Teachers, Unions and Pay

* Re “Where Merit, Competence Need Not Apply,” Nov. 26.

One hardly knows where to begin in refuting William Chitwood’s views on public education and teachers unions.

Almost two-thirds of Los Angeles Unified School District schools qualify for cash rewards under the state’s Academic Performance Index--a huge accomplishment for which they should be proud. The fact that they fall 3.4% below the state average for rewards is hardly a surprise, given the special challenges of a large urban school district, foremost among them that a majority of students are learning English as a second language.

Teachers unions provide due process under agreed-upon contract language. Due process simply ensures that teachers have employment rights that must be respected. Under this process, incompetent teachers can be and are dismissed from employment every year. The truth is that the problem is not one of protecting large numbers of incompetent teachers--that is simply a myth (think about the percentage of truly incompetent teachers you’ve encountered in your own experience). The real problem is that California has a shortage of 30,000 credentialed teachers--which means 30,000 teachers struggling to learn on the job, mostly in urban schools. The solution is not more accountability. The reforms of the past few years have provided an abundance of accountability. What is needed are more bright and energetic college graduates being attracted to teaching as a profession. To accomplish this, teachers must be paid competitively with the private sector.

To those non-teachers who insist on whining about shorter hours and fewer working days (mostly false assumptions when you factor in staff development, mandatory professional development for credential renewals, assessment of student work and lesson planning), I would suggest that if we are really serious about teaching being one of society’s most important jobs, then we must offer the fringe benefit of vacation time along with competitive salaries.

CARL K. ALLENDER

Glendale

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* I agree with Chitwood that competent teachers should receive bonuses. How those bonuses are awarded--the criteria to be used by each school district and by the state in making that determination--is the question. The present state system of cash rewards selects schools based on their API ratings and recognizes (pays bonuses to) the entire continuum of teaching performance from incompetent to outstanding.

The state should recognize that all public-school teachers should be elegible for cash rewards. I agree with Chitwood that there are outstanding educational professionals in all public institutions, not just in schools having high API ratings. A plan that rewards individual classroom excellence would better serve to recognize outstanding public school educators.

What to do with “teachers who can’t teach” is not a question that is difficult to answer. They need to be terminated.

The idea that tenure for teachers guarantees employment is a fallacy. School districts and the state of California have education codes containing procedures for terminating incompetent educators. The trouble is that many district administrators, or as Chitwood stated, “those who can’t teach kids anything worthwhile who become district managers, multi-cultural consultants, curriculum specialists and educational professors,” can’t follow the guidelines required to terminate incompetent teachers.

DARWIN M. OCHS

Lancaster

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* Chitwood holds a belief that there are natural-born teachers who will do a good job no matter what you pay them because they know that teaching is a rare privilege. Chitwood could not be more wrong. Teaching is a job and has a labor market that is subject to the same market forces as other jobs.

Teachers and prospective teachers respond to pay just as anyone else. At the present time, salaries and working conditions are low enough and poor enough that there exists, especially in urban districts, a rather acute shortage of qualified teachers. It is this shortage alone that permits marginal teachers to keep their jobs and teacher unions to flex their muscles. The only way to alleviate this problem, as any economist will remind Chitwood, is to raise salaries and improve working conditions.

DAVID N. TRICHE

Van Nuys