As always Joe, a great piece. One small correction: it was January 20, 1961. I was 10, and similarly inspired by Kennedy’s speech. Our school was closed due to the snowstorm, so I was able to watch him give it.
My first time reading the blog... but a long time fan of you, Joe. As a left-wing "silly," I really do appreciate the practical need for centrism for a democracy to function appropriately, And I very much appreciate your perspective. My only small, small quibble is I would not attribute Trump as a "gift" from Obama. I would argue the far-right (and insane acceptance of Trump) began long, long ago spiraling through Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, Bush, etc. I really love Heather Cox Richardson's take on this from How The South Won the Civil War. But, from your post... this is a very small quibble. I am happy to signed up as a paid subscriber! Thanks!
Thanks for your comment. I don't see Trump as a gift from Obama, think you misinterpreted me. Thirty years ago, I predicted The Revolt of the Gringos--as white males slipped toward minority status--and Trump is their avatar. I think the left made this revolt far more powerful with their identity politics and free-range wokery.
I am like Joe a centrist. Probably a tad more to the right. I thought then and I think now that the positions that clump of Democratic racing to the left took in those debates in 2020 were positions that woukd stand the test of time - about 20 nano seconds of it. There will be time later - I hope -:for Harris to be battered about all those positions. And in any case, one need not fear - the orange felon-rapist-liar-traitor will test every one of them. Right now I want her to run a hard nosed tough as nails well managed winning campaign i Would hope she does not dwell deeply or at all on detailed policy issues. If we ever want to get back to a point when we can have vaguely sensible policy discussions, we have to win now.
She certainly hit the ground running, the center ground that is, and it’s to be hoped she gets stronger from here.
Today Harris addressed a teacher’s union group. No doubt Joe is sharpening his knives for THAT one.
But some questions are begged: are upper middle suburban or private schools failing, too? And if not, is that due to the panacea of accountability?
Joe himself as well as his recent guest on the subject acknowledge that family background is THE crucial factor in school success. To his credit Joe also noted approvingly the vastly ignored, definitive Coleman Report of the 1960s, which came to the same conclusion. In light of all that, how do teachers get blamed for the failure of parents and kids? (Let’s forget for a moment current classroom conditions in these “failing schools” - conditions quite common long before the pandemic. Just walk in there, folks, while a teacher is trying make it work).
Yes, there are teachers who can’t cut it. Everyone in the building knows who they are. That said, a blanket blame and policy centered around accountability, while bad mouthing the unions that support (occasionally to a fault) their teachers, truly oversimplifies the problems and misleads people about the massive social and institutional issues involved.
It is near-impossible to fire an incompetent teacher in a union school. You can check the stats. It is near impossible to reward a good one. It is against the union contract in New York to improve teacher performance by, say, putting a second teacher in the classroom to take notes, laudatory and critical, to share with the main teacher. There are hundreds of other restrictive work rules. By contrast, charter schools--according to a national Stanford University study--get better results. That should be put in context: few schools of any sort are getting great results, a consequence of the family problems identified in the Coleman Report and the general decline of reading, discipline and the unavailability of curricula tailored to the special interests of various sorts of students. The teachers unions are not the only force impeding progress--many school boards are dolt-havens, too--but they are intensely powerful. And they are not helping.
JDonsldson is correct that teachers’ unions do not discernibly impact the schools of Scarsdale, Winnetka, Edina etc. -and they are not the only factor dragging down school performance in New York, Chicago and the other major systems. But the union rules are problematic in city systems partly due to the power teachers’ unions have in Democratic primaries, where they represent an enormous, terrifying bloc. Thus, the time to impose some needed reforms is in general elections -the teachers are hardly a threat to vote for Trump. This is the kind of thing a Schmidt or Longwell would tell the Harris campaign which is why Kamala should reach out to them pronto.
We've been talking past one another, that's for sure. I've not touched on individual points such as New Orleans or your kids' school experience or successful charter schools because they don't address my contention that educational failure, the problem society is mostly concerned with, is a far more complex undertaking than schools can remedy on their own, yet public school teachers become the scapegoat for the failures. I don't see the logic of that. (Do Catholic school teachers get the same blame?)
