Union Boycotts LA Times Over Teacher Evaluation Disclosure

Atypical Geek writes "According to Newsweek, the local teachers union is infuriated over the disclosure of teacher performance metrics. Quoting: 'Do parents have the right to know which of their kids' teachers are the most and least effective? That's the controversy roaring in California this week with the publication of an investigative series by the Los Angeles Times's Jason Song and Jason Felch, who used seven years of math and English test data to publicly identify the best and the worst third- to fifth-grade teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The newspaper's announcement of its plans to release data later this month on all 6,000 of the city's elementary-school teachers has prompted the local teachers' union to rally members to organize a boycott of the newspaper.' According to the linked Times article, United Teachers Los Angeles president A.J. Duffy said the database was 'an irresponsible, offensive intrusion into your professional life that will do nothing to improve student learning.'"

Comments

like any other job?

[uncanny]

I get evaluated at my job, should i be outraged? Maybe this will motivate them to actually try harder to be better teachers instead of just griping about a paycheck. There are worse jobs out there with even worse pay, i say start firing teachers that rank the worst.

Re:like any other job?

[JanneM]

"I get evaluated at my job, should i be outraged?"

Should you get outraged if your evaluation is printed in a major daily newspaper as an example? Without a reporter even as much as contacting you for a chance at filling in your side of the story?

Re:like any other job?

[Smidge204]

Should you get outraged if your evaluation is printed in a major daily newspaper as an example?

Only if it's a bad evaluation that highlights my incompetence...

=Smidge=

Re:like any other job?

[Stradivarius]

The original LA Times article on the web did have a prominently placed solicitation for teachers to submit their comments on their score. Not sure what the plans for the dead tree edition were

It also seems to me that the teachers' side of the story was printed:

Many teachers and union leaders are skeptical of the value-added approach, saying standardized tests are flawed and do not capture the more intangible benefits of good instruction. Some also fear teachers will be fired based on the arcane calculations of statisticians who have never worked in a classroom.

Whether you buy their arguments or not, the teachers' official point of view has been spelled out for the Times' readers.

I for one don't buy it. Certainly care needs to be taken with designing any evaluations of job effectiveness. The value-added approach tries to take such care. The union response was just the standard line that you cannot and should not evaluate them by standardized tests that would let you compare them against each other. And similarly disappointing rhetoric implying that only teachers can evaluate teacher effectiveness - as if mere mortals like parents or statisticians have no insight. You don't need to be a master chef to know whether the food was prepared by one, and you don't need to be a teacher to know whether a teachers's students are learning.

Re:Educational Problems

[Anonymous Coward]

To compete with wikileaks, they must become wikileaks. Things are looking up for the media. Amazing - maybe now they'll have to do their jobs and report on the government with brutal facts, instead of placating the party line.

RTFA before commenting

[betterunixthanunix]

When I saw that test scores were being used, I got ready to point out that test scores are known to vary between rich and poor students. Then I read the actual evaluation, and saw this:

The fifth-graders at Broadous Elementary School come from the same world the poorest corner of the San Fernando Valley, a Pacoima neighborhood framed by two freeways where some have lost friends to the stray bullets of rival gangs.

...

Yet year after year, one fifth-grade class learns far more than the other down the hall.

Re:RTFA before commenting

[Fulminata]

The fact that one class consistently does better than another is reason to look more deeply into the reasons why, but it's not reason enough to jump to the conclusion that one teacher is better than the other. There may vvery well be other factors. Maybe one classroom is closer to the street and has to deal with distracting noise? Maybe one is on the shaded side of the building and is more comfortable during the warmer months? Maybe one teacher truly is better than the other and it's worth studying what makes them better. It's a starting point, not an ending point, and to condemn the teacher of the lower performing class without exploring further why the class is lower performing is irresponsible.

Re:RTFA before commenting

[Idiomatick]

I wouldn't be quiiiite that generous though I agree on the whole. But I think publicly announced raw data of this sort (very uncontrolled and could mean a wide wide range of different things) will be terrible. Why? Because the general populace is stupid. BUT mama-bears that want the best for their kids will turn it into a horrible horrible witch hunt. And it will just make a lot of teachers quit rather than improve.

So instead of crushing a bunch of teachers and be forced to spend lots extra retraining/educating new teachers and having to increase wages. Why not use this as the starting point for a study? Find out what they are doing and retrain current teachers. It may be a bunch of small things you can teach in a month during the summer.

Survival of the fittest while cruel would be effective. BUT it would cost way more to do it that way.

Re:RTFA before commenting

[Idiomatick]

"On average, his students started the year in the 34th percentile in math compared with all other district fifth-graders. They finished in the 61st. "

Didn't catch this quote earlier but it invalidates point 1,2.

Re:RTFA before commenting

[Stradivarius]

Certainly no meaningful job, like teaching or engineering - can be boiled down to only one metric. But certain metrics are very important and should be a significant part of the evaluation.

