New Vision for Schools Proposes Broad Role

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Randi Weingarten, the New Yorker who is rising to become president of the American Federation of Teachers, says she wants to replace President Bush’s focus on standardized testing with a vision of public schools as community centers that help poor students succeed by offering not only solid classroom lessons but also medical and other services.

Ms. Weingarten, 50, is running unopposed for the presidency of the national teachers union, whose delegates at an annual convention in Chicago are expected to elect her Monday. In a speech prepared for delivery after the vote, Ms. Weingarten criticizes No Child Left Behind, President Bush’s signature domestic initiative, which is defended staunchly by Margaret Spellings, the secretary of education.

Ms. Weingarten, saying the law “is too badly broken to be fixed,” lays out a “new vision of schools for the 21st century.”

“Can you imagine a federal law that promoted community schools — schools that serve the neediest children by bringing together under one roof all the services and activities they and their families need?” Ms. Weingarten is expected to ask in the speech, a copy of which was provided by the union to The New York Times.

“Imagine schools that are open all day and offer after-school and evening recreational activities, child care and preschool, tutoring and homework assistance,” the speech reads. “Schools that include dental, medical and counseling clinics.”

By laying out that expansive vision of government’s role in the public schools, Ms. Weingarten wades into a fierce debate among Democrats seeking to influence the educational program of Senator Barack Obama, their party’s presumptive presidential nominee. In an interview last week, she said the ideas in the speech amounted to “what I’d like to see in a new federal education law.”

In her 10-year tenure as president of the United Federation of Teachers, which represents New York City teachers, Ms. Weingarten has defended teachers’ economic interests, raising her members’ salaries by 43 percent in the last five years. But she has also proved willing to accommodate the city’s ideas on improving schools. She has embraced charter schools, and last year — even as teachers unions elsewhere were opposing performance pay plans — negotiated an arrangement in New York that gives bonuses to teachers in schools whose poor children show broad gains in test scores.

With her move to the presidency of the national union, with 1.4 million members, Ms. Weingarten will have a broader platform from which to influence the nation’s education debates. Although the federation is smaller than the country’s other teachers union, the National Education Association, with its 3.2 million members, A.F.T. presidents have had an equal or larger political profile because presidential tenures in the bigger union are restricted by term limits.

Two previous presidents of the United Federation of Teachers, Albert Shanker and Sandra Feldman, also rose to lead the A.F.T.

“My sense is that Randi Weingarten is continuing Al Shanker’s tradition, clearly standing up for the interests of teachers but also trying to engage in thoughtful education reform that will be good for students,” said Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation whose biography of Mr. Shanker, “Tough Liberal,” was published this year.

On Sunday, Mr. Obama spoke to the convention by satellite feed from California, and he mixed criticism of the No Child law with praise for teachers’ contributions and an exhortation to Americans to meet the nation’s responsibility to educate all children. He quoted a young Chicago teacher as telling him that she had been annoyed by a tendency “to explain away the shortcomings and failures of our education system by saying, ‘These kids can’t learn.’ ”

“These children are our children,” Mr. Obama said. “It’s time we understood that their education is our responsibility.

“I am running for president to guarantee that all of our children have the best possible chance in life,” he said, “and I am tired of hearing you, the teachers who work so hard, blamed for our problems.”

Convention delegates gave Mr. Obama a standing ovation.

Ms. Weingarten takes national office with robust support of the rank and file. “The last eight years of the Republican presidency have really been a threat to the middle class and to public education,” said William Gallagher, a high school social studies teacher in Philadelphia for 33 years. Ms Weingarten, he said, would “work hard to make sure the new president, whoever he is, puts education on the forefront of issues in this country.”

In the speech Ms. Weingarten is to deliver Monday, she praises the ideas of a group of Democrats led by Tom Payzant, the former schools superintendent in Boston, who have argued that schools alone cannot close achievement gaps rooted in larger economic inequalities, and that “broader, bolder” measures are needed, like publicly financed early childhood education and health services for the poor.