Merit pay, for example? How is that measured? Who's to say Teacher A deserves more than B given the differences in the composition of their classes, the kids good, bad or otherwise in front of them? Student enthusiasm perhaps, being in class with one of the gifted, charismatic teachers? The profession doesn't work that way, if any do.
An unaddressed point of my own was raising the question, only somewhat rhetorically, of whether every child should have an IEP. Practically, since there are only so many hours in the day, that might require some adjustment of class size limits - negotiated by the hated, child-hampering, thuggish unions . . .
. . . Thuggery, again I'll see that and raise the Republican and rightwing assault on teacher's and every other union. Not very good bedfellows. Privatization Now, Privatization Forever!
So we're back where we started, neither having persuaded the other of much.
Ending with a question once more, I wonder what Eleanor's position on public employee unions would have been.
Unions often go too far. Including teacher’s unions. Ok? Of course it shouldn’t cost a million to remove a teacher for cause. And unions usually pay the price, sooner or later, as teacher’s unions now do by being blamed left and right poor student achievement, or more generally as right of work laws spread nationally. I assume you’d agree that collective bargaining and contracts are necessary, though.
The shop floor is rather different than an urban classroom. There are SO many variables involved, as you know. There should be room in the political center to raise questions about why some kids don’t achieve and seek answers beyond “because of teacher’s unions.” I don’t think that is necessarily your position, but your comments written and spoken add fuel to that misplaced fire.
Shanker was a cynical power broker, building the UFT/AFT in a time of liberal and worker ascendancy and a growing economy. He got the contract for his people, who wanted to make a decent living in a demanding job with some work rule protections. In Philadelphia, anyway, those protections have been pared away considerably. Maybe Randi’s tougher. (I’m assuming you have some idea what urban classrooms are like today; again, having little to do with pandemic issues).
You know, after the Coleman Report was published (and before it was forgotten) liberals back then were aghast: “you mean if poorly achieving kids are put in ‘better’ classrooms it really won’t matter much with their test scores?” So sociologist Christopher Jencks set about taking apart the Report almost line by line to show its essential conclusion wasn’t valid. Jencks and his researchers couldn’t do it. In the resulting book Inequality, he concluded that if we want an integrated society, sending minority kids to white schools is a good idea - but it wouldn’t do much to raise test scores.
Again, it’s family and all that goes with that - a helluva lot - so why the narrow focus on teacher’s unions? They’re just a more visible target than family or culture or curriculum or even class size?
As for Teach for America, I’d agree the rank & file should have better things to do than picket recruiting sites. But the rough figures you provide do suggest that few of the recruits actually stay in the classroom. I wonder why.
Let's start with the last point first: Teaching is a burn-out profession. And not everyone is suited for it. TFA puts highly educated college graduates in classrooms filled with poor students. The fact that half remain in the profession is a triumph. Indeed, the larger point is this: teachers should have to continually prove their worth, the way military officers do--the rule is four years up (promotion) or out. As a parent, I saw more than a few burned out teachers who had no place in classroom, stifling my kids' interest in learning, hanging on because they were protected by the union. (I also saw some great teachers, of course--every parent does...and the idea that the good ones shouldn't be paid more is outrageous.)
But most important: You want me to censor myself because the valid points I'm raising--which you have no answer for--add to an anti-union narrative? Forty years of visiting classrooms made it abundantly clear to me that the "narrative" is valid--and it is certainly unaddressed by the Democratic Party which, theoretically, should have the interests of poor children front and center. I'm not sure public employees unions should even exist. FDR didn't think they should. But if there is a rationale for them, it could be put this way: they should create floors--minimum pay levels--but not walls or ceilings. They exist to protect the interests of teachers, not our kids. That makes them a questionable proposition...and their thuggish defense of the indefensible should not be tolerated.
We're still dealing with the central fallacy of the reform/accountability movement of the last few decades: that of blaming teachers for failures and breakdowns quite out of their control. Agreed, school boards and in fact the entire administrative level up to those boards are of little help, certainly not in the classroom.