For example, I'm a software engineer. My employer places a lot of weight on ability to perform development efforts according to a budget and schedule. These are not the whole picture - it doesn't measure quality, for example. And every development effort is unique, so setting the budget is an error-prone process. Often as a developer you need to deal with an inadequate budget or schedule. Sometimes you get a particularly tough assignment. You do the best you can. Managers realize these constraints are there, and you are not judged entirely on budget performance. But if you consistently fail to come close to budget, while your peers don't consistently have the same problem... that will be noticed.

Teaching seems like a similar set of constraints to me. Every student may be different, and standardized tests scores may not be the whole picture. But like a development budget, standardized tests do capture an important piece of information. It's not unreasonable for the customer - parents and taxpayers - to consider such things. Especially when taken over a few years' time where you can really start to see trends.

The value-added tests do also attempt to remove biases such as student selection, as the metric compares those particular students' scores against their scores from the previous year. So the metric measures just the kids in your class, and measures not where they started but how much they improved.

If the union were advocating that we measure additional metrics and publish those too, I'd be totally behind them. That way we could all debate how much we value the various elements of teaching, and see which teachers provide which advantages.

The problem I see is that rather than try to improve the objective measures available, they're trying to sink the use of such measures. There will never be a perfect metric of teaching effectiveness, just as there isn't one for programming performance. But the lack of a perfect solution shouldn't prevent us from seeking a solution at all. The status quo lack of any solution has not been serving teachers or students well.

Re:RTFA before commenting

[vcgodinich]

Sorry, that is how the real world works. If employee A on the assembly line isn't working as good as B, A gets fired.

Except for teachers and government employees, they get studies on the ambient noise of their rooms to see if that effects their ability to do their job.

Re:RTFA before commenting

[Attila Dimedici]

The problems is that the school district has been sitting on this data for several years. This data has a lot of information that could be used to improve the education that students receive. What you are proposing is what the union is fighting. The LA Times published this information, without including any information identifying individual teachers, in order to generate public pressure to do almost exactly what you propose. In one of the articles in this series, they proposed that if the school district would evaluate the data they have already collected, they could identify who the best teachers are and what makes them better. Then they could train at least some of the other teachers to emulate the best teachers. The teachers' union has rejected that approach.

Scrutiny

[RudyHartmann]

There are hardly any fields of endeavor where the people asking to provide a service are exempt from scrutiny. Teaching is a honorable and needed service, but the teacher's union does not want their members to be subject to the same feedback every other profession endures. They are not such a special class of human beings that the consumers of their service should be shutout from performance evaluation statistics. Would you want to hire the services of a crappy plummer, mechanic, investment counselor, or doctor? Why does the consumer not have access to the data to make an informed decision on whether to accept the services for which they will have to pay for? This is just not fair.

Re:Educational Problems

[ArcherB]

There are definitely problems in the U.S. educational system. This article was pretty cool, and they do state that their metrics aren't perfect, but lead to some valuable insight. I'd like to see further studies on this.

Teacher's Unions are the biggest problem with the US educational system. They are more concerned with teachers' benefits than they are about students. Of course, that is their job, but they give campaign contributions and students don't, they've become a bit too good at it.

I love it when teachers bitch about pay (although, sometimes warranted) and we get the following conversation:
"Haven't teachers always been underpaid?"
"Yes, and we need to fix that once and for all."
"Then why did you take the job?"
"Because I love it!"
"!??!!!?!!?"

Depends who you thnk teachers work for

[petes_PoV]

In most places the whole educational establishment is there for the comfort and convenience of the teachers. Any learning that takes place is purely a side-effect of employing teachers, but it's certainly not the reason why they are employed. (Which is why teachers are so vehemently opposed to testing children and assessing how much they know - since this reflects directly on them, not the kids).

It would be nice to hope that this was the first step in recognising that (indirectly) real people pay for and therefore employ teachers. These real people would like to think the primary role of teachers is to impart knowledge, skills and abilities to the children in their charge. If this article leads parents to question schools about why they are employing sub-standard teachers, then it can only be a good thing, that should be extended everywhere.

Re:Depends who you thnk teachers work for

[cvd6262]

It would be nice to hope that this was the first step in recognising that (indirectly) real people pay for and therefore employ teachers. These real people would like to think the primary role of teachers is to impart knowledge, skills and abilities to the children in their charge.

I'm a prof in a school of ed, but my background is in psych, not ed. I've noticed that many teachers (and those teachers who go on to become profs of education) do not feel that imparting "knowledge, skills and abilities" is their major goal. Rather, as I see it, they envision teachers as replacing the home, family, and parents as the conduit of social morals.

This is horrible!

