How the Teachers' Unions Harm Education

When discussing the failings of public education, many critics have pointed to the debilitating influence of the teachers’ unions, a sentiment that resonates deeply with me because it mirrors my own position: public education will not be fixed until the teachers’ unions are no longer allowed to set or interfere with policy.

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The most significant interference, not surprisingly, has been in their control over teacher hiring and evaluation. Politicians wishing to mitigate this circumstance have spent decades enacting legislation whose sole intent appears to be undoing that control.  This movement has been overwhelmingly unsuccessful, beginning in 2001 with No Child Left Behind.  My former state of  Colorado is but one example of the farce that regulating teaching has become.  The General Assembly in that state passed a legislative boondoggle in November 2011:  Senate Bill 10-191 was supposed to improve the education delivered to Colorado’s schoolchildren by compelling teachers to adopt a reflective attitude about their teaching.  

But you can’t mandate reflection;

you can only mandate activities.

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What Colorado now has is a series of education laws that are for show only, having been hijacked by the unions so that only the paperwork to assure compliance is meaningful.  As a survivor of one of the evaluation systems spawned by the original SB 10-191, I can tell you it is doubtful that anyone is “reflecting” over how they can be a better teacher.  By 2015, the new evaluation system had become a joke in my former school, including how easy it was to corrupt two of its requirements:  the rating of instructional practices by one’s principal and the collection of student growth data by every teacher – sans authentication.  

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Colorado is not alone in the unfortunate path it has chosen. Most states have enacted legislation that compels school districts to create a performance-based teacher evaluation system that relies on paperwork for its effectiveness.  But how does paperwork ensure follow-through in a classroom?  It doesn’t.  If you look at Colorado’s scores over the last ten years (page 45 in CHAOS), you see that students are not scoring above 45% proficiency in either math or reading.  Yet, teachers in Colorado are scoring overwhelmingly in the “effective” or “highly effective” range, to the tune of 88% of them.  In Texas, that number hovers around 80%, and in Iowa, it balloons to 94%, while students in those states languish below 23% and 64% proficient in reading, respectively.  (And both of these states have similar ‘performance-based’ legislation: Iowa.gov and teachfortexas.org)

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There is no getting around the new normal in education: it is possible for any teacher to mold her evaluation disingenuously.  In Colorado, the teachers’ unions have put in place numerous caveats and loopholes upon implementation of the evaluation protocols, as I discuss in my book CHAOS.  This means that, while the laws the public can research on https://www.cde.state.co.us/ seem very much as if they are truly performance-based, the reality is that a teacher’s documentation and self-reported growth data usurp anything else in her evaluation.

And this is something the public knows nothing about.  

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Regardless of who creates the mandates for teacher evaluation, however,  there exists a fallacy that Colorado, Texas, and probably every other state suffer from: trying to fix education through legislation.  This cannot work, and I’ll tell you why: when we enact measures to ensure quality teaching, what we are really doing is creating a bureaucratic machine that rewards paperwork  only. No law can improve the instruction given to children UNLESS it contains a provision for watching a teacher teach…at any time and on a regular basis, via Closed Circuit Television.  As you know, this is not the case in our educational world, nor can it be, according to the unions.  But it should be.  Read the details in chapter 18 of my book.

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The bottom line is that our current education landscape works against achievement, something that is apparent when you examine test scores nationwide. There’s a way to fix that landscape, and it’s really quite simple.  But it will take jettisoning the traditional way many of us think of classrooms.  See chapter 18 in CHAOS if your interest is piqued.