Busy early part of the week, but Jonah Edelman’s controversial remarks were responded to by the teachers’ unions who I think had the best response:

Stand for Children’s Tactics—Bad For Education and Politicians

7/12/2011

Statement from the Illinois Federation of Teachers, Illinois Education Association and the Chicago Teachers Union regarding the comments by Stand for Children’s CEO, Jonah Edelman, recorded at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

Video highlights of Edelman’s remarks can be found on YouTube.

We were disappointed to hear the views of Stand for Children’s leader and his own assessment of his organization’s involvement in Illinois politics.

We heard a lot from Jonah Edelman about power in politics, power over unions and management power over teachers. Sadly, we didn’t hear anything in that hour-long session about improving education.

Frankly, Edelman was never actively engaged in that collaborative process.

By falsely claiming to have manipulated people engaged in honest negotiations, Stand for Children’s leader jeopardizes the ability of education stakeholders to work collaboratively in the future. That can make it harder to improve education quality for children. That’s wrong.

What’s worse is that these false claims clearly show an organizational agenda that has nothing to do with helping kids learn.

Jonah Edelman’s mischaracterization of the SB7 negotiations will not change our commitment to do what is right for kids and to make sure the adults are treated fairly.

However, his openness about Stand for Children’s tactics and agenda will make it very difficult for any education advocate or politician to interact with the organization in the future.

Edelman apologized, but I’m not sure it really does any good given his entire bit was about trying to break up the teachers’ unions.  Rich has much of the coverage today.

I think Rich’s take is pretty fair.  Edelman did get one thing and that was Chicago teachers now cannot strike without a really extraordinary vote.  However, it’s unclear to me that he got anything else that wouldn’t have happened.  My first reaction was that Edelman was right to understand Madigan would remain in power and backing him was smarter.   I’m sure Bruce Rauner and others did hate to hear that, but it was reality.  However, I’m not sure other than the Chicago strike provisions, Stand for Children got much more than what would have happened without them.  IOW, the Speaker found someone to give him a lot of cash for doing things he’d have done anyway plus he got to annoy the unions on top of it.

From his statement:

After the election, Advance Illinois and Stand [for Children] had drafted a very bold proposal called Performance Counts. It tied tenure and layoffs to performance; it let principals hire who they choose; it streamlined dismissal of ineffective tenured teachers substantially – from two-plus years and $200 thousand-plus in legal fees on average to three to four months with very little likelihood of legal recourse. And most importantly, called for the reform of collective bargaining throughout the state, essentially proposing that school boards would be able to decide any disputed issue and impasse – so a very, very bold proposal for Illinois and one that six months earlier would have been unthinkable, undiscussable.

Tenure and layoffs are tied to performance and subject field so this section is partially a win for Advance Illinois, but not a big jump.  Dismissal changes I think are not as extreme as he makes it sound. It’s tied to the forthcoming evaluation of teachers ISBE is putting together to go into effect in 2012 in some districts.  The code he is using to me suggested he thinks this is all tied to test scores or such as these debates go, but the reality is that the system being put in place requires peer and principal evaluations on overall performance of teaching including lesson plans, classroom technique, etc.  There is some tie to test scores which is  a joke given the testing scheme isn’t adequate to actually measure performance of students and certainly not to tie it back to individual teachers.  However, the other portions of the evaluations should provide a reasonable process.  This process was in place since 2010 though and before Stand came into the state in any significant way.  Tenured teachers can’t be fired for the first bad evaluation though so he’s vastly overstating the timeline.  Instead of focusing on firing people right off the bat, the system is designed to provide coaching and mentoring for deficient teachers. This makes sense because what do you do if you just fire the teacher?  Hire a new teacher who you don’t have a good idea of how they will do? However, if they do receive bad evaluations and a second set of evaluators review the process, the ultimate firing process is sped up.  That hasn’t been terribly controversial, the question has been how to streamline the process, but still provide due process.  If the evaluation system works–and that’s a serious question given all the parts to it, this will be a much improved process. It’s hard to say then that Stand for Children got much in this arena.

On the issue of striking outside of Chicago, the right is retained, but both sides have to disclose their final offer, submit to some arbitration and then a strike can take place. That is nothing like giving school boards unilateral power.

After the election we went back to Madigan, and I confirmed – reviewed the proposal that we had already discussed and I confirmed the support. He said he was supportive. The next day he created an Education Reform Commission and his political director called to ask for our suggestions who should be on it. And so in Aurora, Ill., in December, out of nowhere, there were hearings on our proposal. In addition, we hired 11 lobbyists, including four of the absolute best insiders, and seven of the best minority lobbyists – preventing the unions from hiring them. We enlisted a state public affairs firm. We had tens of thousands of supporters. … We raised $3 million for our political action committee. That’s more money than either of the unions have in their political action committees.

Bragging that you got the absolute best insiders misses the point that the unions themselves don’t need a ton of outside lobbyists and unions don’t need money as much because they have the votes to provide to candidates.  More than anything, it’s incredibly slimy to do it, let alone brag about it.  Given Stand didn’t get that much, it should also be embarrassing if you hired that much firepower and didn’t get much for it.

Since the initial takeover in 1995 of the CPS by a board appointed by the Mayor, the unions have been generally a very reasonable and positive force for educational reform in Illinois.  This nonsense that the Tribune and people like Rauner spread about how they block any real progress is easily shot down by the results of the charters which don’t have great records of improved test scores.  There is a reason for this–poverty is the primary problem for our school systems poor performance.  Let’s look at the PISA scores that supposedly show how bad the United States is doing compared to other nations around the world.

When you control for poverty, the United States is at the top of the performance ranking in schools with the same level of poverty as schools in nations with that level of poverty.  The problem is that few developed countries allow their children to group up in the level of poverty the United States does.  Finland, with its teacher corps with everyone has a Masters, it doesn’t even do as well as the United States when you control for poverty.  We have a world class educational system, but we have a piss poor social policy that allows poverty to fester.

There are things we can and need to do to address the educational system in high poverty districts.  Those districts face extra challenges and often are in rural or urban areas where the school system has been allowed to decline over time and due to usually worse pay and work conditions are a repository for bad teachers even while most of the faculty is still quite good and committed.  However, none of that will solve the entire problem until we address high concentrations of poverty.  Changes in high poverty districts can improve things, but will be tinkering ultimately.

The path being followed mostly is to use student testing to determine the quality of a District. The problem is that we do not collect adequate data and the data we use to evaluate student performance is mostly statistically invalid for the purposes we use it.  The new Illinois teacher evaluation system is an improvement over simply using testing data to evaluate teachers, schools, and districts, but it will be very difficult to implement.  If successful, it will improve accountability while also providing a fuller picture of teacher quality.

Teachers aren’t the problem largely. The problem has been high poverty districts where neglect by administrators and sometimes byzantine rules kept the portion of poor teachers sticking around.  Punishing them through taking away of collective bargaining as people like Edelman seem wont to do is nothing more than class warfare on top of an incredibly amount of ignorance about how to actually improve education.