An assignment for Gov. Cuomo
Spearhead a bold redesign of the teaching profession
Gov. Cuomo has said he wants to be the “students’ lobbyist,” and Tuesday, his Education Reform Commission met for the first time. Headed by Richard Parsons, it is composed of 25 members, all committed to fixing public schools but with widely different views on what that will take.
Tuesday’s meeting was mostly introductions and discussion of a forthcoming “listening tour,” after which the commission will aim to form “consensus” around an action plan.
Uh-oh. Consensus, particularly in education, favors incremental and uncontroversial change.
Incremental change won’t help the countless children in New York State who aren’t getting a quality education. Our graduation rate is 39th in the nation; our per-pupil spending is tops. New York’s students need Cuomo and this commission to boldly confront problems that have gone unaddressed for years precisely because they are controversial.
Chief among these: teacher quality. Both common sense and extensive research tell us that the quality of the classroom teacher matters more than anything else that goes on in schools. Of course, the poverty facing many students makes the job of their teachers much harder. We should acknowledge this — and also ac- knowledge that we owe it to those kids to help them overcome their circumstances.
A new framework for teacher evaluations that passed this year, factoring in both student achievement gains and classroom evaluations, was a commendable first step, though its implementation may be blocked in New York City — home to 38% of the state’s students — by the teachers union.
But even where new evaluations start happening, it’s what you do with them that will matter. And the entire structure of the teaching profession in New York — in law, in regulation and in union contracts — remains set up as though differences in teacher quality don’t exist or matter.
The $43.6 billion we spend annually on salaries, benefits and pensions is driven by longevity, not effectiveness. We spend an additional $11.9 billion on noninstructional expenses — with way too many school districts, 694, for one state. We don’t spend money on starting teacher salaries that are competitive with other professions, or on rewarding our most effective teachers in order to retain them, or on a school day long enough to teach our kids what they need to learn.
In other words, we waste precious re- sources on things that don’t help kids at the expense of things that do.
Meanwhile, we lack a strategy to recruit top college graduates into teaching, as countries with the best school systems do. We have onerous state-mandated certification requirements, with little correlation to student achievement and no flexibility for districts.
We effectively guarantee employment through tenure after just three years, well before we really know how good a teacher is. We haven’t thought enough about pathways for career advancement for our best teachers, and we turn a blind eye to those who are ineffective, at great consequence to their students, whom we ask to wait while the adults, well, try harder.
Increasingly, the phrase “teacher-bashing” gets thrown around to discourage consideration of reform. But a serious and respectful discussion about how to elevate the profession to an honored, sought-after craft with high standards and rewards is the opposite of teacher-bashing.
In fact, what we do now — which is, in effect, to tell good teachers that their efforts are futile and undeserving of recognition, then negate them by sending students on into other classrooms where little learning may take place — devalues the work of our best educators and discourages talented people from entering and staying in the profession.
The governor’s commission has laudably devoted a subcommittee to teacher quality. But the absence from that group of both the panel’s most outspoken voice for reform, Geoffrey Canada (a member of the board of Students firstny, an organization I run), and of American Federation of Teachers head, Randi Weingarten, raises questions about whether the commission is too focused on comity.
The commission must design a broad overhaul of the structures that impede the transformation and elevation of the teaching profession in New York State. Then the governor should use his formidable political skills to bring this transformation to fruition.
Cuomo can make New York a national model by ensuring that a quality teacher stands at the front of every classroom. That, more than anything else, would make him the most effective lobbyist that students in our state have had in a long time.