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Paying “bad” teachers to quit
Posted By katie allison granju
This anti-union stunt is getting a lot of attention today.
The Center for Union Facts on Tuesday will ask parents, students and other teachers to nominate the “worst unionized teacher in America.” The center says it will choose 10 and offer each $10,000 to quit; “winners” must allow the center to write about them on its Web site. The center plans full-page ads today in USA TODAY and The New York Times.
If the idea seems breathtaking in its political incorrectness, consider that it’s the brainchild of Rick Berman, a union-bashing attorney known for his in-your-face attacks on consumer, safety and environmental groups.
“We’re not trying to humiliate anyone,” says Berman. “We’re trying to jump-start a conversation that maybe people need severance packages to find themselves another line of work.”
Critics have long said collective bargaining agreements in many school districts make it difficult, if not impossible, to fire poorly performing or misbehaving teachers. “The next best idea,” he says, “is to get people to voluntarily quit.”
Berman says he hopes to persuade education advocates to adopt his “severance package” idea as a school improvement strategy, much as they now view investing in innovative charter schools. “Maybe we wouldn’t need to fund charter schools if the public schools are pristine models of excellence on their own,” he says.
The contest will be hosted on Berman’s Web site, teachersunionexposed.com, which goes live Tuesday. He says that nominations must be backed up by written documentation, including police reports if criminal activity is alleged. He also promises not to publish details about teachers who don’t consent to contest terms or accept the $10,000 award.
(My thought: wouldn’t it take more than 10K to convince any teacher to give up his/her career altogether?)
Mar 11th, 2008
Wouldn’t this give an incentive to teachers to intentionally perform poorly in order to collect on the money?
Teachers keep claiming that they’re professionals and should be treated as such. Every professional I know keeps his or her clients by providing a service that keeps the client happy. Part of that package is that a client who is NOT happy with them can go elsewhere. No professional I’ve met, whether self-employed or working for a firm, is unionized.
Almost all teachers work for union shops, in government subsidized work places, with a clientèle that is required by law to use their services. Most of those teachers are competent, even occasionally brilliant. But they are not professionals unless they work for a private school or some charter schools.
That said, good teachers are truly deserving of praise because they are doing good and vital work with little other than their own integrity as a goad. They could slack off with little consequence other than to their own consciences, but they don’t.
The problem is if your kid is stuck with deadwood there’s not much you can do about it. It’s like a lottery that you have to either enter or go to jail, and if you “win” your kid has one of their thumbs cut off.
The publicity is going to be worth much more than a measly $10K.
But a conversation about introducing incentives and meritocracy into the teaching profession HAS to happen.
I taught for 2 years in a state that did not have powerful teachers’ unions. I saw very little in the way of deadwood. The basic problem facing teachers today is that the school system has taken on responsibilities for students that were parental responsibilities a generation ago. 1) Discipline of students is much more problematic than it used to be. 2) As motivation today is supposed to come from the teacher, not parent or student, coupled with various forms of “no child left behind,” there are very few teachers who can do an adequate job in less than 60 hours per week. The result is that within five years of becoming certified, half have left the teaching profession. That is a much bigger problem than deadwood.
10K is not in the ballpark. Around here, average teacher salary is north of 60K, and they get half pay retirement after 20 yrs. So present value of getting rid of a bad teacher would be something north of a million bucks, even if you don’t count the damage they do in place.
My wife took over a high school band position in a district that had seen its program languish for decades, only to discover her predecessor was running an investment office out of the bandroom. While the kids were pushed off to pep band and high schoolers given jr. high literature to play, he managed portfolios and ran a decent little business out of his office.
Given no reason to quit, he had the nice life of dual incomes, free health insurance for his investment practice, free office and phone. We’ve seen a lot of that in her career - deadbeat teachers only in it for the easy job with endless free time to screw around or run a business on the side and free benefits.
Lacking aggressive standards and at-will termination, it’ll never change.
I read with interest the comments regarding the professional status of teachers. It is precisely this logic that leads to widespread disrespect for the profession of teaching. Teachers must attend college and take licensure tests as do doctors and lawyers. There is certainly “deadwood” in the profession but having working in the “professional” world prior to teaching, I can attest to there being a lot of “deadwood” there as well. One post referred to the exorbitant number, upwards of 50%, of people who leave the profession within five years. This is a testament to the difficulties facing teachers today as alluded to in the same post.
Teachers are unionized, this is true, but they must also serve three years before they can receive tenure. Teachers are unionized to redress past injustices done to teachers such as low pay, etc. While unionization can act as a shield to protect “bad” teachers it also shields the far more numerous good teachers for the whim and caprice of their clientèle and as such serves a greater good.
There is a lot to be said for the teacher’s unions role in the decline of education. Unions are in business these days to protect the lazy and the incompetent. That’s why they are in decline in the private sector and gaining ground in the public sector.
But there is something else the contributes even more to the problems in our public schools. That would be the programs to keep the dropout rate down.
40 years ago dropouts were sent on their way and we had the benefit of uneducated farm and factory workers. They never made much and usually had a bad attitude.
Now the kids are kept in school. They’re even courted by the administration in order to keep their dropout rate low. So they stay in school. But they don’t study, they don’t perform and they contribute a lot to disrupting the classes which keep the other kids from learning.
Because the kids in school are adolescents they even think this kind of behavior is “cool” and something to emulate. This contributes to disciplinary problems and often results in kids who would not normally behave in a disruptive manner to do so in imitation. This in turn contributes to the “my Johnny wouldn’t do that” attitude from the parents. The parents don’t think their kids would behave like that because normally they wouldn’t. But being an adolescent and wanting to be “cool.” They do.
