(Page 2 of 3)
But those same unions still play an influential role in determining how the other 99 percent of education money is spent. The money pouring in to preserve the status quo dwarfs the amount used to encourage reform.
Obama got one thing right in his State of the Union speech, at least on the federal level: "Race to the Top is the most meaningful reform of our public schools in a generation." That's true: A program that doled out a measly $4 billion in chunks ranging from $75 million to $700 million probably is the biggest step the U.S. government has taken toward school reform in a couple of decades. Which is a sad commentary on recent history.
In 1983 there was "A Nation at Risk," a Reagan-era manifesto on the need to get the feds out of education. In 1994 President Bill Clinton signed the Goals 2000 Act, which focused on increasing graduation rates and test scores by adding tutors and tech to traditional classrooms. And in 2001 there was No Child Left Behind. That legislation incorporated extremely watered-down elements of the school choice agenda, including encouragement for charters, vouchers, and other ways students can escape seriously underperforming schools with a little government cash in their backpacks. That legislation was a solidly bipartisan endeavor—Republican President George W. Bush and Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) announced the program in a lovey-dovey press conference—but within a few years NCLB had become widely unpopular. The law's national testing mandate undermined state autonomy, forcing teachers to focus on a high-stakes end-of-year test; meanwhile, state autonomy in selecting and calibrating the tests undermined their usefulness in evaluating academic success. And the law's provisions for school choice proved too easy to work around, eliminating the harshest consequences for failing schools.
The consensus about how Washington can repair America's schools has now shifted yet again, this time away from a test-based choice model and toward a fixation on teacher quality. At best, the teacher quality movement could result in better evaluation procedures, public transparency, merit pay, and a move away from seniority-based hiring and firing. At worst, it will exacerbate the focus on teaching credentials to the exclusion of competence and fund lots of continuing education junkets for senior teachers.
The strongest among the education powers that be, the great immovable object of American education, is teachers unions. In the Wisconsin, Idaho, and Indiana legislatures, bills to limit teachers' collective bargaining to wages and benefits are coming to the floor, with the goal of elbowing union leadership out of education policy decisions. Tennessee Republicans are looking to make the Volunteer State the sixth in the union to prohibit collective bargaining by teachers altogether. (At least some degree of collective bargaining is mandatory in 35 states, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality.)
Some high-profile Democrats have been going after teachers unions too. In December, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a former field organizer with the locally dominant United Teachers Los Angeles, took the education world by surprise when he wrote this in The Huffington Post: "In the past five years, I've partnered with students, parents, non-profits, business groups, higher education, charter organizations, school district leadership, elected board members, and teachers to engage in meaningful change. Along the way, there has been one, unwavering roadblock to reform: teacher union leadership."
In the face of this renewed attack of surprising force (and from surprising quarters), unions are scrambling to figure out ways to hold the line. The reformers' nemesis is Randi Weingarten, the small, fierce president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Bewildered to find herself the villain of Waiting for "Superman," Weingarten has been loudly telling anyone who will listen that she is, in fact, on the cutting edge of school reform. The AFT has a history of being slightly softer on charters than its competitors over at the National Education Association, and Weingarten proclaimed an interest in reaching out to reformers this fall, with "nothing off the table."
Yet when it comes to battles on the ground, unions are sticking with time-tested tactics. "When education reform is done without teachers' input, it is doomed to failure," Weingarten warned The American Prospect's Dana Goldstein in March 2009. After Weingarten helped kill a voucher program and then oust reformist darling Michelle Rhee from Washington, D.C., her words should be taken seriously. Like cartoon supervillains, teachers unions are extraordinarily powerful and likely to reappear in a sequel even after you think they've been defeated.
The Cornell labor historian Richard W. Hurd thinks the recent rise in anti-unionism can be directly attributed to the nationwide need to cut government spending. "It quite clearly is traced to the public-sector budgets and the deep recession—the fact that we still have depressed tax revenue for governments at all levels," Hurd told Education Week in February.
There's nothing like a shortage of cash to make politicians open to new ideas. While a significant $87 billion in education money flowed downhill from Washington last year, the rest of the cash to run public schools—four or five times that amount—comes out of state and local budgets. And after a fat decade, those budgets are suddenly tighter than a pair of Gov. Christie's pants. New Jersey plans to cut $820 million in state education aid—part of $11 billion in trims—to avoid raising taxes. In Texas a $15 billion shortfall, a balanced budget amendment, and an unwillingness to raise taxes have pushed the state legislature toward a proposed $5 billion cut for public schools. Faced with a $25 billion budget gap, California gubernatorial recidivist Jerry Brown is threatening deep cuts in K–12 education. In February another Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo of New York, proposed reductions in education funding and Medicaid to trim a $10 billion budget shortfall, saying the cuts were a necessity in his "fundamentally bankrupt" state.
In New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg is planning $1 billion in cuts to the school budget, including 21,000 teacher layoffs. New York has a "last hired, first fired" rule, which means, as the mayor put in bluntly in a February radio interview, "We'd have to part company with some of the best teachers."
It's the same sob story in at least a dozen other states: We are out of money, and teachers are expensive. Such threats are not unprecedented. Firing teachers ranks just behind firing police and firefighters as a bogeyman tactic for politicians who want to continue extracting money from the bigger, richer levels of government above them. And emergency cash transfusions have been forthcoming in the last couple of years. A federal jobs bill in August dumped $10 billion on states around the nation to preserve 160,000 education jobs, and school bureaucracies were the biggest beneficiaries of stimulus spending as well, picking up about $100 billion nationwide to cover teacher salaries. But Republicans now dominate the House of Representatives, foreshadowing fewer federal giveaways and bailouts to a constituency that overwhelmingly supports Democrats.
That means education budgets may actually lose a pound of flesh this time around, something that hasn't happened in a long, long time in most places. There are exceptions. Louisiana has seen an astonishing flowering of choice and innovation after being forced to re-evaluate the way it does pretty much everything post-Katrina. But most schools and education bureaucracies have become accustomed to living larger and larger every year. Cuts are going to be a big deal.