United we what?: A Response to “Grading Teachers” (part 3 of 6)
The Arcade Fire – Suburban War
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“Argument”: 1. A collected series of statements to establish a definite proposition. 2. Not merely contradiction.
The Times has gone on to publish two significant stories since the last update of this blog series, one an interesting commentarial piece on evaluating entire schools using the value-added method (VAM) as opposed to the traditional API score. Whereas last week’s report spotlighting individual teachers’ results seemed to initially infuriate nearly everyone in the teaching profession, I suspect that the aforementioned article will actually serve as some validation to certain schools who provide excellent education for their students, yet are still deemed via current labeling as “failures”.
The second major story, which is a huge surprise to me, is that our union has agreed to open up renegotiations with the district regarding teacher evaluations. This stands in stark contrast to the hard-line position that our Union president took a week ago when he called for a “massive boycott” of the L.A. Times (though just how exactly one boycotts a business that literally gives away all its content for free online, I’m not sure about).
Now personally, I understand why unions exists, and also why teachers need good ones, particularly in a district with little administrative accountability (not to say that all administrators are ineffective; ours, in particular, are actually great), and few systems in place to ensure teachers are actually supported, rather than singled out.
However, I don’t much like our union. I’m not sure what a boycott of the L.A. Times is supposed to accomplish; I think the problem is that even the Union doesn’t know what it wants to accomplish. We tirelessly preach and pontificate about how the school system is broken because there is so little student accountability and so little administrative accountability. Yet one mention of anything that relates to teacher accountability, and our union immediately takes up a contrarian position. Period. No discussion. No debate. No nothing.
Yet despite promising to work to ensure that struggling teachers are supported, our union is simultaneously preventing this from happening by fighting so hard to hide those teachers who could actually use the support. This is where my faith in our union fails. We say we want to improve, but are unwilling to identify specifically how we are to improve as educators. I haven’t read the paper on the value added model (although if you’d like to plough through the heavy statistics here and summarize for me, I’d be grateful), but the basically, the union decided it would be against it, and then went out to find research to support that claim.
My hope for UTLA, as they finally sit down with the district is that their focus will not be to automatically write-off any new method to evaluate teachers, but rather to ensure that in contract negotiations, the primacy of using data to help educators improve their practice is the main thing. Specifically, the union needs to ensure that LAUSD puts systems in place that guarantee struggling teachers receive support and also guarantee that struggling teachers who do not receive support from administrators cannot be fired (and those admins who are not supporting would need to be dealt with accordingly). If we don’t know what’s broke, we can’t fix it. All that the union needs to do, is ensure that the district “fixes it”, and doesn’t merely “throw it away”. Simply denying there’s nothing broken will not help kids.
Themocracy
Fabulous, the leadership of the union has failed its teachers by their continuous “NOPE” argument. Satire can be so powerful, thanks for the video.
For sure. And it doesn’t hurt that one can pretty much find a good Monty Python video to satirize everything.