As a teacher-to-be, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the national obsession with the former DC Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and the anti-union sentiment that accompanied her rise. Teacher unions have their downsides, sure, but on the whole, they provide a service to the nation’s public schools, as opposed to the prevailing narrative that they simply protect terrible teachers and keep great teachers from rescuing our nation’s children.
Rhee’s rise to fame wouldn’t have been so surprising if she weren’t left-leaning and adored by big name liberals across the country. How could a party so long supported by unions be leading the national effort to delegitimize and destroy one of the most influential unions?
Richard Kahlenberg has an excellent piece over at Slate in the form of a review of Richard Whitmire’s The Bee Eater, a mostly glowing biography of sorts of Rhee. Key quote:
Rhee’s message about education reform is very seductive because it’s simple and optimistic. Childhood poverty and economic school segregation, in Rhee’s world, are just “excuses” for teacher failure. If we could just get the unions to agree to stop protecting bad teachers and allow great teachers to be paid more, she says, we could make all the difference in education. The narrative is attractive because it indeed would be wonderful if poverty and segregation didn’t matter, and if heroic teachers could consistently overcome the odds for students whom everyone agrees deserve a better shot in life.
One of the main problems with Rhee’s version of educational reform is its simplistic focus on and blaming of teachers. Just get rid of the bad teachers and pay good teachers more, problem solved, they say. This discounts the complex interplay of poverty, segregation, budget cuts, and a plethora of other factors that lead to the achievement gap in our public schools. Yes, there are bad teachers out there, and yes, there should be mechanisms to fire them. But destroying teacher unions is not the answer to all our nation’s education problems. Kahlenberg:
Most education researchers, though, recognize that Rhee’s simple vision of heroic teachers saving American education is a fantasy, and that her dramatic, often authoritarian, style is ill-suited for education.
Kahlenberg goes on to discuss various alternatives to Rhee’s approach of mass firings, as well as some of the positive steps she took in DC. He doesn’t profess to have all of the answers, and neither do I, but I know that Rhee is not the solution to our problems.
Well I would like to point out that there are definitely places in the country where unions do protect the bad teachers. I know a few friends of mine who didn’t get a good education in some classes because their teacher was untrained and got the job because she was related to people high up in that local union. Who teaches arts and crafts in an AP Chemistry class??
I agree — there are definitely cases in which unions protect bad teachers. A lot of us have been in or heard of situations like that. But the solution is not to disempower unions entirely; that’s overreaching, to say the least.