Another group, headed by the Rev. Al Sharpton and Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein of New York, issued a manifesto last month urging the nation to redouble its efforts to close the achievement gap separating poor students from affluent ones and blaming “teachers’ contracts” for keeping ineffective teachers in classrooms.

Of the vision of Mr. Payzant’s group, Ms. Weingarten’s speech says, “Sisters and brothers, this is an idea whose time has come.

“Imagine if schools had the educational resources children need to thrive, like smaller classes and individualized instruction, plentiful, up-to-date materials and technology anchored to that rich curriculum, decent facilities, an early start for toddlers and a nurturing atmosphere,” she says.

Ms. Weingarten, whose mother was a teacher in Nyack, N.Y., is a lawyer who was union counsel during the 1980s and 1990s. In the last decade, Ms. Weingarten taught high school history for six years in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn.

In the interview, she said: “We all have to work tenaciously to eliminate the achievement gap and to turn around low-performing schools. But the folks who believe that this can all be done on teachers’ shoulders, which is what No Child tries to do, are doing a huge disservice to America.”

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The best way to "eliminate the achievement gap" is to consistently lower requirements and punish students who are smarter and work harder. Smart/hard working kids have always been an issue with schools in that their success makes others lose hope for feel stupid which leads to depression and a lack of caring. That's one of the problems with NCLB is that it uses testing to show where children are. No child should ever have to fail a test because it removes their initiative and makes them unhappy. All children should be on a level field when they leave school.

[Encryptshun]

Hot button time.

I and 4 generations behind me are/have been teachers. Our educational problems:

1) We underpay teachers, so we get a less qualified workforce when compared to the public sector

2) We focus on standardized-test preparation, when the teachers do not have any say-so in what should be included on the tests

3) Teachers are taught how to teach by academics who have pet theories and pop-psychology trendiness and not by people who actually know how to teach

4) School administrations are beaurocrats who have no management training, yet they are expected to be the divisional VP (effectively) of a school. They are paid vastly more than the teachers but usually are left unaccountable for their school's shortcomings

5) Compensation packages for teachers vary wildly from district to district and state to state, causing a surplus of teachers in the job pool in one area and a complete draught of teachers in another. Why work 12 hours days for the equivalent of less than $10 per hour when you could get a nice 6-hour per day job at $80K a year?

I have only the utmost respect for most teachers out there. Just like any workforce, you get the good eggs and the bad. I've met some very lazy teachers in my time and also some unsung heroes who should have a medal and a Presidential commendation.

Throwing money at our schools, re-engineering the diversity footprint of urban areas, and changing the testing levels will do f***-all to alleviate our educational woes.

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1) Teachers should be paid based on merit. Maybe they should have a variable pay plan based on classroom achievement (tho not solely due to potential issues listed in number 2)?

2) I agree. Standardized testing does give a level set of where the students are which should cause the teachers/school board to get together to see what the problem is. If all kids in school district "B" are 2 grade levels behind where they should be as compared to district "A" then a focus needs to be made on district "B" without impacting the achieving districts or even individual schools. If "B" happens to be in a poor area where the parents themselves are underachievers then focusing more on early developmental skills via pre-school options may help solve some of their later developmental issues. Just throwing that out there......

3) Yep....Not sure how to address that one. Some teachers simply have bad professors who teach some unproven methodology. Can't do much with the professors due to tenure issues for the most part. Tenure is like telling a politician they can say anything they want and do what they want without worrying about being re-elected.

[Encryptshun]

Teacher evaluations are a requirement at all state schools (in Missouri and Illinois, at least) but really setting up a merit-based pay system would work AGAINST most of the really good teachers and coddle the bad ones. The reason being that "success" is still primarily weighted on students passing standardized tests and getting passing marks on daily work. So if you have a really good teacher who teaches kids what they need to KNOW rather than following the state-created curriculum to the letter, the students aren't going to do as well on the standard tests. Conversely, a lazy teacher can teach only the standardized curriculum (which is easier) and just hand out passing grades like candy for everything else and get a much better performance rating (because the flawed logic, remember, is "the better grades they get, the better the teaching is") rather than "the more they KNOW, the better the teaching is.

