NY Times Magazine: Are Teachers' Unions the Enemy of Reform?

In the May 23, 2010 edition of the New York Times Magazine, The Grey Lady questioned what it calls the base of the Democrat base -- teachers' unions -- and their effect on education reform.

In one of the story's images, you see the words, "Are Teachers' Unions the Enemy of Reform? Discuss" scrawled across a white board in the front of a classroom.

The 12-page article begins with a story about Michael Mulgrew, a Brooklyn vocational high school teacher who also serves as the head of New York City's United Federation of Teachers.

"Next to Mulgrew was his press aide, Richard Riley. 'Suppose you decide that Riley is lazy or incompetent,' I asked Mulgrew. 'Should you be able to fire him?'

"'He's not a teacher,' Mulgrew responded. 'And I need to be able to pick my own person for a job like that.' Then he grinned, adding: 'I know where you're going, but you don't understand. Teachers are just different.'"

The article continues to detail the various nationwide iterations of the battle Florida witnessed last month in the Republican-led effort to bring about education reform -- primarily through the vetoed SB 6 -- and improve the state's chances of winning President Obama's Race to the Top money.

"Parents marched and lobbied in Tallahassee, Albany and Los Angeles, demanding that their school systems be reformed the way Obama's instructions for winning the Race said they should. Newspaper editorial boards of all political stripes joined in their cause; "Union Lackeys" was a typical title of a Las Vegas Review-Journal editorial about recalcitrant Democratic legislators."

The evidence against the idea that "teachers are just different" seems to be mounting. The New York Times article pointed out a school on 118th street that is a living experiment of the effect of giving teachers a financial incentive (namely, keeping their job or getting a raise) to improve performance. On one side, there's the Harlem Success Academy, a charter school, and on the other side there's a regular public school. They are only separated by a fire door in the middle and even share a gym and a cafeteria. The article details some of the similarities and differences between the two schools. For example, they both have essentially the same resources, the same community, and the same building. The charter school spends about a $1,000 less per pupil. But while the resources are largely the same, the results are vastly different.

"To take one representative example, 51 percent of the third-grade students in the public school last year were reading at grade level, 49 percent were reading below grade level and none were reading above. In the charter, 72 percent were at grade level, 5 percent were reading below level and 23 percent were reading above level. In math, the charter third graders tied for top performing school in the state, surpassing such high-end public school districts as Scarsdale.

"Same building. Same community. Sometimes even the same parents. And the classrooms have almost exactly the same number of students. In fact, the charter school averages a student or two more per class. This calculus challenges the teachers unions' and Perkins' "resources" argument -- that hiring more teachers so that classrooms will be smaller makes the most difference

Indeed, the core of the reformers' argument, and the essence of the Obama approach to the Race to the Top is that a slew of research over the last decade has discovered that what makes the most difference is the quality of the teachers and the principals who supervise them."