[M. D. Nahas]

My God! How can you advocate unbiased, quantifiable measures of teacher performance! Teachers have magical powers that can't be measured by numbers! Teachers aren't like people in other jobs who can be fired based on their performance! And tests are a horrible way to measure learning! Teachers never use tests themselves! Tests are never used to assign advanced/remedial classes, nor to enter college, and certainly not to get Advanced Placement credits! And, certainly, by God, hide this measure from the parents! You might make them think that something can be done to improve their child's education!!!

Yes, this ranking is a good one

[dlenmn]

This comparison is particularly useful because it tracks students over time so that the effect of a teacher can be separated from other preexisting conditions (like poverty). This graphic from the LA times really says it all. The image shows how on teacher greatly improves the standing of students in his class, while the other does the exact opposite. This ranking has merit.

Re:Educational Problems

[PopeRatzo]

Unions are a kind of collusion....

So, it's OK for everyone else to negotiate the best price except workers. Is that what you're saying? Or are you saying it should be illegal for workers to organize and collectively bargain? Should it also be illegal for CEO's to negotiate their best salary and benefits package? Should it be illegal for cartels to set commodity prices? Under what statute or legal principle would you make the right to organize illegal?

It's amazing how free market purists suddenly don't trust the free market when it comes to workers' pay.

Re:Educational Problems

[bsDaemon]

My mother is a public high school Spanish teacher. She has an undergraduate degree in Romance Languages from an Ivy League, a Masters in Spanish from a well-known state school, and is currently working towards her PhD. She's been teaching at the school she's at for almost 15 years, I believe. She used to work for an import/export company, then an investment banker. She speaks 7 languages with a high degree of proficiency, 5 of which she's fluent in.

In addition to the class time, there is prep time, duty (being made to come in early to watch kids on and off the bus, hang out outside bathrooms looking for smokers, etc), all the time at home grading papers, etc. If teachers were paid by the hour, most would likely make less than a fast food worker when averaged out. The argument that they get paid in the summer for not doing anything is also fallacious, as the fact of the matter is teachers have the choice, at least here in VA, to take their pay only during the school year, or to have it averaged out over 12 months so that they get less per cheque but have income during the summer.

I make almost as much as my mother does with 1 undergrad degree and just a couple years of relevant experience. I also don't have to give up nearly all my evening time grading papers, having to go to meetings about other people's kids so as not to have time to pay attention to my own (although i haven't got any yet), etc.

With my dad retired from the airline where he was a pilot for over 20 years and occasionally substitute teaching, my mother has assumed the role of primary income for them, so the fact that with all her degrees and experience she's making less money than the typical sysadmin with that much experience (who are another group of people, who if you average out their salaries over the amount of time they're required to put in are grossly underpaid) by quite a wide margin is really sort of shameful.

Then there are the parents who don't or won't take responsibility for their own children, and the children who won't take responsibility for themselves. My mother only teaches upper-level Spanish (3,4,5 and the AP prep classes). Even in those classes, usually in Spanish 3 where you have kids just hanging on long enough for the advanced diploma requirement, you get jackass kids who aren't really concerned with learning. And if they would rather smoke dope and show up late, parents want to blame the schools and the teachers for the kids poor grades.

I'm sorry, but if 90 percent of the kids in a class have a B or better, it's likely not the teacher's fault that the other 10% aren't keeping up. If we had pay-for-performance bonus rules, then my mom would make out like a bandit because she's a great teacher, the vast majority of her students love her, and they do well. This isn't the case for all the teachers. And yes, there are bad teachers. I've seen and known many in my day.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that yes, teachers are underpaid. And if they were paid more, then better people would be able to afford to go into the profession. Most of the worst teachers are the young ones who go into it because they want their summers off and basically live with a case of Senioritis for the first 10 years of their careers. If you're willing to pay enough to make it feasible for an experienced engineer or scientist to come in and teach math and still be able to make their mortgage payments, then you're on the right track. I hate math teachers who know math but can't explain how it applies to anything real.

The teacher pay argument shouldn't be that all teachers automagically deserve more money, but that you need to be willing to pay talent what talent deserves. Of course unions won't like that, but I don't live in a Union state, and being a teacher isn't like being an autoworker -- it's not a blue-collar job, even though they by and large get blue collar pay.

Re:Educational Problems

[ScrewMaster]

To compete with wikileaks, they must become wikileaks. Things are looking up for the media. Amazing - maybe now they'll have to do their jobs and report on the government with brutal facts, instead of placating the party line.

Yes, however they'll only do that if they see that there's eyeballs (and hence greater sales) in it. In this particular case, the relevance of the information is obvious to most people: if you have kids, you want to know that they're being taught competently. So people will buy the paper to find out. There are many other issues of equal or greater importance that are more complex, and it is up to the journalists to help people understand the relevance to their own lives. If they can do that, both inform and, to a degree, educate, then they'll regain my respect.