But, again as clearly noted by Joe (or his podcast guest), even the charter schools so often praised have the crucial advantage of having parents interested and determined enough to provide their child with the chance to attend those winning schools: parental involvement, from infancy on up. Implied or stated in charter schools, too, is the threat of removal for misbehavior. At the classroom level that has enormous impact.
Everybody wants more of the best and brightest to enter the teaching profession. In light of the building working conditions, innumerable obstacles to learning and daily pressures (kids, parents, administrators, etc.), and with little support, why should they? Just ask the young idealists who've tried, and got out.
Every school in New Orleans is a charter school. No miracles, but things are a lot better than they were under the old system. In my experience--and I've been following school choice for 40 years, since the early experiment in East Harlem--about 15% of less affluent parents are going to fight to get their kids into the best school they can, 15% don't give a damn and 70% go with the flow...If that 70% have to get involved, and make a choice for their kids, they become more informed and more active.
In my experience, too, the teachers unions have been opposed to almost every educational innovation, especially charter schools but also programs like Teach for America. They want to be "treated like professionals" but they negotiate like auto-workers, opposing merit pay, stressing seniority over quality, making it near-impossible to fire incompetents. As a parent, I can tell you stories about the effect of union work rules on my children. The unions are a reactionary force...and a powerful one. I'm for actually treating teachers like professionals, with the respect, remuneration and responsibility that professionals command. We need to celebrate excellence not mediocrity, and the unions seem intent on defining mediocrity down.
The various issues raised here tend to support the contention that identifying no teacher accountability and powerful unions as the primary causes of "failing schools" grossly oversimplifies a problem with innumerable complexities.
Students such as your children here in Philadelphia surely would have attended the academically selective schools (at least so designated before pre-wokeness; still essentially so). I should add that in our system of mass, compulsory education it may not be as easy as parents wish for the individualized attention they seek for their child. In
a perfect world maybe every kid has an IEP. Anyway, teachers in those schools are in the same PFT and if there are problems there such as those you allude to, it's news to me; those are seriously good students in truly outstanding schools, with the union and without accountability. Dunno: maybe Weingarten's UFT (?) is a worse animal than the PFT.
As for the 85% of, may we say, 'indifferent' parents? - their choice will be determined by whatever is the nearest or trendiest school name being tossed about, with zero effect on how or if their kids have been otherwise prepared - as have those in the select schools. It was family background then and it still is.
It's the out of classroom duties that underlie many of the contractual demands the unions make, those and being imperiously ordered about by classroom-escaping, careerist administrators. Lacking contract language those duties, in underfunded districts especially, would be endless.
Teach for America: I wonder how many have stayed?
As noted above, the issues are limitless - psychological, social, cultural (much ignored), economic, political - so the steps toward progress should be equally layered, not pointed with fingers.
Of course, the issues are complicated--they are as complicated as life in a diverse society. The point is: the teachers unions have exacerbated the problems, in my experience, rather than ameliorated them. It's interesting that you have no real response to the issues I raise; union supporters never do--with one exception, Albert Shanker. He and I sat down several decades ago and negotiated an ideal school system--there were charter schools, a pay scale based on performance rather seniority, lots and lots of Teach for America apprentices working under master teachers. At the end, we had a good laugh. I said: Let's go out and sell it to your union. He said: Are you out of your f-in mind? To which I said: QED. AS for Teach for America, last time I checked more than half of them stayed in education, some as teachers, some as administrators, some doing ed research. And, last I checked, union members were picketing the TFA recruitment booths on college campuses. This speaks to thuggery, not excellence.
Completely off topic, Joe, let us not forget that this is the 100th anniversary of a composition that I suspect has some resonance in the Klein family - Rhapsody in Blue. When the chance comes to catch our breath, we should take a few days to celebrate and contemplate that particular gateway drug.
Kennedy's was the very first inaugural speech that ever saw, on television. Have listened to many more over the years, but few have had the resonance and the open ended appeal, that were embedded in his.
I wish Harris would do as you suggest, but as a Bay Area resident, and a native Californian, I have unfortunately very serious doubts along that line. Though am always willing to be surprised.
