The Teacher Wars (33 page)

Never before had prominent Democrats critiqued teachers unions so brazenly at a convention in which 10 percent of the party's delegates were union teachers. The Denver event represented a
new way of talking about the unions, one that melded the righteous outrage of the old Black Power critics, like Stokely Carmichael and Amiri Baraka, to the moderate technocratic politics of the post-Reagan Democratic Party. Younger African American politicians, like Booker, Fenty, and, the most prominent of all, Barack Obama, personified this shift.

As an Illinois state senator Obama passed legislation that brought accountability reformers, the Chicago Teachers Union, and the Chicago school board together to expand the number of nonunionized charter schools in the city. In 2005, during his first term in the U.S. Senate,
he spoke at the launch party of Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), a political action committee founded by charter school philanthropists who work in the financial sector, and who are often harshly critical of teachers unions. One of them was Whitney Tilson, the hedge fund entrepreneur who had been TFA employee number one. At dinner before the event, Obama impressed the DFER founders by telling them about a visit he had made to a successful Chicago public school, where a teacher complained to him that too many of her colleagues at “traditional” schools had the attitude that “these kids”—poor kids—“can't learn.” Later on, he elicited cheers from the DFER crowd by saying, “If someone can tell me where the Democratic Party stands on education reform, please let me know. Because I can't figure it out. Our party has got to wake up on this!” When Obama was running in the Democratic Party presidential primary two years later,
he was booed at an NEA event after he praised performance pay for teachers. The two big teachers unions endorsed Hillary Clinton. Then, during a televised debate with John McCain, Obama referred to Michelle Rhee as Washington's “
wonderful new superintendent,” seemingly impervious to the fact that she had become enemy number one to much of organized labor. (A few weeks after the debate, Rhee appeared on the cover of
Time
magazine, standing in a classroom holding a broom. The implication was that she would take on the unions and sweep incompetent tenured teachers out of D.C.)

When it came time for President Obama to appoint a secretary of education, he passed over Linda Darling-Hammond, the TFA
critic, union ally, and teacher training expert who had been an adviser to his campaign. Instead he took DFER's advice and nominated Arne Duncan, who as superintendent in Chicago had shut down underperforming schools, opened new charter schools, and experimented with teacher performance pay tied, in part, to value-added measurement. Despite warnings from nonpartisan experts to move cautiously on using value-added for teacher accountability—“
the current research base is insufficient to support the use of VAM for high-stakes decisions,” RAND wrote—value-added became a cornerstone principle of the Obama administration's signature education program, Race to the Top. On the day he announced the Race, the president emphasized that one of its goals was firing bad teachers. “
Let me be clear,” he said to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. “If a teacher is given a chance or two chances or three chances but still does not improve, there's no excuse for that person to continue teaching. I reject a system that rewards failure and protects a person from its consequences.”

Originally passed through Congress as part of the 2009 economic stimulus alongside funds for less controversial school improvements, like saving teaching jobs and renovating school buildings, Race provided over $4 billion to states and school districts that agreed to implement a reform agenda focused, for the first time, on individual teachers. To win a grant, states would have to evaluate, pay, and grant tenure according to how effectively a teacher grew student achievement in measurable ways. The administration's guidelines did not include the term “value-added.” But the Department of Education defined “student achievement” as “a student's score on the state's assessments … end-of-course tests … and other measures that are rigorous and comparable across classrooms.” It defined “student growth” as “the change in student achievement … between two or more points in time.” That was value-added. Race to the Top also asked states to require principals to evaluate every teacher every single year—a huge new responsibility for administrators, many of whom had been accustomed to giving cursory checklist evaluations to each employee only once every three or five years, in which teachers were rated on simplistic factors
like appropriate dress, punctuality, and neat and quiet classrooms. And the law expected states to find a way to legally remove teachers, even tenured teachers, whose performance did not improve. Race to the Top “turnaround schools,” those with the very lowest test scores, would have the option of removing over half of their teachers, including those with tenure.

In a nod to the unions, especially to the powerful new president of the AFT, Randi Weingarten, states would lose points in the competition if their own teachers unions opposed their plans. (Weingarten was a sophisticated New York politico who, although untrammeled in negotiations with Mike Bloomberg and Michelle Rhee, signaled more openness toward teacher accountability than any union leader since Al Shanker.) States could win points, however, for doing something the unions resisted bitterly: hiring more teachers from alternative certification programs, like Teach for America. There were some important non-teacher-related priorities in Race to the Top, too. States that wanted grants would have to shut down or restructure failing schools, open more high-quality charter schools, and sign on to high-quality curriculum standards. The Common Core State Standards in English and math, an effort driven by governors, philanthropists, and the teachers unions, became the first politically viable nationwide curricular reform in American history.

In the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, Race to the Top had an ingenious design. It held out an irresistible carrot—federal funding—and directed financially starving states to compete against one another to grasp it. Other Department of Education grant programs adopted similar priorities on teacher accountability, so the entire federal reform agenda was tightly aligned. Politically, it worked. Though only nineteen states won Race to the Top grants, two-thirds of the states changed their laws on public school teachers in order to compete, half of the states declared that student test scores would be included in teacher evaluations, and eighteen weakened tenure protections. In Colorado a young, charismatic state senator and TFA alum named Mike Johnston crafted legislation decreeing that student achievement data
would account for 51 percent of a teacher's evaluation score, more than evidence from classroom observations. If a Colorado teacher earned two bad ratings in a row, she would lose tenure protections.
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In New York, student achievement growth would now count for 40 percent of a teacher evaluation score. Eleven states moved to end “last in, first out,” the policy that requires districts to lay off inexperienced teachers before tenured teachers, regardless of performance—an increasingly relevant issue around the country as budget cuts forced many districts to consider staff reductions. Florida and North Carolina ended tenure altogether. Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana limited the scope of issues teachers unions can address through collective bargaining; so did deep blue Massachusetts, though only for teachers in low-performing schools.