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It all depends on what is on the standardized tests now. I know "back when" they went over all the basics and seemed a good indicator of strong vs weak points for individual students. They also let the student/parent/teacher/school what area should be focused on for the individual student as well. Of course, if they are behind in everything then it's worthless.

Even teachers who "go a different path" to teach should have positive resulting test scores. There are numerous ways to skin a cat but the end result always equates to a skinned cat.

[Encryptshun]

I'm glad this turned into a discussion on education -- I've been waiting to weigh in on this topic for a while. Here we go:

Consider the fundamental disconnect between what our government says should be the educational standard and what our communities/students/teachers/parents say it should be. In the countries which are kicking our arse, education is strictly merit-based after, say, age 14. We force kids to stay in school until 16 when many of them want to quit and go to work. So you get no student support and no parental support. That is bad mojo for a teaching/learning environment and it detracts from the students who really WANT to be there, since the teachers are forced to spend more time on students who do worse, resulting in education to the lowest common denominator. We need wage-earners in our society, better they be Americans than undocumented immigrants who don't pay income tax. The government also bases funding for schools on the enrollment -- so the schools are encouraged to keep a student enrolled on paper or risk losing funding.

Mainstreaming is a bad idea. Taking a kid who has a severe learning disability (and I'm not talking dyslexia here -- I'm talking Down's Syndrome, severe ADHD, etc) and putting them in a classroom with healthy kids who all have at least an average IQ and then expecting it to be better for everyone is a CROCK OF SH*T. Again, you end up educating to the lowest common denominator -- and whereas the purpose of the mainstreaming is to expose the deficient (yes, I said it) kids to the "inclusion" of the main group, it works the OPPOSITE. Kids aren't "inclusive" -- they are EXclusive. They make fun of NORMAL people, let alone some poor sweet waterhead who can't read or wipe themselves. We see this phenomenon on NICO every day.

We do not edify our educators. Teaching is not considered an "honorable" profession in the U.S. for the most part. Look at the widely-used expression "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach." People think it's an easy job where you get paid for 9 months of work and a 3-month vacation. My mother taught for 35 years. The most she was ever out of a classroom at one stretch was a month, and during that time she was working on career ladder projects, writing grants for programs she needed for the kids and which the administration would not give budget support for, and doing annual pre-planning to get all her materials and lesson plans written up to carry her through the school year. She worked 60-hour weeks, 50 weeks a year and got paid as though it was a 40-hour week, 39 weeks per year.

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See, I have an issue with the 14yo deal and I really don't care what other countries are doing. Until the US lowers the "age of adult" to 14 then it is my responsibility to ensure my kids get an education. Hell, at 14 they can't even work a full time job and if THAT law was changed then you would have disinterested kids semi-working jobs until they get pissed off and quit in order to live off the Gov't and my paycheck as they sure would not be at home under mom and dad's rule (cuz they know everything). There is no way a 14yo is developed enough to make decisions like that. From a job perspective, look at "de-centralized America" and the loss of low-pay jobs there have been. Other factors are making these jobs go overseas and those without an education are having a hard time getting other higher-tech or non-mechanical positions in the job market. The drop-out rate is growing exponentially all over and I highly doubt it is from kids being eager to get into the job market. 12 years of schooling has historically worked so why the sudden change to make it easier on kids today?

As far as mainstreaming I'm not talking at all about kids who have problems as you are talking about. Sorry, it's not the norm and they should be in special classes and not in class with kids who do not have such learning disabilities. I feel the same way about kids who speak Spanish only and are dropped in English-speaking classrooms.

I find teaching an honorable profession tho I do have some concerns about college-level academia. From a classroom perspective there must be some form of standards set for each grade and all kids should learn appropriate math, English, etc. The problem I run into with teachers who "go out on their own" and teach outside of the standardized book is that it is a problem for me to teach my own kids. My 13yo's math teacher does just that. She discusses how to do something and shows some examples on the board. At the end of the day she will pass out homework sheets which are brought home and I have no reference material to go over it with her. There are no examples, just problems which I have not worked with in 25 years. Off to the internet I go to figure them out. In the long run it frustrates her and takes 2 hours to go over something that should only take 15 minutes.