Larry Sands, writing forCity Journal California, outlined how the faltering LA Unified School District will have a hard time getting reforms enacted because of opposition from the powerful teachers union:
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!A major study on teacher quality makes clear just how sclerotic the Los Angeles Unified School District has become—but while the diagnosis and prescriptions are clear, the prognosis is far from certain. The National Council on Teacher Quality’s 58-page report, “Teacher Quality Roadmap: Improving Policies and Practices in LAUSD,” was commissioned by the United Way and several civil rights groups and paid for by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. While the report focuses on Los Angeles, many of its findings are applicable to other school districts around California, where collective bargaining agreements have hamstrung administrators and state laws supersede local policies.
Such studies are vital because they spotlight problems and prescribe a course of action, but they’re only half the battle. The other half, of course, requires implementing needed reforms. New LAUSD superintendent John Deasy welcomed the report, but he knows as well as anyone that the most effective reforms would require fundamentally revising the district’s collective bargaining agreement with the United Teachers of Los Angeles—something that the union and its bought-and-paid-for board of education are simply unwilling to do.
The report, published in June, urges major changes to the union contract and to state law. Teacher evaluations should be overhauled, along with tenure rules and work schedules. Rules should be changed that assign teachers to particular schools based on seniority considerations. Compensation should reward performance, not just advanced degrees and years of experience. Another prescription would incorporate standardized test scores into teacher evaluations—a reform already in effect in Washington, D.C., Florida, Maryland, and Colorado. And the report recommends delaying tenure or permanent status until a teacher has been in a classroom for four years, instead of the two years the current contract stipulates.
Unlike most other teacher contracts, L.A. Unified’s arrangement with UTLA specifies that though full-time employees must work a full eight-hour day, those eight hours needn’t necessarily be in the classroom with kids, or even at school. According to the contract: “The varying nature of professional duties does not lend itself to a total maximum daily work time of definite or uniform length.” The report concludes that the contract lends itself to abuse and that teachers should be at their worksites for a full eight hours.
The report also advises giving principals considerably more power to hire teachers of their choosing and making it easier for administrators to get rid of incompetents. At the moment, what the report calls “perverse incentives” compel principals to overlook poorly performing teachers, which, over time, makes it even more difficult to get rid of them. “For example,” the report notes, “the online evaluation system includes a pop-up warning telling principals who have selected ‘needs improvement’ for three or more of the 27 indicators to contact Staff Relations and present documentation to reinforce the ratings.” In short, if a principal thinks a teacher needs to improve, he’ll need to receive approval from the district’s human resources bureaucracy before he can act. Who needs that kind of aggravation?
The report is particularly tough on seniority. California is one of only 12 states in which the most recent hires get pink slips first—regardless of teacher quality—when layoffs become necessary. The report proposes that a teacher’s performance should be one of the considerations used to make such decisions.
Speak Your Mind