Obama’s No-Brainer on Education

Let me share what I and other teacher members of the National Education Association do and believe.
Our dues produce materials that teachers use in their classrooms to build relationships and make instruction relevant to children from all cultures represented in public schools. We provide training to assist in teaching the growing population of ELL???s. In order to ensure every child has a safe school we have professional development to deter bullying in our hallways. These units are based on the collaborative work of national experts, teachers, and NEA staff.
We collaborate with the Nat???l Board for Professional Teaching Standards to address recruitment of quality teachers in high need schools. We know the importance of supporting teachers so they don???t leave teaching by having induction programs, adequate compensation, and resources they need to be successful with students, regardless of background or zip code.
We often have NEA members on accreditation visits to colleges of education by NCATE. Our commitment to ensuring adequate preparation extends to insisting that alternative certification programs require completion of the outcomes that traditionally certified teachers meet so that we know a well prepared, highly-qualified teacher is working with every child.
NEA is a leader in promoting outreach to minority communities. We have teamed with innovative educators and activists to address the high school pushout rate. NEA collaborates with people that support public schools and the teachers that work in them.
Finally, regarding ???tenure???. We don???t want bad teachers in classrooms. We do want adequate support for all teachers to improve our practice. Most public k-12 schools do not have tenure as defined in the collegiate arena. Teachers, if they have any rights, have the right to due process. If a principal wants to terminate a teacher they must have a reason based on the teacher???s performance, document efforts to help the teacher improve, and show that the teacher did not improve instruction.
In Kansas, if a principal sees a teacher isn???t competent they have 3 years to fire that person without giving a reason. If a teacher has been allowed to stay for 3 years, principals have the burden of proof to document incompetence. That is due process.
We fight for that right because the history in education has been that without due process, inequality exists. Women were terminated for getting married. If a principal had a conflict with a teacher they would be fired. It has always been up to the employee to demand basic rights of equity.
1 out of 100 Americans is an NEA member. We work everyday, take our work home at night, and work through summer because we believe our students have the right to a superior education. We are of every ethnicity, faith, and political party. We are your family and friends. We are in the classroom working towards a great public school for every child and our mission has always been to leave NO child

The big textbook corporations and the standardized testing corporations need to pool their resources and immediately lobby congress to put an end to this plague of greedy, lazy and abusive teachers AND their unions! In turn, for their trouble, of course they should be awarded contracts mandating that the schools purchase their products...

Hmm. This reminds me of another major sector we've been hearing about: Sub-prime mortages and predatory lending. Deregulation and greed.

Alter, if you think the public schools have problems now, wait until the school voucher and merit pay proponents get their hands into them with their lofty economic, unproved theories. Usary, usary, usary...

Jonathan,
I graded your paper, Obama's No-Brainer on Education. Nice opening. It grabbed my attention. Watch out when writing a persuasive piece. Avoid insults and exaggeration (Paleolithic). It weakens your argument. Remember, clever may get you a few chuckles but then you have to know something.
Always know your subject. It's not really clear that you have a grasp of the issues surrounding merit pay for teachers. Surely among the millions of practitioners of the noblest profession there are many really good teachers who have considered the problems of merit pay. Would it be a nationwide scale based on standardized testing, or a multiple measure of student achievement? How would competition for pay among teachers impact the school climate? How exactly would merit pay be granted fairly? Issues of fairness in accountability are a concern because a school is not a professional basketball team or a business. Consider your analogy. Students are neither a commodity nor are they simply, dollars to grow. They are multi-dimentional unfinished puzzles even for the master teacher. School communities can't buy sell or trade a student with serious situational problems. The doors of the public school are open and teachers work with their students in a dynamic mix that changes unpredictably everyday.
If the problem is that the US is ranked 25th among 30 industrialized nations, have you connected the proposed solution of merit pay to those countries? You make a case for a longer school year. Do those ahead of us have merit pay? Are there other things that are part of those systems that support learning? Remember to adequately research and support your argument with relevant details. Let's hope Senator Obama does his homework before he dangles the schools over the precipice of a poorly thought out, No- Brainer, reform again. SAnnand