Teachers unions that had been involved in tense standoffs with accountability reformers found themselves weakened. In Central Falls, Rhode Island, a tiny bankrupt town that had lost its manufacturing economy, the local high school, which had a dropout rate of more than 50 percent, became a Race to the Top “turnaround” school. In March 2010, when the AFT local there resisted a proposal to require teachers to work a longer day without much extra pay, superintendent Frances Gallo attempted to fire the school's entire teaching staff, eliciting praise straight from the White House. “
There's got to be a sense of accountability,” President Obama said.

In June 2010, the most acrimonious labor negotiation in the nation, between Weingarten and Rhee, ended with 80 percent of D.C. teachers voting to accept a contract that offered an across-the-board 20 percent raise, a faster process for tenured teachers who wished to file an appeal of a termination, and the option for any individual teacher to forgo tenure entirely and work to earn bonuses of between $3,000 and $25,000. The bonuses would be paid for
through $64.5 million in philanthropic donations and distributed according to a new evaluation system based on value-added scores and classroom observations.

Several of the same donors helped fund
Waiting for “Superman
,” a 2010 documentary film that told the story of five charming kids hoping to gain admission to oversubscribed charter schools. Oprah Winfrey interviewed the film's director, Davis Guggenheim, and Thomas Friedman wrote a
New York Times
column praising it. The cover of
New York
magazine asked, “Can one little movie save America's schools?” The film portrayed all urban neighborhood public schools as blighted places packed with incompetent tenured teachers, while presenting nonunionized charters as the solution. It failed to depict any unionized charter schools, like the highly regarded Green Dot Schools, or any low-performing charter schools—about a quarter of the sector—or any successful traditional schools in high-poverty neighborhoods. Ominous music played when Randi Weingarten appeared on-screen; there was no indication of the fact that even while defending unpopular policies, like “last in, first out,” the AFT had already signed on to a number of groundbreaking new teacher evaluation plans that considered student performance and weakened tenure.

Weingarten was realistic about why her union was under attack. Teacher tenure provided a level of job security inconceivable to most American workers, many of whom were barely hanging on during a recession with a nearly 10 percent unemployment rate. “
Only 7 percent of American workers are in unions,” she told me. “America looks at us as islands of privilege.”

But all the attention paid to teacher tenure as The Big Problem in American education, and to value-added evaluation and firings as The Big Solution, had a way of eliding how these major policy changes were affecting kids in real-world classrooms. One of the biggest impacts of Race to the Top was the explosion in the number and types of tests and assessments students take in order to collect the data used to evaluate their teachers.
A 2013 AFT study of two major urban school districts found that in one, students spent the equivalent of thirty days taking practice tests and learning test-taking strategies, and about two full weeks sitting for exams. In
another, students spent sixteen days practicing and three days taking tests. In one district I visited, Harrison District 2 in Colorado Springs, the typical child experienced at least twenty-five testing days each school year, which cut down on time for instruction, field trips, group projects, and any other classroom activity not associated with collecting student growth data.

Under the new guidelines, even art teachers would be evaluated by student growth measures. Thus, on exam day in Sabina Trombetta's first-grade art class at Chamberlin Elementary School in Colorado Springs, the six-year-olds were shown a slide of Picasso's
The Weeping Woman
, a 1937 cubist portrait of the artist's lover, with tears streaming down her face. It is painted in vibrant greens, bluish purples, and yellows. Explaining the painting, Picasso once said, “Women are suffering machines.”

The test asked the first graders to look at
The Weeping Woman
and “write three colors Picasso used to show feeling or emotion.” Another question asked, “In each box below, draw three different shapes that Picasso used to show feeling or emotion.” A separate section of the exam asked students to write a full paragraph about a Matisse painting.

In its Race to the Top guidelines, the Department of Education hadn't specified exactly how to collect student growth data for the two-thirds of teachers nationwide who taught a non-tested grade or subject, ranging from art to kindergarten to social studies to theater. After all, NCLB had required testing only in math, reading, and science, and only for kids in the third grade or higher. That caused a gaping hole between policy and practice that states and districts rushed to fill. In Harrison District 2, a largely low-income Latino district in Colorado Springs, superintendent Mike Miles was considered a national trailblazer on one possible solution: Give children paper tests in every single subject, at every grade level.

In order to assess Trombetta, thirty-eight, a ten-year teaching veteran and winner of teaching awards from both her school district and her county, the district required her first graders to sit for seven pencil-and-paper tests in art that school year. To prepare them
for those exams, Trombetta lectured her students on art elements such as color, line, and shape—bullet points on Colorado's fine-arts curriculum standards. Something similar was happening in the district's gym classes, where a test asked second graders, “Draw a picture of how your hands look while they are catching a ball that is thrown above your head.”

When I visited Trombetta's cheery, colorful classroom on a November afternoon in 2010, she really wanted to talk. As she ate a TV dinner for lunch, she said she liked the idea of exposing her young students, many of whom had never visited a museum, to great works of art. But, she complained, preparing the children for the exam meant teaching them reductive half-truths—that dark colors signify sadness and bright colors happiness, for example. “To bombard these kids with words and concepts instead of the experience of art? I really struggle with that,” she said. “It's kind of hard when they come to me and say, ‘What are we going to make today?' and I have to say, ‘Well, we're going to write about art.' ” She confided that she wasn't sure if she wanted to continue working in the district. And sure enough, at the end of that school year Trombetta quit her job and moved to Vienna, Austria, where she now teaches at the American International School. There her students are assessed only on the art projects they create.