have a factual discussion. Strauss, Weingarten, and just about everyone else attacking Time magazine appear to be delusional.