Arthur Goldstein, a New York educator, contemplates some of the challenges ahead, and why unions matter.
Whoever you voted for, we’re in for a tough four years. The GOP wants to end teacher tenure, enact merit pay, and implement “school choice” nationwide. I don’t know about you, but I’m not at all comfortable with that. Do you trust your principal? Do you trust every principal in the city? We are union, and while my principal may not be insane, yours may be a slobbering lunatic.
I recall, years ago, calling a NY Times reporter to comment on an article. I mentioned to him that I had two students who spoke English fluently, placed in my ESL classes because they were illiterate. As far as I could tell, there was no program suited to help them. The reporter asked if he could write about it. I wasn’t sure.
“Do you have tenure?” he asked. I said I did and he said not to worry. He sent my quote in a fax to the DOE. My principal called me into his office. We had a big meeting with counselors and supervisors. It appeared everyone’s ass was sufficiently covered, which was all that mattered. Still, the principal let me know all of this, whatever it was, was solely my fault.
He started making me check out with him every day, especially on those Regents days where high school teachers tend to disappear. When he refused to buy books for my students, I found something in the contract that said he was required to to provide supplies. I threatened to grieve, for the first time in my career. The principal bought the books and stopped harassing me.
That principal, if he could have, would have fired me for publicly expressing concern for my misplaced students. I needed tenure then, and you need it now. City charter teachers don’t have tenure. They may move around every few years from school to school. Institutional memory doesn’t exist in gig culture.
Years later, as chapter leader, I was quoted as saying my then-principal was “not insane.” The old principal who harassed me visited and started ranting about how I was implying that he was insane. What can you say but thank God for tenure. They can pry it from our cold, dead hands. (By then we won’t need it anymore.)
Merit pay? It’s been around since 1920 and has never worked anywhere. And who gets it? The person who washes the principal’s car on Tuesday? The one who visits the Comfort Inn with him Wednesday? The one who jumps up and down to make the bestest bulletin boards?
Or do we battle one another to raise standardized test scores, which may as well reflect zip codes rather than teacher quality? Campbell’s Law says the more we push this stuff, the higher the possibility for undesirable consequence. It leads to outright fraud, like, GW’s Texas Miracle, or Michelle Rhee’s questionable achievements, even after she blamed and fired everyone she could.
“School choice” means we send tax dollars to private schools. Often as not, this benefits those who already send their kids there—those who really don’t need extra support. Also, once they know the government pays, schools can raise prices to weed out those they don’t want, or simply to pull in more cash. When people get to vote on voucher programs, they tend to reject them. That’s why Trump’s people might try to force it on states with conditional block grants.
This isn’t the first hostile administration we’ve faced. Other than Trump, the most recent one, actually, was Obama’s. I always wondered whether his education secretary, Arne Duncan, would be able to speak while Bill Gates was drinking a glass of water. Common Core rose from the primordial ooze under Obama.
