Diane Ravitch and Unions

As many of you know, I have a great amount of respect for the scholarly work of Diane Ravitch. Here she is again proving not to be merely a tool of the neo-conservative reform movement by supporting teacher's unions. She makes great points about unions being a) protective of teachers' rights and b) the real problem being bad leadership and poor hiring/tenure decisions.

We would all do well to remember the historical conditions in which teacher unions came about, as Ravitch does. The gender inequities and a world in which a teacher is fired for marrying or becoming pregnant... through the grapevine, I've head of stories that are not too far off from that happening today. As for today in New York City in the current climate of accountability:

Teachers found that they were in trouble if they did not teach exactly as the mayor and chancellor dictated, if they did not follow the scripted cookie-cutter format of mini-lessons, if their bulletin boards did not meet detailed specifications, or if their classroom furniture was not precisely as prescribed by regulation. In these past few years, I have often been confronted by teachers who asked what they could do when their supervisors and coaches insisted that they teach in ways they (the teachers) believed were wrong. I could only answer that they should be glad they belonged to a union with the power to protect them from “oppressive supervision,” to use the term that was familiar to the founders of Local 2 of the AFT.

And again, I really don't want to be a teacher again. Cookie-cutter was never my teaching style. Standing and shouting out our new vocab words - now that's some fun.

"Why Teacher Unions are Good for Teachers and the Public." (Ravitch, D. American Educator. Winter 2006-2007.)

Notes on Hanushek

Eric Hanushek has been criticized for his methods in the study about the rise in school expenditures and the fall in school achievement for how he weighted different surveys - basically, if you're not interested in statistics, you probably don't care about much more than his findings have been refuted... but not, in my opinion, completely disproven.

This article refers to Hanushek and makes the links between school expenditures and school achivement clear to a non-stat type person. The author also creates a "Teachability Index" (ouch) for different students and uses it to compare teachability to expenditures.

My only worry is that if we assume kids are "unteachable," will we still try and teach them? What will we do to make them more teachable?

"Myths of the Teachers's Union." (Greene, J. FrontPage.com. 1/9/07.)