When Illinois enacted new education reform through Senate Bill 7 in June 2011, Arne Duncan praised the passage of the legislation by saying, "While some states are engaging in noisy and unproductive battles around education reform, Illinois is showing what can happen when adults work through their differences together. Illinois has created a powerful framework to strengthen the teaching profession and advance student learning in Illinois." I argue that, contrary to Secretary Duncan's assertion, the legislation has merely replaced noisy and unproductive battles with quiet and subversive battles. The legislation enacted a whole slew of "reforms" that made the state eligible for Race to the Top funding. The most touted components of the bill are authorization for a longer school day for Chicago schools, making it more difficult to obtain tenure, making it easier to revoke tenure and making it more difficult to strike. There was also companion legislation passed prior to Senate Bill 7 that changed the teacher evaluation system to include standardized criteria for classroom observations and student test performance.
It is ironic that in this new era of cooperation among adults in Illinois, there have been more teacher strikes in the first year of implementation than in any other times in the recent past. In fact it had been over two decades since the previous teacher strike in the Chicago Public Schools. This time around, over 90% of the teachers in Chicago voted to strike which was well over the new threshold of 75% set by Senate Bill 7. Given the poor working conditions and relatively lower pay for Chicago teachers, you might think that it makes sense that teachers in Chicago would strike over being asked to work 25% more time for a 2% raise in pay. The progress and outcomes of the Chicago strike were tracked in much of the national media.
Less well known outside of the Chicago area was the first ever teacher strike in Lake Forest, where the average teacher pay is over $100,000 per year. In addition, there have been strikes in three other Chicago suburbs, Highland Park, Prairie Grove, and Evergreen Park, with varying levels of teacher pay. There were strike notices, but no strikes yet, in three other districts with unresolved contracts. Five strikes out of eight strike notices is an unusually high percentage. There were varying issues in play within each school district, but one theme that cut across all the districts is, ostensibly, dissatisfaction with the pay raise offered by each district.
However, I think there is a more fundamental reason why there is an outbreak in teacher's anger over pay. Teachers have suffered through layoffs and pay freezes for over four years. For the most part teachers have been patient with school districts and have understood that economic conditions require everyone to tighten their belts. But SB 7 has changed everything. Even though Secretary Duncan argues that it is a model of cooperation, in reality it reminds me of President Reagan's oxymoronic relationship with Russia around nuclear arms: "Trust, but verify"
Reagan no more trusted the Russians than SB 7 trusts anyone in education. In one fell swoop every IL administrator's authority to evaluate was summarily revoked in June 2012. All administrators had to participate in roughly 40 hours of retraining on how to evaluate with the new system. The reformers believed it was essential to throw the entire education system in IL into chaos to ensure that those districts that have over 90% of their students meeting the standards do a better job of determining whether their teachers are adequately performing. In addition, for those schools where 90% of the students are failing to meet the standards, the reformers felt that principals needed a solid evaluation system that would allow them to accelerate the granting of tenure to high performing teachers or to dismiss unsatisfactory tenured teachers, if the schools ever reached a critical mass of tenured teachers, instead of constantly have to scramble to fill new positions.
Just as Reagan used his "Trust, but verify" mantra as subterfuge to dismantle the Russian military in the Cold War, reformers are using the mantra of accountability as a quiet and subversive battle to dismantle the teacher union even though there is no discernible evidence that their reforms will have any impact on the lives of children. In fact, it is easy to see that the reformers "have no clothes" when you look beyond the rhetoric and realize that this complicated evaluation system fundamentally relies on data that does not exist for many teachers. There are no state assessments in IL for any areas of social studies, most areas of science, art, music, kindergarten, 1st grade, 2nd grade, 9th grade, 10th grade, and 12th grade.
Another sign of the non-data-drivenness of data-driven reformers is the absolute dismissal of the data establishing the fundamental importance of trust and collective responsibility in sustaining long term growth in student learning. The "trust, but verify" teacher evaluation assault on the teaching profession destroys the very trust and collective responsibility that is the foundation for true reform in our schools. There is no doubt that we need to rethink our human resource management of schools, but we need forward thinking not rehashing of ideas that are even considered out dated by many in the corporate world. Next time I will elaborate on the tectonic shift in thinking about how employees are valued in today's successful corporations.