I believe the title of this article is misleading. The problem addressed in this article is NOT a "no-brainer" and does not have an easy solution. I teach junior high school language arts and American History/Government, and have been a very effective teacher, improving my students' reading and writing skills with tremendous success. While I would love to be rewarded with the extra effort I take to know my students individually and write curriculum based on their needs, this reward cannot be at the expense of the protection I receive, through my union, from false accusations and irate parents. I get my students for 54 minutes a day. Less than an hour. Maybe MOST of the accountability needs to come from students' most influential teachers - their parents families. I have never ONCE heard a discussion of the accountability on part of the parents to make sure that education is a major priority in households. I implore Mr. Alder to think fully before he lambasts an education that is dictated by politics and bureaucracy, NOT by teachers themselves. While there are lazy teachers out there, there are also teachers, like myself, who take 120 essays home to grade at the expense of family time. How many corporations' employees work two hours a night and several hours on the weekend, after spending more than their contracted time AT their job?

Mr. Alter missed the one thing that would both put more money in the classroom AND give us a clearer picture of how our students stack up against each other and students in other nations. Instead of 50 state assessments under NCLB, how about one national test? All the states would get the same test and we'd know how, as a country and state-by-state, how we are doing and at far less cost. In my own state, Washington, we are paying between $52 and $75 per student depending on grade, to test under NCLB. It's an outrageous amount.
Also, it's a little disingenuous to say that New Orleans doesn't have teachers unions; it's now one big charter school experiment. Please.

While it is certainly fair to debate in opposition to teacher unions' relunctance to ramp up accountability, I'd like to see recognition of the growing population of teachers who are not members of unions and do not subscribe to this resistance. Like me, there are many teachers out there who, in an effort to get feedback about their own performance, rely very heavily on knowing how our students are growing. Because of this desire, many of us have indeed crafted valid and reliable ways of assessing our own students so that we may triangulate our classroom assessment data with standardized testing data in the effort to gain a thicker and more holistic insight about a student's progress. The truth is that as difficult as the teaching profession is, I find that knowing for certain that I am helping students keeps me sane. Given this very authentic motivation for assessment, I take offense to Alter's statement, "[it is] wrong to give teachers 'ownership over the design of better assessment tools." This statement is clearly the remark of a journalist who has spent some time researching a one dimensional perspective of many teachers unions but has neglected to recognize a growing population of teachers who see themselves as individual scholars and professionals, outside the realm of teacher unions, responsible for facilitating change and growth in students. I highly suggest that Mr. Alter spend some time interviewing or facilitating focus groups with such teachers before he once again misrepresents many of us by lumping us into one overgeneralized perspective.

Mr. Alter is on the right track, but the accountability he suggests is missing a step. I teach in an elementary school in the poorest neighborhood in my state. I have also taught at the weathiest school in my city. I was hired to teach reading, writing, math, language, science, social studies and all of the other social skills.

Why is it that in many (most?) elementary schools we see a lot of literacy, some math and no sciences? I have seen this in all of the 5 schools where I have taught. I think teachers should be held accountable for teaching what they were hired to teach. What would happen if a person outside of a union-protected job only performed half of their duties?

I build a strong, caring community every year. I teach it all. My students have outstanding attendance and their test scores keep up with higher income schools. My class is unique in our city's title buildings. But, I cannot be congratulated for this. An outstanding teacher cannot stand out in a union that keeps us all the same.

So, I continue to strive for excellence with the same pay as teachers that manage to teach reading, and a little writing, using a "coach" to teach math to the class because after 18 years of teaching they still don't get math. These teachers have abysmal test scores that they blame entirely on the students and their "out of control" behavior. Thanks to my union, this is fairness.

Mr. Alter is on the right track, but the accountability he suggests is missing a step. I teach in an elementary school in the poorest neighborhood in my state. I have also taught at the weathiest school in my city. I was hired to teach reading, writing, math, language, science, social studies and all of the other social skills.

Why is it that in many (most?) elementary schools we see a lot of literacy, some math and no sciences? I think teachers should be held accountable for teaching what they were hired to teach. What would happen if a person outside of a union protected job only performed half of their duties?

I build a strong, caring community every year. I teach it all. My students have outstanding attendance and their test scores keep up with higher income schools. My class is unique in our city's title buildings. But, I cannot be congratulated for this. An outstanding teacher cannot stand out in a union that keeps us all the same.

So, I continue to strive for excellence with the same pay as teachers that manage to teach reading, and a little writing, using a "coach" to teach math to the class because after 18 years of teaching they still don't get math. These teachers have abysmal test scores that they blame entirely on the students and their "out of control" behavior.

