The Los Angeles Unified School District's ambitious plan to reform secondary education and boost literacy in the upper grades has been derailed at least temporarily by the objections of teacher and administrator unions. LA Superintendent (and former Colorado governor) Roy Romer had hoped to launch a study to determine whether classroom assignments were rigorous and consistent across the school district. Teachers were to be asked to submit sample writing assignments along with examples of student work and explanations of their grading criteria. Last week, however, United Teachers-Los Angeles told its members not to participate in the study, saying that it created too much paperwork for teachers. The administrators union told principals not to order teachers to participate, arguing that the study was a sneaky way of evaluating teachers and principals.
United Teachers-Los Angeles has also refused to cooperate with the implementation of California's reward program for teachers in low-performing schools that make big gains. The state has identified schools at which staff members are eligible to receive rewards, but the state program leaves to local districts and teachers unions all decisions about how the money should be divided within the schools. In most school districts, administrators and union officials have agreed to split the money evenly among teachers in the winning schools. The LA teachers union refused to negotiate a plan for distributing the bonus, citing a policy of not bargaining on any pay tied to test scores. As a result, the bonuses in LA had to be distributed according to a state default formula that ties reward amounts to teacher seniority. The awards are substantial - in districts where the bonuses were split evenly among teachers in the school, they amounted to $25,000, $10,000, or $5,000 per teacher, depending on the size of the school's academic gains - and many LA teachers are furious that their checks are much smaller than those of fellow teachers with greater seniority. One teacher told a reporter that he was particularly angry because his students showed some of his school's largest gains, but because he was only a fourth-year teacher, his bonus check was on the small side.
When it came to the study of classroom assignments, the union resisted the idea of any research that could find differences across teachers or principals. When it came to performance-based pay, the union signaled not that all differences are bad, only those based on performance. "Reform unionists" say that their goal is to use collective bargaining to promote changes that will lead to higher student achievement, but it is hard to be hopeful about the prospect of unions advancing reform goals when they resist efforts to treat teachers differently based on their effectiveness in the classroom.
"Romer backs down on instructional assessment," by Sonia Giordani, Los Angeles Times, November 1, 2001. (available for a fee at http://www.latimes.com)
"Teachers jeer bonuses decided by seniority," by Martha Groves and Duke Helfand, Los Angeles Times, October 30, 2001. (available for a fee at http://www.latimes.com)