How Teachers' Unions Hope to Improve the Schools

By HARRY BERNSTEIN

March 6, 1990 12 AM PT

Practically everybody agrees that America’s schools need momentous improvements, but many of the laudable goals set last week by powerful political leaders were ridiculously mushy.

Some ideas from others, though, are specific and controversial, such as the ones being debated this week by the Kentucky Legislature, which based its proposals in part on those offered by Albert Shanker, president of the 750,000-member American Federation of Teachers.

Probably the mushiest, least useful ideas are those approved last week by the nation’s governors with support from President Bush.

After studying our education problems at length, the governors and the President all agreed that, among other things, by the year 2000 every school in the country should be free of drugs and violence and U.S. students should be first in the world in math and science.

Great, only they didn’t come up with a plan to reach those goals.

Much more specific and therefore far more debatable are the proposals by Shanker and those in the Kentucky Legislature to revolutionize our public schools by radically changing the way that they teach kids and also offering significant monetary rewards to teachers whose students make meaningful educational improvements.

Also last week, the 2-million-member National Education Assn. announced creation of a National Center for Innovation in Education that NEA President Keith Geiger said is the country’s widest-reaching network for restructuring our schools.

Between them, the two politically potent unions represent nearly 85% of the 2.1 million primary and secondary school teachers, the most highly unionized segment of America’s work force.

The teachers’ newly intensified campaign to overhaul the school system could help the political leaders focus on ways to at least move toward what are now only their “pie-in-the-sky” goals.

Both unions are already pushing one radical concept that gives teachers and school officials an equal voice in managing their schools. That wise power-sharing idea is spreading rapidly and has been started in many large cities, including Los Angeles.

Even more radical are some of Shanker’s latest proposals. For instance, one suggestion is that schools consider having teachers work in teams of six, with each team getting the number of students that they normally would teach.

The teacher teams would divide their students into customary class size, but teachers and students would remain together for six years, learning together and making their own adjustments in schedules and subject matter as they went along.

This, Shanker says, would turn the usual bureaucratic assembly-line process of educating children into a “teaching and learning enterprise,” with teachers in successful “enterprises” earning substantial bonuses.

Teachers would not have to learn the names and capabilities of many hundreds of students over the six-year period, just those on their teams.

Pupils of mixed ability in each class would be divided into groups of five or six and be given more responsibility for their own education and for helping their teammates.

Lecturing by teachers would be sharply curtailed as student participation increased. Teachers would be paid a decent basic salary and compete against a norm determined for their own individual school, and all teachers in a school whose students progressed above their norm would get a handsome bonus.

This incentive school system would develop an entrepreneurial spirit that would stimulate teachers to come up with more of their own ideas for raising the educational level of their students, Shanker predicts.

The union’s proposal isn’t a vague, long-range hope. Some of it is almost surely going to be tested soon in Kentucky, where, with the backing of both teachers’ unions, the Legislature this week is considering an even more elaborate plan to restructure schools.

Kentucky got serious about educational reform last year when the state’s Supreme Court dramatically declared that the whole public school system was unconstitutional because it wasn’t “efficient,” as required by the state Constitution.

The court ordered the state to abide by that vague constitutional mandate by next June, and the state’s leaders accepted a plan drawn up by, among others, David Hornback, an education lawyer. If it passes as expected, it will add about 35% to the state’s current school budget of $1.2 billion.

During the next two years, base line educational levels will be established for each school. In other words, they will be competing against their own record, not against one another, for financial rewards.

The base line will be calculated by a sampling of students who will be asked essay questions and demonstrate their educational level in ways other than by answering multiple-choice questions.

Every two years thereafter another sampling will be taken in each school, which will be managed jointly by teachers and principals. Teachers in schools that have raised their students’ level slightly will get a small bonus, but if they are innovative and raise the level substantially, all teachers in the school can get bonuses of up to 50% of their annual pay, which now averages about $25,000 a year.

Students in schools where educational levels have dropped 5% or more will have the right to transfer to a more successful school. If a school fails to meet its norm, more and more students will transfer and teachers and principals in the unsuccessful schools would face the loss of their jobs and be required to relinquish their decision-making power to specially selected teachers.

Some educators, including Russell Smith, Stanford’s dean of education, are rightly concerned about placing such a high priority on money as a reward for teaching, and NEA President Geiger worries that the plan will further divide children into groups of “winners” and “losers.” We have too much of that already for less fortunate children in ghettos.

But innovative, specific ideas like those proposed by the unions and the Kentucky Legislature deserve national attention because without them or other equally imaginative proposals, our education system will continue to trail those in most other major industrialized countries.

SPENDING ON EDUCATION

Spending as a percent of gross domestic product, grades kindergarten through 12

SWEDEN: 7.0

AUSTRIA: 5.9

SWITZERLAND: 5.8

NORWAY: 5.3

BELGIUM: 4.9

DENMARK: 4.8

JAPAN: 4.8

CANADA: 4.7

WEST GERMANY: 4.6

FRANCE: 4.6