7/15/08

Jonathan Alter

One of the best things about the Democratic primaries was that horse-race-obsessed reporters rarely asked the candidates about education. Why was that good? Because hundreds of delegates who were at stake are members of Paleolithic teachers unions, ready to pounce on any challenge to the failed system they dominate.

When the subject did arise, it quickly became a pander party with President Bush’s (and Sen. Edward Kennedy’s) No Child Left Behind law as the pinata.

But with the general election under way, Sen. Barack Obama has a chance to show that he can move at least as far toward real change in education as Sen. John McCain. Obama deserves kudos for drawing scattered boos earlier this month for mentioning charter schools when appearing via satellite before the National Education Association. But that was just a baby step. Now he needs to embrace a grand bargain: much higher pay for teachers in exchange for much more accountability for performance in the classroom. Good teachers need to be rewarded with more pay and respect for being members of our noblest profession. They need more resources. But they also need to be removed from the classroom when they fail to improve. Obama occasionally says as much, but goes fuzzy when it comes to how.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. The U.S. ranks 25th among 30 industrialized countries in math. When the landmark “A Nation at Risk” report was issued 25 years ago, the education system was ailing, but the United States was still No. 1 in college-graduation rates. It is now No. 21.

The irony is, we know what works to close the achievement gap. At the 60 KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) schools, more than 80 percent of 16,000 randomly selected low-income students go to college, four times the national average for poor kids. While KIPP isn’t fully replicable (not enough effective teachers to go around), every low-income school should be measured by how close it gets to that model, where kids go to school from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. and part of the summer, and teachers are held strictly accountable for showing student improvement.

Railing against the tyranny of tests is fashionable, but it isn’t going to save our children and our economy. Nor will more money for important programs such as art and music. The more basic problem is that we have no way of determining which teachers can actually teach. Teaching arguably is the only profession in the country with ironclad job security and a well-honed hostility to measuring results. Because of union resistance, No Child measures schools, not individual teachers. The result is that school districts fire on average one teacher a year for poor performance. Before recent reforms (which have boosted test scores), New York City dismissed 10 of 55,000 teachers annually.

Teachers unions bristle at the business comparison. But they should listen to Andy Stern, head of the nation’s largest union, the Service Employees International Union: “Paying people according to outcomes does matter. I don’t care if a teacher has a high-school degree, college or a Ph.D. if he or she can produce results.” Stern is worried that if his brethren in the teachers unions don’t embrace accountability, “parents will vote with their choices” and the unions will begin dying, as they are in reform-minded cities such as Washington, D.C.

If Stern can say that, why not Obama? All the criticism of Obama’s moving to the center is misguided. General elections are won among moderate swing voters, many of whom would respond well to a Democratic candidate willing to show he can slip the ideological stranglehold of a retrograde liberal interest group. Obama’s right that the No Child-inspired testing mania is out of control, but wrong to give teachers “ownership over the design of better assessment tools.” That’s a recipe for no assessment, because the unions, for all their lip service, don’t believe their members should be judged on performance.

Obama claims that he’s bold on this topic. But he hasn’t been direct enough about reforming No Child so that it revolves around clear measurements of teacher effectiveness. Research shows that this is the only variable (not class size or school size) that can close the achievement gap. Give poor kids from broken homes the best teachers, and most learn. Period.

To get there, Obama should hold a summit of all 50 governors and move them toward national standards and better recruitment, training and evaluation of teachers. He should advocate using Title I funds as a lever to encourage “thin contracts” free of the insane work rules and bias toward seniority. He should offer federal money for salary increases, but make them conditional on differential pay (paying teachers based on performance and willingness to work in underserved schools, which surveys show many teachers favor) and on support for the elimination of tenure. And he should tell the unions they must change their focus from job security and the protection of ineffective teachers to higher pay and true accountability for performance.

Jonathan Alter writes for Newsweek and the Washington Post Writers Group.