I am a classroom teacher in a "high achieving" school in Minnesota. I really think the public needs to realize true problems with our education system. Stop blaming teachers. My wife is a registered nurse and often makes comments about how amazed she is at how much work teachers actually do.

The article talks about recruiting teachers. PAY US. That means taxes have to go up. For a simple view of salaries, I have a Master of Arts degree in my field and 8 years experience (teach full time). My wife has a 2 year RN degree and 3 years experience (works 32 hours a week). She makes $7,000 more a year than I do.

I agree that the agricultural calendar from the 1800's is out-dated (summers giving kids months off), but I don't think the whole system is failing. Due to advances in "technology," kids now have the attention span of canaries. The school day is too short for them, but we have to make sure we get them to their athletic practices and events. If you really want to fix education, disconnect "extra curriculars" from the school, run it like a business if that's what you want, but then pay me and RESPECT me like a professional. There's a few bad people in any field, but it seems this article and the public thinks once a teacher is tenured, we just push play on a movie while we sit in a lounge, drink coffee, and plan our summer vacations and just how we're going to spend all of our money.

Were our TEACHERS any better 25 years ago? Didn't they belong to NEA, AFT, etc? What has changed? Did kids have cell phones, I-pods, etc. 25 years ago? No. We had books and notebooks and pens. If I didn't perform up to my ability, my parents didn't call my teacher to ask her what was wrong with her. They addressed what I wasn't doing.

This article sounds like someone didn't like his math teacher. Why don't you come visit my room for a day? Then after that, you'd have to come home with me to work on planning for the next day, grading any assignments, and just figuring out how I can distract a room of 35 17 year-olds long enough to put down their tech. gadgets and learn something...without daring to offend one of them so I don't have to deal with an extremist parent.

As a classroom teacher in a "high-achieving" school district in California, I find Mr. Alter's comments to be surprisingly uninformed and ignorant of the process of teacher credentialing and tenure. I worked for 18 years in a "corporate job" before deciding to make a mid-life career change to become a teacher. Although i already had a BA, I was required to go back to school for a year to obtain a teaching credential. After that, I "sweated out" two years of constant evaluations, both formal and informal. Never in my life have I worked so hard for so little money. I find the same to be true of all my colleagues as well...anyone who becomes a teacher because they think it is an "easy job" with summers off quickly learns otherwise. Why do you think that almost half of all new teachers quit the profession within 5 years? Even though i am "tenured" I am continually subjected to numerous observations each year by my principal and other administration members. Because I have been a teacher for 11 years, I am no longer eligible for "step" raises and must rely solely on COLA increases from the state - that is not likely to happen this year or next, since the CA budget is 17 billion dollars in debt! Although my students (mostly Asian and Indian children born to engineers and scientists who moved to the U.S. for greater opportunities) are very high achieving with some of the best assessment scores in the state, I maintain no illusion that their accompishments are due solely to my "superior teaching skills". I know that I could easily move 5 miles south to a low-performing district where my "superior teaching skills" would make little difference in a community where education is not highly valued and promoted within the community. So, Mr. Salter, before you promulgate again on what a cushy job we teachers have, I suggest you visit some classrooms, talk to some teachers, and "walk a mile in our shoes".

It's an eye catching headline: "No_Brainer on Education." For me as a retired teacher the headline, "Simplistic answer to Complex Problem", would be more appropriate. The author shows a commendable passion for education. However he doesn't seem to know much about how schools really work. Take, fosr example, the statement, "New York City dismissed only 10 our of 55,000 teachers annually." In fact, many more were let go because of lack of competence. I'm sure, based on my own experience, many tenured teachers were pushed into resigning or retiring. Ub addution, many new teachers simply didn't have their contracts renewed. Teachers' unions tend to support the school district in not renewing those contracts.
Teachers' unions do NOT have as their goal the retention of incomptetent teachers. But that belief is the basis of Mr. Alter's position. He believes that the main problem with our schools is incompetent teachers. But what if that belief is simply wrong? Ii that belief is incorrect, then the solution, higher pay along with "much more acountablility for performance in the classroom," will not work.
The problem with his proposal is that many things affect student accademic performance. Many of these are not in the control of the teacher. They have very little control of curriculum. Curriculum is controlled by the academic standards of the state they work in and the texbooks they use. The state's standards may not be appropriate. As for textbooks, it's important to understand that this is a multi-billion dollar business. The publishers of textbooks send lobbyists to the state capitols to influence textbook selection.
So there are many things that affect accademic performance. The teacher's skill is vital, but many other things affect a child's performance in school. The wise politician will look at them all.
I challenge Newsweek to send a political reporter to a real school to find out what actually goes on.

