Oh I Wish I Were in Washington D.C.!

What a difference a day makes!

Today’s New York Times online included a story on Michelle Rhee, the controversial year-long superintendent for the troubled D.C. school system.  She’s one of the many Ivy Leaguers who used a few years of teaching in urban schools via Teach For America to springboard into the forefront of educational policy (that’s a whole another post!).  In the past year, she’s been shaking the D.C system to the core: closing underpopulated schools, firing 15% of the central bureaucracy, dismissing a few underperforming principals.

Why is she in the paper today?  She wants to do away with teacher tenure.

Sort of.

Here’s her proposal, according to the Times:

Ms. Rhee has not proposed abolishing tenure outright. Under her proposal, each teacher would choose between two compensation plans, one called green and the other red. Pay for teachers in the green plan would rise spectacularly, nearly doubling by 2010. But they would need to give up tenure for a year, after which they would need a principal’s recommendation or face dismissal.

Teachers who choose the red plan would also get big pay increases but would lose seniority rights that allow them to bump more-junior teachers if their school closes or undergoes an overhaul. If they were not hired by another school, their only options would be early retirement, a buyout or eventual dismissal.

Teachers would have to give up tenure for ONE year and, in return, get a big pay hike.  Big whooping deal.  What’s the controversy?

My initial reaction was, “Sign me up!  I wish I were in D.C.!”

The teachers’ union, of course, opposes the plan.

This seems to be just another one of those cases where a reactionary teachers’ union stands in the way of making progress for children.  I know teachers at our school we’d be much better off without.  I know teachers at my child’s various schools we’d be much better off without.  A plan like Michelle Rhee’s would let us do this.  Out with the dysfunctional, in with the functional.

BUT.  (There’s always a but, isn’t there?)

ONLY.

IF.

YOU.

HAVE.

GOOD.

ADMINISTRATORS.

Let’s say it again.

This will only work if there are good, smart, savvy administrators who will be making these decisions WITH THE INTERESTS OF THE CHILDREN at heart.

Which, unfortunately, is not always the case in a dysfunctional school district.

The Dance of the Lemons (moving ineffectual people from one place to another) applies as much to administrators as much as it does to teachers.  And administrators have a LOT more power.

If our last principal had to make decisions about whom to keep on after tenure was abolished for one year, he’d have probably used that year to get rid of anyone who didn’t kiss his behind.  That certainly would have included teachers who were ineffectual.

BUT.  It would also likely have included several excellent teachers as well.  Teachers who rocked his boat.  Teachers who had ideas of their own.  Teachers who threatened his underdeveloped, jargon-filled, bureaucracy-mandated understanding of education.

This type of reform can only work if you launch it at the top as much as you apply it to the bottom, which, unfortunately, is where teachers stand.

Then I thought about why I write this blog anonymously, even with a union protecting me.  There’s retaliation in districts.  There are lots of petty and significant ways to make people’s lives difficult.  Lots of ways to annoy and harass and not support.  To make you not want to come in to work day after day.  And that’s with tenure.

The media often portray unions as out of touch, looking to feather their own nests, unresponsive to the needs of constituencies other than their members (in schools, children, for instance!).  And they often are.  But they also offer protection and due process.  Like the courts, which, these days, are also often ineffectual, they provide procedures for justice.

Michelle Rhee, at the end of the video, agrees that she’s a dictator.  A benevolent one, but, nevertheless, a dictator.  Is this what our democracy is coming to?

The United States is a great experiment in democracy.  The Founding Fathers created a system of checks and balances–the 3 branches of government, along with freedom of speech which creates a free press–to try to form a system that worked better and more freely than dictatorships, however benevolent.

The problem, these days, is that despite checks and balances–or perhaps because of the checks and balances–democracy is dysfunctional.  The systems are massive and sluggish and clogged.  (I don’t think it was accidental the McCain camp picked Joe the Plumber to stand for everything that’s screwed up by big government!)

Large school districts are just like the government, writ small.  The problem with large school districts is that they don’t function as systems, and when that happens, people long for one person to change things with her iron will or his inspiring words.  Like Michelle Rhee.  Or Barack Obama.

All you can do is hope the person is good.  Benevolent.

All that said and done, I still wish I were in D.C. . .

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