And now, a good word for teachers

The flip side of the union coin is that teachers spend way too much time dealing with red tape. The bureaucracy that has grown up around schools as we expect them to fit in teaching around social work and performing investigations for the DEA, is ridiculous. This is true at the school level as well; teachers and principals need a great deal more flexibility to manage problem children than they currently have. I see the bureaucracy and the increasingly inflexible union work rules as part of the same process: teachers hampered by rules demand more rules of their own, which makes the administration want more rules to curtail the power of the teachers . . . the system worked a lot better when schools were both more flexible, and more accountable.

Nor will miracle teachers make up for the deficits of deprived homes. Teachers in inner city schools are dealing with marginalized kids, many of whom have parents who can't or won't cope. This is the hardest teaching their is, and it's no wonder so many give up. Especially since we can't take the obvious step of paying them more and the bureaucracy less.

I don't agree with Phillip Howard on everything, but in this I think he's right: the vast tangle of rules we've erected to ensure that our public servants don't ever make a mistake has instead ensured that they never get to do anything quite right.

Comments

Most everything you've said here is smart and true. I have to point out, though, that most of the time, the nature of human systems means that "more oversight" and "less bureaucracy" are often contradictory goals. It can be frustrating, when debating with voucher proponents, because they seem to tack effortlessly from the "we need to extract teachers from red tape" argument to the "we need to have more accountability from individual teachers!" Those are almost entirely opposite goals.

Posted by Freddie | May 14, 2008 12:50 PM

The difference is between prospective and retrospective accountability. Following someone around every minute is stupid. Setting clear standards and goals, and then monitoring to see that people have met them, is good.

Posted by Megan McArdle | May 14, 2008 1:15 PM

Freddie, I agree that those are opposite goals in a government run or heavily regulated system.

Being accountable means that you have to prove to your superiors (all the way up the chain to the legislature) that you are doing a good job for your customers so there is a lot of red tape.

But I think under a private system this is not the case. There is a direct metric of whether you are doing a good job or not the number of students that you attract to your school. So you have much more freedom to do what you want so long as it works (keeps enrolement high, makes the school more money).

This is at least my experience from working in a heavily regulated quasi government company (regulated electric utility) and in a very competitive company (energy risk management). We had much more red tape in the utility but also less accountability. Now I am accountabale in the sense that we either made money or didn't which is directly related to serving our customers so I don't have to prove myself at every turn.

I am not sure what I think about vouchers, but I do think that they could lead to more accountability and less red tape at the same time.

Posted by eccdogg | May 14, 2008 1:17 PM

A silly question for the eduwonks out there:

Has there been any consideration of having the same teacher grouped with a class of kids from K through 6 or something? I'm guessing this has been tried somewhere and found wanting.

Posted by Klug | May 14, 2008 1:24 PM

This is tangentally on-topic, but my favorite edublog* has a terrific post on the bureaucratic inertia that pretty much stifles every attempt at reform:

...when the programs parents put weeks, months, and years of their lives into making happen finally happened -- they weren't what parents had worked for.

They were something else.

Exhibit A: foreign language instruction in the grade school. A group of parents here spent 8 years lobbying for foreign language instruction in K-5.

The administration, backed by the school board, blocked them all the way.

Ultimately, though, the parents prevailed, and foreign language instruction was "implemented" in grades 4-5.

What did that mean?

That meant French and Spanish were both taught to all kids: French one semester, Spanish the next. Or vice versa. Your child couldn't take just one language and develop proficiency. He had to take one language for half the school year and then drop that language and start taking a whole other language the next semester, pretty much guaranteeing he would retain neither.

Also, the school didn't teach spoken French or Spanish. There were no language labs, no language CDs, no use of the school laptops to help kids acquire a native accent before the window closed at puberty a year or two later.

The school didn't teach very much in the way of French or Spanish vocabulary or grammer, either (this wasn't the teachers' fault). Instead, the school taught "the culture." Songs, cooking projects, things of that nature.

That was the beginning, and the district has been chipping away at the program ever since. This year they may be down to just one day of foreign language culture instruction a week.

Now the town is asked to vote in an 8% tax increase which will go, in part, to funding "enhancements" to the program.

This was the end result at a wealthy suburban school district in NY with active, educated parents. What do you think happens in poor minority neighborhoods?

*I occasionally post, and often troll the comments there. This is my shameless attempt to expand our reader base beyond the disgruntled parents/educators/math nerds who comprise our regulars.

Posted by Independent George | May 14, 2008 2:23 PM

Klug— actually, you can find that system from time to time. My sister-in-law was in such a program in Oregon, where she taught (roughly) the same group of kids from 2nd through 6th grade, several times. Then they shut down that school and I don't believe the one she works at now has that same system in place.

As with any system, it has its advantages and disadvantages. I would suspect that it wouldn't give much in the way of benefits for inner-city schools as the population is more fluid than the semi-rural area where my sister-in-law taught. You'd have too much flux in the class itself and the new kids would really stand out.

Posted by B. Durbin | May 14, 2008 10:56 PM

I took less money to teach in a private school for my first teaching job. The other teachers in the school, many of whom had stacked national certifications that are rewarded in public schools, abandoned those credentials for the joys of less interference and less money as a result. Its simply worth it. During my time teaching, I do not recall being evaluated formally, instead calls from parents sufficed to indicate I was doing a good job. I thus had the opportunity to build and create my own curriculum and educate students my way. It made three quarters pay and an hour commute worth every last minute. I find funnily that this is reversed on the college level. My public undergrad made life incredibly easy and straightforward, whereas my private grad was a bureaucratic nightmare. Most issues in grad school boiled down to who could yell loudly enough at the right person in the chain. Complete nightmare.

Posted by Nate | May 15, 2008 3:38 AM

"The flip side of the union coin is that teachers spend way too much time dealing with red tape."

Well, this would get some sympathy from me if the teachers unions, as the #1 lobbying group in NYS, ever lobbied for less regulation, instead of constantly lobbying for more (such as the example I gave under the earlier post).

Posted by Jim Glass | May 15, 2008 9:04 PM

I think the issue is not the teachers or the bureacracy. Voucher schools work because the children there see themselves differently. Instead of being losers at the bottom of society, they are special - they go to a school that is somehow special. This makes room for them to create a different peer group culture where "acting white" (studying) is not automatically stigmatized as it is in a regular school. These thoughts flow from Harris' The Nurture Assumption.

Posted by Larry | May 16, 2008 8:02 AM