As always Joe, a great piece. One small correction: it was January 20, 1961. I was 10, and similarly inspired by Kennedy’s speech. Our school was closed due to the snowstorm, so I was able to watch him give it.
My first time reading the blog... but a long time fan of you, Joe. As a left-wing "silly," I really do appreciate the practical need for centrism for a democracy to function appropriately, And I very much appreciate your perspective. My only small, small quibble is I would not attribute Trump as a "gift" from Obama. I would argue the far-right (and insane acceptance of Trump) began long, long ago spiraling through Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, Bush, etc. I really love Heather Cox Richardson's take on this from How The South Won the Civil War. But, from your post... this is a very small quibble. I am happy to signed up as a paid subscriber! Thanks!
Thanks for your comment. I don't see Trump as a gift from Obama, think you misinterpreted me. Thirty years ago, I predicted The Revolt of the Gringos--as white males slipped toward minority status--and Trump is their avatar. I think the left made this revolt far more powerful with their identity politics and free-range wokery.
Sorry I misunderstood😀. I understand your point and it makes so much sense! Thank you for clarifying.
I am like Joe a centrist. Probably a tad more to the right. I thought then and I think now that the positions that clump of Democratic racing to the left took in those debates in 2020 were positions that woukd stand the test of time - about 20 nano seconds of it. There will be time later - I hope -:for Harris to be battered about all those positions. And in any case, one need not fear - the orange felon-rapist-liar-traitor will test every one of them. Right now I want her to run a hard nosed tough as nails well managed winning campaign i Would hope she does not dwell deeply or at all on detailed policy issues. If we ever want to get back to a point when we can have vaguely sensible policy discussions, we have to win now.
She certainly hit the ground running, the center ground that is, and it’s to be hoped she gets stronger from here.
Today Harris addressed a teacher’s union group. No doubt Joe is sharpening his knives for THAT one.
But some questions are begged: are upper middle suburban or private schools failing, too? And if not, is that due to the panacea of accountability?
Joe himself as well as his recent guest on the subject acknowledge that family background is THE crucial factor in school success. To his credit Joe also noted approvingly the vastly ignored, definitive Coleman Report of the 1960s, which came to the same conclusion. In light of all that, how do teachers get blamed for the failure of parents and kids? (Let’s forget for a moment current classroom conditions in these “failing schools” - conditions quite common long before the pandemic. Just walk in there, folks, while a teacher is trying make it work).
Yes, there are teachers who can’t cut it. Everyone in the building knows who they are. That said, a blanket blame and policy centered around accountability, while bad mouthing the unions that support (occasionally to a fault) their teachers, truly oversimplifies the problems and misleads people about the massive social and institutional issues involved.
It is near-impossible to fire an incompetent teacher in a union school. You can check the stats. It is near impossible to reward a good one. It is against the union contract in New York to improve teacher performance by, say, putting a second teacher in the classroom to take notes, laudatory and critical, to share with the main teacher. There are hundreds of other restrictive work rules. By contrast, charter schools--according to a national Stanford University study--get better results. That should be put in context: few schools of any sort are getting great results, a consequence of the family problems identified in the Coleman Report and the general decline of reading, discipline and the unavailability of curricula tailored to the special interests of various sorts of students. The teachers unions are not the only force impeding progress--many school boards are dolt-havens, too--but they are intensely powerful. And they are not helping.
JDonsldson is correct that teachers’ unions do not discernibly impact the schools of Scarsdale, Winnetka, Edina etc. -and they are not the only factor dragging down school performance in New York, Chicago and the other major systems. But the union rules are problematic in city systems partly due to the power teachers’ unions have in Democratic primaries, where they represent an enormous, terrifying bloc. Thus, the time to impose some needed reforms is in general elections -the teachers are hardly a threat to vote for Trump. This is the kind of thing a Schmidt or Longwell would tell the Harris campaign which is why Kamala should reach out to them pronto.
We've been talking past one another, that's for sure. I've not touched on individual points such as New Orleans or your kids' school experience or successful charter schools because they don't address my contention that educational failure, the problem society is mostly concerned with, is a far more complex undertaking than schools can remedy on their own, yet public school teachers become the scapegoat for the failures. I don't see the logic of that. (Do Catholic school teachers get the same blame?)