The truth is that journalism in the U.S. today is not what it used to be ... but this kind of report is exactly what journalists are supposed to be doing. That is, informing the public about what their government and its various organs are up to: it's why the Press has such standing in the Constitution. So the Teacher's Union might like to keep their performance (or lack of it) a secret, but as public employees they should not entitled to that. Fact is, such unaccountability is at the root of our school system's problems, and I'm glad this newspaper is giving it to them good. They deserve it, and frankly the fact that they're objecting so strongly indicates that they know there's a problem here, and are self-serving enough to want to continue the cover up.

pay talent what talent deserves

[roman_mir]

What does that mean, "pay talent what talent deserves"?

I have a real talent for jerking off, it took years to master, I should get paid for that wonderful talent. So who is interested in paying?

--

Your argument is absurd. In real world we don't pay people simply because they have talent. People get paid because someone is making money.

A talented basketball player makes money for the investors.

A talented software developer makes money for a company.

A talented thief controls High Frequency Trade transaction house.

Another talented thief controls money flow from many people to a small subset.

A talented plastic surgeon gets paid for his work and discretion.

etc.

--

The REAL talent in this case is the UNION, it gets a LOT of people paid for doing very very little, sure some do more, but most do very little, that's what a union does, that's what it is all about. Used to be that a union was really built by people dying on floors of factories, that's not what today's unions are about, especially GOVERNMENT unions!

If your mother is so talented yet she feels that she is financially unappreciated, she has a choice of working in a private school, isn't that so? In fact if her talents are in high DEMAND then she can tutor people for much MORE money than she'd be making in a school, and eventually with that money that she could save, she could open her own private school, why not?

It's not that I am questioning talent of your mother, I have no idea, but the entire point is that you can have the best talents but nobody cares, and nor SHOULD they! Can she apply her talents so that people would want to give her more money, that's the question.

Re:Educational Problems

[ArcherB]

Unions are a kind of collusion....

So, it's OK for everyone else to negotiate the best price except workers. Is that what you're saying? Or are you saying it should be illegal for workers to organize and collectively bargain? Should it also be illegal for CEO's to negotiate their best salary and benefits package? Should it be illegal for cartels to set commodity prices? Under what statute or legal principle would you make the right to organize illegal?

It's amazing how free market purists suddenly don't trust the free market when it comes to workers' pay.

Actually, it is illegal for corporations to get together to fix prices. And, yeah, it should be.

Look, I don't have anything against unions until they get so powerful that they either take the company down (auto industry), endanger safety (airline industry), or cause the industry they represent to fail (teachers' union). When they look out for the safety and fair treatment of the actual employees, (fire union, police union), I don't have a problem with them.

Re:Educational Problems

[lbates_35476]

While I think that teacher's unions are "part" of the problem, I'm convinced that the bigger problem is that there is a lack of discipline and kids aren't afraid of anything that a teacher or principal can currently do to them. "Time out" just doesn't motivate a teenager to change their behavior. Parents just are not supporting teachers in this area. We have a complete generation of children that "can do no wrong" in the eyes of their parents. Until parents quit thinking their child is a complete "angel" and always blindly takes their side against teachers and administrators we will continue down this path. How things have changed in the last 30 years.

No I will admit that teachers and administrators could be wrong, but parents have got to go into this with the assumption that the child is probably wrong until proven otherwise. Assuming that the children are always right hasn't and won't work. They are children after all. While there may be times when the child is right, it is extremely important that they learn to work within the power structure that exists. The real world just isn't going to change to accommodate them even if they are right, they must find a way to adapt or we are setting them up for a lifetime of disappointment. The workplace is just not going to put up with the lack of discipline that teachers are forced to endure today and it is the children that are in for a rude awakening.

In return for this support, parents should expect teachers to be accountable. Asking teachers to be accountable for their student's proficiency without discipline or any ability to modify the student's behavior can't work.

Re:Educational Problems

[demonlapin]

Should it be illegal for cartels to set commodity prices?

That is illegal; there's a reason OPEC meetings aren't held in New York, and that LCD makers were fined for collusion (like here; that's from 2008, or here, for the new suit by the state of New York)

It's amazing how free market purists suddenly don't trust the free market when it comes to workers' pay.

I'm not aware of any "free market purists" who think cartels are a good thing. After all, teachers aren't barely-literate manual laborers; they have college degrees - shouldn't they be able to negotiate a salary on their own? If there were a market in teacher pay, for example, I'm reasonably certain that a high school physics teacher would make a lot more than a kindergarten teacher. Instead, in most public systems, pay is determined by seniority and box-checking. (Got a master's degree? Check. Gone to summer course X? Check. Collect for each box checked.)

exactly the point

[nten]