What is needed is to get these disruptive kids out of the classroom, not keep them there. They’re the ones that graduate unable to read and write at a high school level. They’re not learning by staying in school, they’re just marking time doing as little as they can get away with.
If they drop out they are going to be low skill, low income losers, but even if they stay they’re still going to be low skill, low income losers We shouldn’t let them take other kids with them.
In an institution that obtains both its clientele and its funding at the point of a gun, exactly what virtue is involved in delivering excellent professional product? It’s like Ivan the Terrible making Death Camp Guard of the Month. Ecrasez l’enfame.
“(My thought: wouldn’t it take more than 10K to convince any teacher to give up his/her career altogether?)”
My experience with teachers trying to operate in the real world (I deal with financial and credit issues) is that, for the most part, they are incredibly bad at math. And quite inept at making monetary decisions.
As a former high school science teacher, I have plenty to say on this subject!
Regarding the previous comments by other posters on student discipline, they are right on target: I was forced to keep maladjusted, troublesome students who had no business being in a public high school, let alone a junior-level chemistry class. Many could not read or calculate at anything approaching grade-level, and simply siphoned my time and attention away from rest of the class. All in all, I spent perhaps 40-50% of my time disciplining unruly students, time I could have spent helping students who were there to learn.
Moreover, students were free, more or less with impunity, to threaten the teachers with violence. I was then an athletic man of 190 lbs. and in my late 20s, but one several occasions I was threatened with physical violence. The administration, fearful of appearing incompetent and having an ‘incident’ show up in its performance ratings, did nothing.
I have BS and MS degrees in science, and have worked since leaving teaching in two medical schools and the pharmaceutical industry doing research. I learned virtually nothing in the education courses I was forced to take to get certified, most were completely lacking in rigor and required little effort on my part. The sole exception was a methods course specific to my field, and that was taught by a former secondary science teacher turned Ph.D. scientist. The current public education system must be changed to allow entrance into the field of people with content knowledge and simply coursework in education. The basics of educational technique can be taught in a 6-8 week seminar; most successful adults already know much of what they will need to teach. This is less so with children prior to secondary school, but even then much can be learned on the job instead of in the ivory tower. An experienced 4th grade teacher, demonstrating in class, has a lot more to teach a novice teacher than some Ph.D. who hasn’t been in a classroom near kids in ten years or more. The current system excludes qualified people simply because they lack the piece of paper certifying them, even though they may in fact be expert in a given field. For example, I have studied history for over 35 years as a hobby and know as much as many doctoral degree holders in my area of specialization. But because I do not have a degree in history, and have not student-taught the subject, I stand no chance of teaching it in a public school. The lesson from this should be to change the system to make it competency-based, not credentials-based. Allow qualified people to take an achievement test to prove their competency in a given subject. To do less is to waste the many talents of prospective teachers, i.e. those professionals who have amassed an adult career’s worth of expertise, knowledge and experience. An engineer or scientist who has used those skills on the job would be a priceless addition to any science faculty, but only if we don’t discourage those people from entering the field in the first place by burdening them with ridiculous requirements and red tape.
Another sore spot: If teachers are to be regarded as professionals, why are they required to coach and perform other ancillary activities, often for little/no compensation? I know a high school English teacher, a fellow martial artist who belongs to the same school as I do. This man teachers a full course load, but got roped into coaching basketball. As it turns out, he enjoys it OK as he likes the guys. But if you break down what he gets paid for doing it on an hourly basis, is it a pittance – less than minimum wage. Why should a science teacher, for example, or perhaps a computer teacher, have to coach? Keeping up with advances in these fast-moving fields is challenge enough, on top of teaching, grading papers, and all the other tasks educators are tasked with. Pressuring teachers to coach or run clubs is simply foolish; it detracts from their primary duties. Want a football team or basketball team? That’s fine; budget the money for hiring a fulltime coach whose training and inclination dispose him/her to running sports programs and teams. Your physics teacher should not be a drafted PE coach (My older brother once had a PE coach as a physics teacher, that’s no lie), nor should your coaches be science or other teachers conscripted into coaching for fear of losing their jobs.
One final gripe: We could safely eliminate most of the massive bureaucracies that ‘oversee’ public education, i.e. overpaid administrators, superintendents, and other functionaries, most of whom make far more money than the classroom teachers down in the trenches actually teaching the students. This is a classic case of the tail wagging the dog. Most of these positions could be cut and the savings used to hire more teachers, build more schools or – heaven forbid – pay existing teachers more money. Remember, you get what you pay for: Of course there are exceptions, but if you pay teachers a salary far less than that received by doctors, engineers, or lawyers, you are going to lose the best and brightest to those fields, and the prestige of teaching will continue to lag behind those professions.
“Golden Parachute” clause…firms will basically bribe CEOs to leave the company if they’re running it into the ground. Why should this be a new idea?
eric@6:33–
The present value of a 60k salary for 20 years, followed by a 30k pension for 35 years, discounted at 6%, is $823K.
Thanks Phil for the calculation, which I just eyeballed. But (a) the teachers get automatic raises, and
(b) right now the risk free rate of return is something under 3%, so I stand by my eyeball estimate of something north of a million bucks.
Union bashing gets you nowhere. Unions are necessary so that administrators don’t engage in favoritism. Teachers are professionals and Unions protect their right to act like professionals. Unions also help protect teacher safety, which is a major concern. This guy Berman who thought up this stunt cause he doesn’t like unions, environmentalists, and other people who can think instead of submit like sheep, is a jerk of the first order.
“Submit like sheep” - that’s funny, because that’s exactly what you have to do if you are a member of a union. Comrade.
Unions will be the death of the American work force, sooner or later. It is long past time to get them the hell out before they do much more damage than they already have.