State of the Union? …Under attack!

President Obama recently delivered his State of the Union address in which he highlighted education as a necessity to move our country into the future.  Obama referenced two education reforms he wishes to implement: performance pay for teachers and the end of teacher tenure as we know it.  Obama stated, “We want to reward good teachers and stop making excuses for bad ones.”  Both of these will directly affect teacher rights and the unions that represent them. 

Teacher unions protect the rights of those they represent, they in no way work to keep bad teachers employed.  It is the job of school administrators to weed out underperforming teachers before they gain tenure.   The shift is simple: tell a new hire that their first year is an extended interview and they will only be kept on if the fit is right for both parties.  As for that burnt-out veteran, my guess is that they are still valuable to the school and could be used in different roles under a good administrator.

Performance pay is acceptable to most teachers if a sufficient measure can be developed.  Until that multiple and complex measure is determined, any performance pay system will be violating the professionalism, equity, and rights of teachers.  We will really need unions once these performance measures are implemented!

The President’s address also highlighted the need for innovation.  If you read this blog, you know that this is something I deem as extremely important to our nation’s success - we must teach and foster creativity and innovation.  I wrote about it in “Why Test Scores are Failing Us”.

Unfortunately, reforms supported by the President, such as merit pay, will likely continue to be tied to high stakes testing which take all the creativity and innovation out of curriculum.  I guarantee that teachers today are more refined in their craft than those that spawned the generations of NASA scientists that got us to the moon.  But, we have to have room to operate.  A generation of teachers running scared will not take risks (see my blog about the importance of risks), and yet in promoting innovation that is what we are asking the next generation to do.

While Obama also mentioned the need for family and community support of students, any reform which is fundamentally built around punishing teachers will ultimately fail.  The state of the union and the teachers these unions represent is strong (is it ever anything else?) but definitely under attack. 

Give teachers a real voice – reclaim public education!