You do get what you pay for, and the teacher's union (NEA) are the single largest campaign contributors in the United States. They pay for politicians, and they get them. That is not the sole problem, but its intertwined with the rest of it. Schools have trouble telling good teachers from bad ones, and there aren't enough good ones to go around anyway, so they pay them all the same as if it were unskilled labor, and pay the administrators more in the hopes that overcompensated administrators can manage away incompetence in those actually doing the teaching. These incompetent teachers and overcompensated administrators like the NEA because it is job security. The really good teachers either go along knowing that most schools can't tell they are worth extra, don't care about the money anyway, and don't really have the ability to make a change. They are gifted teachers after all, not gifted politicians. I don't know if there is a way to tell a very good newly graduated teacher from a very poor one in the time allotted for an interview, or if there is any hint on a resume. The ability to terminate the employment of a teacher as soon as they show themselves to be sub par without worrying about lawsuits would be a less efficient, but more feasible solution to mind reading employment candidates. Paying more won't create a greater number of good teachers either, because they are almost never money motivated people. Using poor or untested teachers as little more than TAs and proctors while the better compensated, proven teachers instruct large numbers of students via live or recorded media would provide more students with access to good teachers, and a testing ground for new teachers to earn their credentials in a less pivotal role in the child's life.

Re:Educational Problems

[PopeRatzo]

Teacher's Unions are the biggest problem with the US educational system.

Not even close. The biggest problem in the US educational system is shitty parenting.

By the way, don't you believe teachers should have the right to collectively bargain? Should they not be allowed to negotiate their best pay package? Don't you trust free markets?

There is no law that says a school system must sign a contract with the teachers' unions. There is no law that says they must agree to contracts that say shitty teachers can't be fired, just as there's no law that says CEO's can't negotiate multi-million dollar golden parachutes so when they destroy a company they get a fat benefits package (like Carly Fiorina and her successor). There was also no law that said big car companies had to give their unions ridiculous pensions and post-retirement health care packages. They did so because they didn't want to agree to the modest raise that was being requested back in the '70s. The CEOs thought they were being clever, thinking that their retirees would continue to die at age 68 and they'd pull a fast one, but when people started living a decade longer, they were fucked and cried "the unions made us do it!" And the Chamber of Commerce and the Club for Growth and other anti-middle class organizations spent millions of dollars spreading FUD about unions so now knuckleheads spout crap like "Teacher's Unions are the biggest problem with the US educational system" when they ought to goddamn-well know better.

You want to improve schools? Do what I did and run for the school board. I ran as a parent when my daughter was in school, and I ran as a citizen-at-large after she graduated. I've been on and off the school board for 16 years and even in a city where there's a very powerful teachers' union, like Chicago, you'd be surprised at what can be done both to get rid of bad teachers and to improve kids' educations. The problem is that management is unwilling to assert itself, not that teachers have done what anybody could do, which is negotiate the most favorable pay package they could. It's not their fault that they're negotiating with cowards and imbeciles who themselves are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars (and they are NOT in the union). The head of a school system in a medium to large size Chicago suburb is making several timesthat school district is performing below average. Who's fault is that?

The second biggest problem with the US educational system is that people think they should just send their kids to school and hope for the best. The third biggest problem is that public schools are forced to serve every single child, regardless of disability or behavioral problem, which is something so-called "private" schools don't have to deal with. One severely handicapped student can take up as much teacher time and school resources as two classrooms full of normally-abled students.

And that list of problems doesn't even include the fact that we've got growing numbers of people who are requiring public schools to teach nonsense, like is being done in South Carolina and Texas. This crap about "unions are the problem" is just a denial of the history of the US, which if you're from Texas, is to be expected because that's what the textbooks do now.

Re:Educational Problems

[Anonymous Coward]

It's amazing how free market purists suddenly don't trust the free market when it comes to workers' pay.

It's not a free market unless union membership isn't required, and harrassment of non-union workers by union members is not permitted.

Meet those requirements, and then you can talk about a free market.

Re:Educational Problems

[ErikZ]

You don't need three advanced degrees (And the debt load that comes with it) to each ANY high school class. Period.

Home schooling is becoming more and more popular, and one of the reasons is how completely disconnected from reality Public schools are.

Re:Educational Problems

[ScrewMaster]

There's a difference between negotiating your price as an individual, and negotiating price as a group. At that point, you're now "negotiating" at gunpoint which is a whole different animal.

I'm a software developer: I'm not a member of any "Union", and I survive simply because there's a demand for my services, and I negotiate the best price I can with my employer. Furthermore, how much I can demand is tied pretty directly with my overall competence. I'm motivated to remain good at my job because otherwise I won't have one. Explain to me why a teacher should be treated any differently than any other worker. Are they so special that they can do a crappy job, get tenure, and then retire on a really really nice pension?

Worse yet, unions have, in many cases, gone from protecting workers from exploitation to becoming the very thing they decry, and often do more damage than they're worth. All those "think of the children!" types ought to be up in arms about this.

Whole story.

[AnonymousClown]

Then there are teachers like my sister who pulls in close to $70K per year, gets a $3,000 raise when she completes teacher training programs in the Summer, and has this incredible pension with TIAA CREF paid for by the school system that guarantees that she'll retire as a millionaire.