I???m thrilled that Jonathan Alter is calling for ???bold??? action from Obama on education reform. It???s entirely fitting that a stellar member of the MSM (mainstream media) lead the charge against the sloppy, disreputable, paranoid ranks of the nation???s educators. Who could be better than the MSM to flex the muscle needed to begin to bring about the ???extinction??? of the teaching profession as we know it? The editors and writers at publications like Newsweek are, without doubt, paragons of professional integrity. It is in fact amazing that, with its bold lack of concern with the bottom line and pure pursuit of the most pressing news stories of the day, Newsweek has stayed in business all these decades. Let that be a bright example for the insular, self-serving teachers! Indeed, with the wide accessibility of the net, teachers can visit Jon Stewart???s Daily Show site and learn chagrin when they hear the simple, clear message of Newsweek editor Jon Meacham that the MSM is ???conflict driven.??? In pointing out how often martial images appear on MSM magazine and newspaper covers, Meacham, quite rightly, said he had no apology to offer for that. I should think not, since producing as frequently as possible those images of conflict is all about keeping the readership apprised of the vast diversity of issues we face at home and abroad. I do think Mr. Meacham misspoke, though, when he said that those narratives the MSM generates and changes about as quickly as a pair of underwear don???t have any real impact on the voting public. I???m sure we should view the media???s work as every bit as important as teachers???. (For example, though it didn???t quite work out for her, blasting Hillary Clinton???s picture on the covers of all those magazines as the next president was fine journalism and a boon to the democratic process.)
I could write hundreds more words in praise of the MSM, but suffice it to say that they get it right 99% of the time. (I don???t know if there are international rankings of news organizations or nifty tests for would-be journalists, but I???m sure if there are, the U.S. media is at the top of the heap.) So Obama, teachers . . . well everybody needs to just keep quiet and listen to Jonathan Alter.
I???m ready to fall back into silence myself. After all, I???m a teacher on summer break, and the hammock and beer can await. Lots of folks think teachers have it so easy with the summer off, but while I???m in the hammock, I???ll be working my ???Paleolithic??? brain hard about the battles I???ll need to fight in the fall to prop up the union to the detriment of my students. I will say this one other little thing for myself: Though I???m a card-carrying member of the NEA, I don???t count myself amongst the terrorists that former Education Secretary Rod Paige saw in my union. Come to think of it, though, that might be a good follow-up article for Mr. Alter: Teachers: the Real Terrorist Threat!

Isn't about time that someone in the press recognized that negative and punitive approaches to education in this country are unwarranted and don't work.? NCLb and its Reading First component did far more harm than good. Obama would be much smarter to come out in favor of celebrating the best in American education- which is the best in the world- and taking the positive view that he is going to save our neighborhood schools
in instead

In response to Jonathan Alter???s Obama???s No-Brainer on Education (July, 21, 2008) where Alter proposes pay for performance as part of an education reform plan. My question is, exactly who will receive (or be deprived of) money if a student succeeds or fails? Not that there aren???t incompetent teachers, but his premise seems to be that academic success or failure occurs in isolation.
Last year my fourth grade daughter had several teachers work with her weekly (reading, social studies, math, computer, media center, physical education). Who is to determine that her social studies teacher didn???t influence her reading or that her computer teacher didn???t improve her research skills that helped her ace that author study? As a high school teacher, it would be crazy to assume that a student???s statewide standardized testing triumph or collapse occurred because of my influence alone when each student has 8+ teachers during an academic year. Additionally, what about the influence of community volunteers or a student???s support network outside of school? Sometimes a life or academic lesson takes years to produce fruit but when the lesson blossoms should someone receive back pay years down the road? Lastly, what about the students themselves? Students who strive for academic victory against overwhelming odds of poverty or broken homes?
I agree that our education system is broken and in need of reform but pay for performance on the surface may appeal to the world at large but assigning responsibility for students??? standardized test scores is more complex than Mr. Alter reveals.