Teachers versus the Public: What Americans Think about Schools and How to Fix Them

7. Divisions Within

CHAP TER SEVEN Divisions Within 93 Two years before Rahm Emmanuel’s reform proposals provoked a teacher strike in Chicago, New York City (NYC) mayor Michael Bloomberg announced his plans for “ending tenure as we know it.” The NYC school system had come under fire for granting tenure to teachers without adequate assessment of their competence. Awarded at the end of three years of teaching, tenure made it extremely difficult for school administrators to fire low-performing teachers and eventually gave rise to the school system’s notorious “rubber room” for warehousing egregiously incompetent teachers who nonetheless continued to draw their salaries. After a more stringent performance assessment process was introduced, NYC schools granted tenure to 58 percent of eligible teachers, a steep drop from the 97 percent who typically had received it in earlier years. When a local public radio station featured a story on the new tenure rate, teachers and former teachers flooded the telephone lines. Unsurprisingly, most callers lambasted moves to tighten tenure requirements. But a few teachers criticized the proposals as too weak. Said one teacher, who left the Bronx to take a job in Westchester County, “It is way too easy for teachers in NYC to get tenure. You only have to show up for three years, and you’re basically granted it. . . . I was among really bad teachers, and they got it just because it was three years.”1 Not all teachers think alike, despite the unified teacher voice heard through many a news outlet. “Are Teachers the Problem?” headlined a Time magazine story on teacher backlash against school reform.2 Nor is it only union critics who portray teachers as a monolithic bloc. When New Jersey governor Chris Christie attempted to draw a distinction between most Garden State teachers and union activists who opposed him, one activist replied, “The teachers are the unions. We are the same people.”3 Yet enough teachers dissent from union positions that it has proven possible to form alternative, reform-minded teacher organizations. Two NYC teachers, disgruntled with the school board’s and the union’s disregard for their input, launched Educators 4 Excellence (E4E), a group that committed its members to a stringent reform platform. According to journalist Richard Lee Colvin, “Teachers who want to join are expected to pledge to support using value-added test-score data in evaluations, higher hurdles to achieving tenure, the elimination of seniority-driven layoffs, school choice, and merit pay.”4 Outside NYC, the group opened chapters in Los Angeles and Minnesota. Other organizations—Teach Plus, the Hope Street Group, and the New Millennium Initiative, to name a few— are recruiting teachers for advocacy work independent of teacher unions. Still other reform-minded caucuses are forming within existing organizations . For example, Colvin describes a faction within the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA), known as NewTLA: In November of 2011, the NewTLA caucus got 85 of its members elected to the 350-member union House of Representatives and helped elect a candidate for president of the union who was thought to be more amenable to reforms. Soon after, the union agreed to grant individual schools flexibility over the school calendar, hiring, and assignment of teachers. Then [in February 2012], the caucus supported asking UTLA’s membership to direct the union to negotiate with the district on the creation of a new teacher-evaluation system . The measure won easily.5 Do these groups represent only a minuscule sliver of the teaching profession , or do they reflect deeper divisions? Do they reflect the views of younger teachers, who will be the teaching force of the future? Are they representative of a substantial conservative faction within the teaching profession, including many who identify with the Republican Party? What other social cleavages are contributing to internal divisions? Are they so large and deep that they belie the presumed unity and singularity of the profession? 94 Divisions Within In the not-too-distant past, teachers were divided into two rival organizations , the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). The NEA, the larger of the organizations, was originally led by school superintendents, and it claimed to speak on behalf of the entire education community. The more militant AFT focused specifically on better salaries and working conditions for classroom teachers . When Al Shanker and his AFT colleagues called for a strike in New York City in 1960, the local chapter of...