Merit pay, for example? How is that measured? Who's to say Teacher A deserves more than B given the differences in the composition of their classes, the kids good, bad or otherwise in front of them? Student enthusiasm perhaps, being in class with one of the gifted, charismatic teachers? The profession doesn't work that way, if any do.
An unaddressed point of my own was raising the question, only somewhat rhetorically, of whether every child should have an IEP. Practically, since there are only so many hours in the day, that might require some adjustment of class size limits - negotiated by the hated, child-hampering, thuggish unions . . .
. . . Thuggery, again I'll see that and raise the Republican and rightwing assault on teacher's and every other union. Not very good bedfellows. Privatization Now, Privatization Forever!
So we're back where we started, neither having persuaded the other of much.
Ending with a question once more, I wonder what Eleanor's position on public employee unions would have been.
Unions often go too far. Including teacher’s unions. Ok? Of course it shouldn’t cost a million to remove a teacher for cause. And unions usually pay the price, sooner or later, as teacher’s unions now do by being blamed left and right poor student achievement, or more generally as right of work laws spread nationally. I assume you’d agree that collective bargaining and contracts are necessary, though.
The shop floor is rather different than an urban classroom. There are SO many variables involved, as you know. There should be room in the political center to raise questions about why some kids don’t achieve and seek answers beyond “because of teacher’s unions.” I don’t think that is necessarily your position, but your comments written and spoken add fuel to that misplaced fire.
Shanker was a cynical power broker, building the UFT/AFT in a time of liberal and worker ascendancy and a growing economy. He got the contract for his people, who wanted to make a decent living in a demanding job with some work rule protections. In Philadelphia, anyway, those protections have been pared away considerably. Maybe Randi’s tougher. (I’m assuming you have some idea what urban classrooms are like today; again, having little to do with pandemic issues).
You know, after the Coleman Report was published (and before it was forgotten) liberals back then were aghast: “you mean if poorly achieving kids are put in ‘better’ classrooms it really won’t matter much with their test scores?” So sociologist Christopher Jencks set about taking apart the Report almost line by line to show its essential conclusion wasn’t valid. Jencks and his researchers couldn’t do it. In the resulting book Inequality, he concluded that if we want an integrated society, sending minority kids to white schools is a good idea - but it wouldn’t do much to raise test scores.
Again, it’s family and all that goes with that - a helluva lot - so why the narrow focus on teacher’s unions? They’re just a more visible target than family or culture or curriculum or even class size?
As for Teach for America, I’d agree the rank & file should have better things to do than picket recruiting sites. But the rough figures you provide do suggest that few of the recruits actually stay in the classroom. I wonder why.
Let's start with the last point first: Teaching is a burn-out profession. And not everyone is suited for it. TFA puts highly educated college graduates in classrooms filled with poor students. The fact that half remain in the profession is a triumph. Indeed, the larger point is this: teachers should have to continually prove their worth, the way military officers do--the rule is four years up (promotion) or out. As a parent, I saw more than a few burned out teachers who had no place in classroom, stifling my kids' interest in learning, hanging on because they were protected by the union. (I also saw some great teachers, of course--every parent does...and the idea that the good ones shouldn't be paid more is outrageous.)
But most important: You want me to censor myself because the valid points I'm raising--which you have no answer for--add to an anti-union narrative? Forty years of visiting classrooms made it abundantly clear to me that the "narrative" is valid--and it is certainly unaddressed by the Democratic Party which, theoretically, should have the interests of poor children front and center. I'm not sure public employees unions should even exist. FDR didn't think they should. But if there is a rationale for them, it could be put this way: they should create floors--minimum pay levels--but not walls or ceilings. They exist to protect the interests of teachers, not our kids. That makes them a questionable proposition...and their thuggish defense of the indefensible should not be tolerated.
We're still dealing with the central fallacy of the reform/accountability movement of the last few decades: that of blaming teachers for failures and breakdowns quite out of their control. Agreed, school boards and in fact the entire administrative level up to those boards are of little help, certainly not in the classroom.
