Teachers' Rulebook is Killing the Schools CG Chair Philip K. Howard
The Daily News, June 11, 2001 In the stalemated contract talks between City Hall and the united federation
of teachers, the teachers are insisting that they deserve a 20% raise, not only
to achieve parity with suburban school districts, but also because they work in
frustrating, practically inhumane, conditions.
Almost everything the teachers say is true, but they leave out one detail: they
have mainly themselves to blame. They cling to a stranglehold of legal rights
in the form of work rules, tenure and court-like hearings for even the smallest
disputes.
Until the teachers let go of these suffocating entitlements, schools are doomed
to failure.
Mayor Guiliani is holding fast for more accountability. So the UFT now offers
to let the Mayor appoint a majority of the Board of Education. But public schools
aren't dysfunctional because of people who sit in a boardroom. Accountability
starts with the teachers, custodians and others in schools. Break one link in
the chain of accountability, and the system collapses. How can we blame a principal
who has no authority over teachers?
The fight over accountability usually bogs down in the confusion over the individual
rights of the teacher. Just let the teacher have his or her day in court. What's
unfair about that? But how does the principal prove who is trying hard and who
isn't? Put the students on the stand? Termination hearings are awful, a quagmire
of personal attacks. One superintendent observed that "dismissing a tenured teacher
is not a process, it's a career." No principal wants to go through it. And almost
none do.
Most teachers are dedicated and want to do the right thing. But a healthy culture
cannot exist when everyone knows it doesn't matter what you do.
What replaces personal accountability is endless bureaucracy. Over the years,
the UFT has negotiated detailed work rules intended to improve the teachers' lot.
The accumulation is now more than two hundred pages of fine print: no lunchroom
or recess duty, no more than forty minutes per week with the principal; no this,
no that. Asking a teacher to help out on extra projects is itself a breach of
the contract.
As a counterweight to teacher entitlements, the Board of Ed has imposed thousands
of rules telling teachers and principals exactly how to do their jobs.
The cornucopia of rules and rights probably looks good to those who like legal
structures that lay everything out in advance. Now everyone has their very own
rights. It's like handing out candies so the children don't fight over them.
But the candy is poisonous. It kills the human judgment and goodwill needed to
make anything work. Like a plague, teacher "burn out" spreads through schools
because teachers don't have the nourishment of their own spirit.
This system must be discarded, not reformed. Putting more mayoral appointees
on the Board of Education is like a bad joke, equivalent to another Soviet five-year
plan. The problem is the system itself, not who's running it.
The highest hurdle is the pervasive mistrust. "We need due process," as a union
official in another state put it, "as long as there are people who might fire
you because they didn't like what you wore that day." But protection against unfairness
doesn't require a legal trial or thousands of rules. Just give independent officials
the authority to oversee personnel or disciplinary decisions. Checks and balances,
like teaching itself, must be matters of human judgment.
There's a deal to be made here. Raise salaries -- dramatically for good teachers
-- in exchange for throwing off the fine-print shackles. Schools are uniquely
human enterprises, not factories that can be outfitted with legal robots programmed
with thousands of rules.
Only when teachers allow themselves to be judged can we walk away from a bureaucracy
that has removed dignity and accomplishment from the honored profession of teaching. | 