My mother was a book-keeper for a school district and as a result was able to get the same benefits as the teachers. She has absolutely no problems with money in her retirement, now and she isn't exactly a frugal person to put it lightly.

In my financial planning class, we were shown stats that showed that teachers are the tops when it comes to people who retire as millionaires.

If you start teaching at the age of 22 right out of college and stick with it for 30 years (retire at 52), you'll be set for life - nice comfortable life. The first couple of years suck in terms of apy, though. But after you get over that hump, you're making a nice living. Looking back now, I kind of wish I did that.

Either your mother is in a very shitty school district, or you're not telling us the whole story.

Re:Educational Problems

[andymadigan]

Hate to play devil's advocate here, but cartels are not (usually) legally protected, and legally the board of a company can hire whatever CEO they want. Unions, however, are legally protected entities. It would be a bit nuts to fire all the teachers and hire new people, but the law is there because some employers would do it if they could.

Teachers Unions are worried because true evaluation of teacher performance would create two classes of teachers for them: those that were good at their job and didn't need the union to help them, and those who were bad at their job and the union could not save. That would make the union ineffective, threatening the pay of those who run the union. It's an institution and center of power, and it has a will of its own. This shouldn't be, unions were intended to prevent employer abuse, not to stop employers from hiring the best people for the job.

Re:Educational Problems

[z80kid]

Each of those industries is dominated by dinosaurs that only linger on because they are kept on life support by government.

They are kept on life support by government at the behest of the unions. GM wasn't bailed out for our benefit - it was bailed out for the benefit of the UAW.

Re:Educational Problems

[russotto]

There's a difference between negotiating your price as an individual, and negotiating price as a group. At that point, you're now "negotiating" at gunpoint which is a whole different animal.

It's only "gunpoint" when people are prevented from negotiating other than as a group. Which is in fact the case with teacher's unions (and most surviving unions), but the problem isn't with group negotiation; the problem is with the force required to sustain it.

Re:Educational Problems

[russotto]

My mother is a public high school Spanish teacher. She has an undergraduate degree in Romance Languages from an Ivy League, a Masters in Spanish from a well-known state school, and is currently working towards her PhD. She's been teaching at the school she's at for almost 15 years, I believe. She used to work for an import/export company, then an investment banker. She speaks 7 languages with a high degree of proficiency, 5 of which she's fluent in.

Have any of her students who didn't already know Spanish learned to speak Spanish in her classes?

I know a lot of people who have taken high school language classes (including myself). I know exactly 0 who learned a language that way. They're a checkbox in the "well-rounded education" checklist, nothing more.

If teachers were paid by the hour, most would likely make less than a fast food worker when averaged out.

If a minimum wage fast-food worker were to work for 12 hours a day every day for 10 months a year, he or she would make about $26,500/yr. You going to tell me that most teachers work more and make less? Pull the other one, it's got bells on.

Re:Educational Problems

[PopeRatzo]

that they either take the company down (auto industry)

Just remember, it was management's idea to give those ridiculous retirement benefits, not the unions. The union requested a modest pay raise, and management thought they'd get away cheap by giving retirement bennies instead, thinking workers would only live to 68. In hindsight, the pay raise would have been much cheaper.

Re:Educational Problems

[drinkypoo]

The teacher's union is the largest problem with education in this country. It is virtually impossible to fire a bad educator. Almost all school jobs are union, so it's actually almost impossible to fire a bad systems administrator. I know of at least one whose job I would have as I have on two occasions been hired as a contractor to do things he should have known how to do, in fact things covered by his job description.

Unions are leeches sucking the lifeblood out of this nation. Before the invention of labor laws, they were a necessary evil. Now they are an unnecessary evil often run by the mafia or other organized criminal organizations (yes, even today) and they exist to secure special rights for some individuals when what is truly needed is labor laws which cover all employees.

Re:Educational Problems

[David Jao]

If there were a market in teacher pay, for example, I'm reasonably certain that a high school physics teacher would make a lot more than a kindergarten teacher.

I think you are badly and dangerously wrong. Correct facts are a prerequisite for a robust debate, and your facts are wrong.

According to a recent study, the true economic value of an outstanding kindergarten teacher is somewhere around $320,000 per year. As in, three hundred and twenty thousand US dollars. A high school teacher is not worth anywhere near as much. That's because, by the time students get into high school, they are too old for a teacher to change them very much. In order to make a significant difference in a student's life outcome, you have to get to them while they're young.

If schools actually start paying their best kindergarten teachers $320,000 per year, then yeah, sure, to hell with unions. Until then, however, I view them as a necessary evil.