But, again as clearly noted by Joe (or his podcast guest), even the charter schools so often praised have the crucial advantage of having parents interested and determined enough to provide their child with the chance to attend those winning schools: parental involvement, from infancy on up. Implied or stated in charter schools, too, is the threat of removal for misbehavior. At the classroom level that has enormous impact.
Everybody wants more of the best and brightest to enter the teaching profession. In light of the building working conditions, innumerable obstacles to learning and daily pressures (kids, parents, administrators, etc.), and with little support, why should they? Just ask the young idealists who've tried, and got out.
Every school in New Orleans is a charter school. No miracles, but things are a lot better than they were under the old system. In my experience--and I've been following school choice for 40 years, since the early experiment in East Harlem--about 15% of less affluent parents are going to fight to get their kids into the best school they can, 15% don't give a damn and 70% go with the flow...If that 70% have to get involved, and make a choice for their kids, they become more informed and more active.
In my experience, too, the teachers unions have been opposed to almost every educational innovation, especially charter schools but also programs like Teach for America. They want to be "treated like professionals" but they negotiate like auto-workers, opposing merit pay, stressing seniority over quality, making it near-impossible to fire incompetents. As a parent, I can tell you stories about the effect of union work rules on my children. The unions are a reactionary force...and a powerful one. I'm for actually treating teachers like professionals, with the respect, remuneration and responsibility that professionals command. We need to celebrate excellence not mediocrity, and the unions seem intent on defining mediocrity down.
The various issues raised here tend to support the contention that identifying no teacher accountability and powerful unions as the primary causes of "failing schools" grossly oversimplifies a problem with innumerable complexities.
Students such as your children here in Philadelphia surely would have attended the academically selective schools (at least so designated before pre-wokeness; still essentially so). I should add that in our system of mass, compulsory education it may not be as easy as parents wish for the individualized attention they seek for their child. In
a perfect world maybe every kid has an IEP. Anyway, teachers in those schools are in the same PFT and if there are problems there such as those you allude to, it's news to me; those are seriously good students in truly outstanding schools, with the union and without accountability. Dunno: maybe Weingarten's UFT (?) is a worse animal than the PFT.
As for the 85% of, may we say, 'indifferent' parents? - their choice will be determined by whatever is the nearest or trendiest school name being tossed about, with zero effect on how or if their kids have been otherwise prepared - as have those in the select schools. It was family background then and it still is.
It's the out of classroom duties that underlie many of the contractual demands the unions make, those and being imperiously ordered about by classroom-escaping, careerist administrators. Lacking contract language those duties, in underfunded districts especially, would be endless.
Teach for America: I wonder how many have stayed?
As noted above, the issues are limitless - psychological, social, cultural (much ignored), economic, political - so the steps toward progress should be equally layered, not pointed with fingers.
I appreciate the dialogue.
Of course, the issues are complicated--they are as complicated as life in a diverse society. The point is: the teachers unions have exacerbated the problems, in my experience, rather than ameliorated them. It's interesting that you have no real response to the issues I raise; union supporters never do--with one exception, Albert Shanker. He and I sat down several decades ago and negotiated an ideal school system--there were charter schools, a pay scale based on performance rather seniority, lots and lots of Teach for America apprentices working under master teachers. At the end, we had a good laugh. I said: Let's go out and sell it to your union. He said: Are you out of your f-in mind? To which I said: QED. AS for Teach for America, last time I checked more than half of them stayed in education, some as teachers, some as administrators, some doing ed research. And, last I checked, union members were picketing the TFA recruitment booths on college campuses. This speaks to thuggery, not excellence.
Completely off topic, Joe, let us not forget that this is the 100th anniversary of a composition that I suspect has some resonance in the Klein family - Rhapsody in Blue. When the chance comes to catch our breath, we should take a few days to celebrate and contemplate that particular gateway drug.
Wonderful!
Kennedy's was the very first inaugural speech that ever saw, on television. Have listened to many more over the years, but few have had the resonance and the open ended appeal, that were embedded in his.
I wish Harris would do as you suggest, but as a Bay Area resident, and a native Californian, I have unfortunately very serious doubts along that line. Though am always willing to be surprised.