Labeling teachers’ unions as part of the problem has become a shibboleth for many writers. At the same time they grudgingly admit that the unions are just doing their jobs by protecting teachers. Protecting them from what? The answer is incompetent administrators and politicians for whom education is useful only as a political football.
First, yes, there are incompetent teachers. But teacher unions are not going to allow school districts to fire incompetent teachers as long as they protect incompetent administrators. It is an absurd reality that in each school, the administration is in charge of instruction. It’s absurd because their goals don’t just differ, they often conflict.
I’ve known principals who increased class sizes by converting classroom space into storage space. As for tenure, tenure is there to protect teachers from being fired because a weak principal feels threatened by a competent teacher, or because an administrator needs to provide a job for a relative. Tenure is there to protect the teaching styles of a diverse teacher corps from longtime administrators who don’t know what to look for in a modern lesson — and disapprove anyway.
As for evaluating teachers based on standardized test scores, a child’s education requires a partnership between teachers, administrators, parents and students. No such partnership exists.
Teachers should have the same level of authority in schools as doctors have in hospitals. In reality, teachers are the last to be consulted.
The headline of the “In Our View” editorial in the May 15 Columbian states “Schools at Bursting Point: Issue of overcrowding, a problem at school districts, likely to linger for years.” Well, it has lingered for years. A recent U. S. Department of Education study observes, “A growing body of research has linked student achievement and behavior to the physical building conditions and overcrowding.” No kidding! Teachers have been telling us that for over 40 years.
In 1975, during my own practice-teaching days, a master teacher told me that the greatest determinant of the quality of a child’s education is the school building and the neighborhood in which the school is located. He was right. In some Los Angeles neighborhoods, the schools were spacious, clean and in good repair, class sizes were reasonable, and a sizable portion of the student body went on to college; in other neighborhoods, the schools were slums, class sizes directly conflicted with the ability to teach and control classes, and the drop-out rate was deplorable. The quality of education matched the conditions in and of the schools.
We’ve known this for decades, and little has been done to correct it. Why? Correcting it costs money. And worse, correcting it means admitting that teachers know what they’re talking about and giving them the power to direct remedies. And that is something legislatures and district administrators will never do.
Joel Littauer of Vancouver has a master’s degree in education and was a classroom teacher for 20 years and a teacher trainer for seven years in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