Re:Educational Problems

[Attila Dimedici]

You do realize that Obama made the bond holders and other high priority creditors (according to current bankruptcy law) accept less money than a bankruptcy court would have awarded them, while the unions got basically all that they were "owed" (when in bankruptcy court they would have gotten next to nothing)? That Obama threatened said bond holders with IRS audits and investigations by other branches of government if they failed to agree? Such audits and investigations would have been very expensive for the bond holders even if they had not broken any laws or regulations. Bush made some government loans to GM and Chrysler, but the major bailout was by Obama. Bush wanted to use TARP funds, but Congress would not change the wording to allow that. Obama used those funds anyway.

Re:Since when is a teacher solely responsible

[Chibi Merrow]

I know this is Slashdot and all... Could you be bothered to even slightly learn anything about the source's methods?

The study tracks scores from year to year... And it shows that there are certain teachers who consistently bring scores down, and other teachers who consistently bring scores up. Since students are assigned practically randomly, if it was all down to how hard the students tried we wouldn't see that.

Speaking as a teacher

[aussersterne]

(though at NYC colleges, not LA K-12), release the metrics. I'd have nothing to hide, and I'd suspect any teacher that doesn't want such things made public. As far as I'm concerned, prospective students have a right to know how other students have fared in my classes, what other students thought of my teaching, and how both have changed over time. If that makes a lot of people want to avoid my classes, maybe--just maybe--I'm in the wrong field of work.

Re:Educational Problems

[zippthorne]

In hindsight, the original deals might have been valid: the first workers to get those bennies did only live to 68. The problem is that as health care and nutritional improvements increased the lifespan, they were unable to re-negotiate. With a union, everything gets ratcheted up. Things very, very, rarely get negotiated down.*

*partially because people don't seem to know that there is a good answer to the typical objection of "but what about all the people who were counting on those benefits." and that answer is, "pro rata." There's no reason why new people should get the benefits you can't afford just because you're committed to people who've spent their whole careers working for you.

Re:Educational Problems

[Dishevel]

I believe that unions benefit unions. That is all they do. They all just want more members. Paying more dues. So they can give it to politicians who will pass laws that make people who do not want to be in a union forced to pay dues anyway. Let me say this really clearly.

FUCK UNIONS.

They may have been useful when corporations owned the government but it is just as bad when the unions own them.

Re:Educational Problems

[Dishevel]

Cant pay teachers what they are worth. They are currently boycotting a paper for showing people what they are worth.

Dear people who pay my salary. PAY ME WHAT I AM WORTH! Please though do not judge me on how well I am doing. Do not look at the results I produce. Just give me more and we will call it paying me what I am worth.

Re:Educational Problems

[CastrTroy]

Being from Canada, I always found the SATs to be an odd thing. You go through 12 years of schooling, getting graded the whole way along, and then the only thing that counts for getting into university is a test that takes a few hours. Seems like a bad system. It's prime target for cheating, first of all. A bad student could hire someone to take the test for them. I'm sure they check IDs and stuff, but I wouldn't go so far to say it hasn't been done, or isn't done on a regular basis. In Canada, they look at your marks from high school. There's a "university application centre" that handles the applications, and they know how different schools vary from other schools, and take that into account as well when processing the applications. It's a much better system. You get into university, not just based on a single test, but on your overall performance during high school.

Re:Teacher Evaluations

[tnk1]

That calculation has already been accounted for. If you are trending one class year-to-year for the level of improvement, then the level of the students should not matter because the pool of students is the same for each sample. What they are comparing is the level of the same class at the beginning of the year to the end of the year. So yes, you will see the advanced kids getting higher scores than the special-needs kids the entire year, but if those same advanced students get a lower score at the end of the year, relative to the beginning of the year, they have regressed, despite the fact that they are still far ahead of the special-needs classes.

Mr. Jones (advanced) start year score 95 -> end year score 92 Mr. Jones' kids are high scoring, but have regressed. He might be considered a low performing teacher even though his kids are all high performing.

Ms. James (special-needs) start year score 75 -> end year score 79 Ms. James' kids are definitely below the advanced kids on average, but they have improved on their performance over the year. Ms. James might be considered a higher performing teacher, even if her students may never see the honor roll in their whole career.

That's how they worked out their ratings. They are not trying to pretend that a high performing teacher will turn special-needs kids in to advanced placement kids, they are only rating the ability of the teachers to drive improvement of any sort for the children.

Of course, if special needs kids keep getting teachers like Ms. James from elementary all the way to the end of high school, one might actually see that (statistically) a special needs kid might be able to progress to being advanced through steady progression by way of a chain of superior teachers for their entire school career. There are probably barriers to that sort of rosy kid of outcome, but we need to remember that what we learn in school, even in the more advanced classes, is not exactly esoteric knowledge. It is knowledge that is commonly known and fairly widely used. There is no reason that a student with superior instruction could not learn all of that, even if they have a rather average (or even below average) intelligence.

Re:Educational Problems

[TheGeneration]

Golly gosh it is so awful when the owners of a corporation have to actually keep their contractual promises to their employees. Boodeehoodeehooo. I'm crying so many tears for those owners that ran the company into the ground.

Re:Educational Problems

[InterGuru]

Since Unions are such a big problem, I assume that than non-union Mississippi has better schools than unionized Massachusetts.

Re:Educational Problems

[PopeRatzo]

The problem is that as health care and nutritional improvements increased the lifespan, they were unable to re-negotiate

I agree that the companies were very stupid and shortsighted, but nobody forced them to sign those contracts. Instead of trying to dick around the workers, they could have negotiated in good faith.

If by "re-negotiate" you mean, re-neg on a contract, well, if I buy a car from one of those companies, and my income goes down so I can't make the full payments, will they "renegotiate" the contract with me and accept less than the original terms of the contract? Maybe I borrowed $20k on the car, but now I want to pay them $12k. Are they going to go for that you think?

Re:Educational Problems

[schnell]

The system you describe sounds interesting, but is ripe for abuse in its own way. How, for example, does the "university application center" know how one school varies from another, and how do they judge it? Does it somehow mean that my 4.0 GPA is worth less to them if they think my school wasn't as good as somebody else's?

I would much prefer to have everyone take the same test and be judged on standardized criteria - that leaves it up to every student to show their knowledge on a level playing field. Sure, SATs are imperfect tests, and can easily fail to capture a student's depth or breadth of knowledge. But that's why high school transcripts, AP tests and activities play a significant role in US college admissions as well.

Re:GM's idea? Really?

[PopeRatzo]

Except that they got pay raises and exorbitant benefits.

No, they didn't get pay raises. They got the bennies in place of the pay raises.

And I'm going to need to see some kind of citation about the benefits being management's idea.

Sorry, the best I can do is this: When I was a kid, my grandfather, who lived in the same big house with my dad and mom and sister and grandma, worked at a GM supplier on the South Side that worked under the same contract that GM had in Detroit. I remember hearing about those negotiations every single night at the dinner table.

I come from a union family. Three generations before me, from railroad-workers unions to firefighters and policeman's union to Teamsters.

If it hadn't been for those unions, I would not have grown up in a middle-class family, and I'm betting neither would you, because those gains made by organized labor did things like create the 5-day workweek, and paid vacations, and sick leave. If it wasn't for those unions, and their influence on the political system, I would never have gone to university or grad school. If it wasn't for those unions, there would be no middle-class in the US. Just an ownership class, a merchant class and a bunch of workers who lived paycheck to paycheck and owned nothing. Just look at the decades before the organized labor movement to see what I'm talking about. Women dying in shirt factories, kids working in meat packing plants instead of going to school, company stores. Starting with the Reagan administration, we've been heading back in that direction, and combined with his (and his three successors) all rewarding companies that shipped jobs overseas, we will never again have a strong manufacturing sector in the US. That's gone for good, finished. US wages are headed for China levels.

And that's going to apply to tech workers, too. Already, there are places in the US where it's cheaper to have a call center than India, because of declining pay levels. Tech workers are working longer hours, having fewer benefits, and in more and more cases they're just contract workers so they get no benefits at all, not even vacation.

Don't believe that because you're a high-flying tech worker that you're immune from the decline of the middle class. During the period from 2000-2008, your real income went down by an average of $2000. If you're still middle-class, it's largely thanks to your credit card and huge mortgage, and even those are going to be going away. The US is down to about #11 among other countries in quality of life and dropping fast. And no, it's not due to the past 19 months.

Re:GM's idea? Really?

[PopeRatzo]

Hopefully the anti-capitalist Michael Moore can bring jobs back to the Rust Belt.

You honestly believe it was unions that sent the manufacturing jobs overseas? Do you realize that those jobs moving overseas had everything to do with "free trade" policies begun under Nixon, expanded by Reagan and then put into overdrive by Clinton. It had nothing to do with unions, because no matter how much less American workers took, they'd never take the kind of wages that are paid in the developing world.

"Globalism" and "Free Trade" are the agenda of the corporatocracy that killed Detroit, and Pittsburgh. South Korea drives the cost of American manufactured goods through the roof, but we've got to let Hyundais and Kias in for nothing. This has never been about getting elected. It's been about our politicians doing what they're paid by corporations to do. And the Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court has just taken the last gate off the hinges. Now it's a cakewalk for corporate power, driving America into the Third World.

It's so short-sighted to think it's labor's fault. You've got to think a little deeper than the Rush Limbaugh party line.

Did you know that a starting UAW autoworker today is making the exact same wage as a starting US auto worker in the 1970's? And by the way, back then the car companies were profitable and a new car didn't cost the equivalent of an average family's income.

If America has any hope, you've got to stop being so easily fooled by advertising and the corporate media. After half a century, they know exactly how to play you and the vast American "middle" is singing right along, unfortunately. If that keeps up, you might as well accept that the America you grew up is gone forever and our quality of life is heading straight into the toilet.